P. Pierre-Marie Soubeyrand,
Community of Beatitude, France
(Part 2)
Love in the Heart of the Trinity and in Jesus actually helped Thérèse to become truly small, but Jesus will elevate her and make her great. Do you know the story from the convent infirmary when a sister asked her, “How should we invoke you when you are in heaven?” She replied: “Our sister, great little Thérèse” (cf. Vs 195.)
We see constant contrasts in her: she is great in love, yet remains quite small. And the greatest in the kingdom, says Jesus, are indeed the very little ones here on earth. And that’s what she was. She wanted to be a great saint. Love is what makes saints great.
God loves us. Jesus is God who has shown this love. Yesterday, Bishop Gaucher tried to show that Jesus is truly incarnate mercy, as also stated in the encyclical by Pope John Paul II, which he quoted: Dives in misericordia.
We must contemplate Jesus as incarnate mercy. How could we recognize God - love without this great and incomprehensible mystery, only humanly? This mystery can only be known through love. Love is inventive, but human reason cannot invent or comprehend it.
Saint John at the very beginning of his first letter says that the mystery of the incarnation has helped us touch the Word, see love, know love, and contemplate it. And he concluded this passage of his first letter with the words: “We write this to you so that your joy may be complete.”
Our joy and Thérèse's joy is to be able to contemplate and touch God of love in Jesus, to be captivated by the tenderness of Jesus, who never abandoned Thérèse throughout her life. And Jesus's life truly expresses this love to the utmost. Saint John writes: “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.” And he continues: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:9–11). And this is because we have “come to know love,” because Saint John “saw.” And I would say: through the eyes of Saint John and also of Mary Magdalene - and why not also through the eyes of the Virgin Mary, who was given to us as Mother right under the cross - we too are given to contemplate the crucified Love that loved to the utmost. Jesus tells Saint Catherine of Siena: “It was not the nails that held me to the cross, but love.” This is the proof that God loves us, as Saint Paul also writes: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). There is no greater love than this, says Jesus: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). It is again Saint Paul in his letter to the Corinthians who describes such “foolishness” or love.
You see, this is something that today’s world rejects. And it is something very essential. What astonishes me greatly every time I return here to the West is that what is so dishonored, smeared, and distorted is precisely love. Today they want to offer us a counterfeit love, a fleeting love, perhaps to help us forget so many difficulties. However, right in the midst of our life’s trials, Jesus teaches us - just as he taught Thérèse - to love to the utmost. This love, however, is folly, says Saint Paul: “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:21–25).
God's wisdom is the wisdom of love. It is precisely at the cross that Jesus shows us - and Thérèse understands it especially in the last years of her life - how far love can go, especially in the order of suffering, which for her, as well as for so many other saints, is the very expression of ultimate love.
Love transforms suffering. And I would say that it is precisely the miracle of God’s love, because there are so many diseases that today’s world experiences - even to epidemics that we are unable to overcome and before which we remain helpless… If we were to understand that suffering can be transformed by love, and thus become redemptive, it would be the peak of love. Thérèse understood this, for she was obedient even to the cross, and thus her love most resembles Jesus’s love.
Love transforms suffering and trials through the smallest acts of love, repeated minute by minute. I believe that this is available to everyone, each one of us. We may not be capable of great heroism like the martyrs, I admit that. I knew very well Brother Christian - a Trappist from Tiberina - and today I invoke him daily. There were many disagreements between us, but in his will there is something that also speaks to us. His death filled me with a very strong love because I know that today he, like his brothers, is a hero of faith and his love in heaven shines brightly because he shed his blood out of love.
Thérèse teaches us to the same movement of love. She is not able to be a hero of faith. After all, she states in one of her letters to Abbot Bellières that it is certainly good to desire martyrdom of blood, but even greater is the martyrdom of love, which is lived drop by drop, every day until the end. And one could say of Thérèse that she is such a first martyr of love who initiates the great century in which we live. We hope that in the 21st century there will truly shine new martyrs of love, as John Paul II proclaimed about Father Maximilian Kolbe: he is a martyr of love, of brotherly love. Our century will shine in the history of the Church precisely with these martyrs of love, following the example and in the footsteps of Saint Thérèse.
I believe that this is what is most characteristic of our time: we are in a time of martyrdom, which means in a period of testimony of ultimate love. Thérèse wrote: My joy is to love suffering. And in the infirmary, she said: I do not regret having surrendered myself as a victim of love (cf. Vs 150). And by surrendering herself to love, she transforms suffering and gives it redemptive value. As Saint Paul also confirms: “… what is lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions I fill up in my flesh for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Col 1:24). And this can be done by each one of us like Thérèse, like the little one, whether in sickness or in old age, in family trials or when losing a job or other trials – every day, again and again, we can offer sacrifices of love precisely where we are. You can teach this to your children, your loved ones: to sacrifice themselves out of love, to offer self-denial, trials, suffering, or any hardship. This is what the Virgin Mary also asks in Medjugorje. Our sister Emmanuel prepared a nice big book for children titled: “Children, help me” - to win over the world with love, with acts of love that can transform suffering and allow, even in the midst of this world, so heavily tested, a great treasure of God - love to shine.
For us too, then, what Thérèse wanted to live applies: to love like Jesus. It can be said that she also realized this - precisely in the act of surrendering to merciful God's love, which she wrote on June 9, 1895. This year it falls on Trinity Sunday. She wanted to love to the utmost, to the complete consumption of herself. She says: My homeland is in your face, which is the kingdom of my love (B 25). She no longer knows how to do anything but love… I think that it is precisely in this that the transformation of the whole Christian life lies. You know, Thérèse did not have any great ecstasies. The only one we can recall is the one she experienced at the last moment of her life when she uttered these last words: My God, how I love you! Here suffering must yield to the light of Jesus, her divine brother, whom she loved so much. The sisters say that then her face relaxed, an amazing light appeared on it, and she regained the freshness of a fresh rose, which she, of course, lost during her illness (cf. Vs 151). In this last ecstasy, she truly entered the heavenly kingdom.
Thérèse prayed with effort and in a poor manner. Her life, as she herself says, was ordinary; however, she constantly tried to be quite small and to do insignificant things, constantly repeated acts of love, in inner dryness and suffering, even in the midst of monotony of sacrifice and the poverty of her life. From her very simple and poor life, she made a gesture of love. She lived only in love.
In one of her poems - Living from Love - she writes:
To live from love, that is to live from your life,
you are the bliss of the chosen, glorious King!
In the Host you live for me - hidden from the world…
And I hide from the world, as you wished.
Lovers wish for solitude,
in the heart, a shared heart wants to beat;
under your gaze, I can most happily
live only from love!
(B 16)
In the union with Jesus in every moment lies the greatness of Thérèse's life. You know, Thérèse did not try to experience only the connection of love with Jesus during the moments of prayer, but her whole life was transformed and became a loving connection with Jesus. What perhaps shocks us Christians most in our lives is that even at the moment of the closest connection with Jesus, we often cannot pray. One of our sisters - Colette - also experienced something similar. In one period of her life, prayer was indifferent to her and even “bothered” her. However, love filled her life and transformed it until she met the Lord face to face, so today, just like Thérèse, she can confess her love in the eternal embrace with Jesus.
This can be experienced by each of us. We may not be able to be heroes or martyrs, but we can love, love Love and live love, so that one day we die of love. I believe that this is the most moving thing in the lives of Christians. We learn to live from love here on earth, so that we may die of love and thus approach our Beloved, approaching Jesus.
In the same poem, Thérèse writes in stanza 14:
To die of love, that dream is home for me,
I often dream of the delight of martyrdom.
Angels, tune your silver-stringed harps,
I feel that I am ending this exile! …
Burning arrow, burn me without hesitation,
after a moment the moment is hard for me to live!
Divine Jesus, fulfill my fervent wish:
I want to die of Love!
(B 20)
Saint John Vianney says the same; he also wanted every movement, every beat of his heart to be a movement of love, so that he could die in the enthusiasm of love. It is necessary - and we have a lifetime for it - that we learn to love. Precisely at the moment when we will love most perfectly, when love in us reaches its peak, then Jesus will come to us in death from love, so that we may pass into eternal life of love in the Most Holy Trinity.
Let us, like Thérèse, be consumed by love, let us enter into this ineffable joy, because there is no greater joy than to love. Jesus tells this to his disciples at the Last Supper when he demonstrated his love in such a strong way. He reveals to them the joy of that intensely moment when they will undergo their martyrdom, the joy of loving. For Jesus, the joy is to love the Father, for Thérèse, to love Jesus: this is the path offered to us, the desire that becomes “painful joy,” as our eastern brothers say.
I would like to read you a passage that Thérèse wrote in one of her poems:
My joy is to win
life for your souls, Jesus.
My heart wants to repeat to you
with loving, ardent, and quietest love:
For you, divine brother, it is sweet,
even in suffering to live
and my joy on this earth
is to comfort your heart.
(B 61)
Thérèse experiences heavenly joy already here on earth. The love that she experiences in earthly exile is the same love that she will experience in heaven. It is the same love that carries her into ineffable joy, enchanting her even as she remains here on earth in dryness and struggles. This love gives her the strength of martyrs and brings her to heaven, to the peak of love, as she herself says at the end of her act of offering to merciful Love: My Beloved, I want to renew this offering countless times with every beating of my heart until the shadows disappear and I can assure you of my love in eternal meeting face to face! … (AS 258).
USED ABBREVIATIONS:
(Czech editions of the writings of St. Thérèse; numbers indicate pages.)
AS: Thérèse of Lisieux: Autobiographical writings (Story of a soul), published by the Carmelitan spirituality edition No. 8, printed by the Vimperk Printing Office for the Czech-Moravian General Delegation of the Carmelite Order, 1991.
Vs: Thérèse of Lisieux: Entering into Life, published by the Carmelitan spirituality edition No. 22, Carmelite Publishing, Kostelní Vydří 1992.
B: Poems of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, selection and translation by Anděla Janoušková, published by Carmelite spirituality edition No. 39, Carmelite Publishing, Kostelní Vydří 1995.
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