MOUNT CARMEL
CLOISTERED CONVENT
Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon on January 2, 1873, the youngest of five daughters born to Louis and Zelie Martin. Louis Martin was a highly successful watchmaker and jeweler who was able to retire from his profession at the age of forty-seven, and he lived in an upper bourgeois class of society, owned his very com- fortable home, and had his money invested in real estate. His last child, Thérèse, was a sickly infant and had to be boarded with a wet nurse for the first year of her life. A warm and affectionate child, she was deeply devoted to her family, and the death of her mother when Thérèse was three and haqlf was a traumatic experience, plunging her into a state of sadness and sensitivity which she suffered for eight years.
In her autobiography she divided her early life into three distinct periods: the first, the happy and colorful period before her mother died; the second, the nine years from 1877 to 1886, her "winter of trial," as she called it, a time of sensitivity and weariness and occasional religious scruples; and the third, the period between 1886 and 1888, beginning with her sudden "conversion," a moment when she seemed to gain the maturity she had been struggling for all those years, and terminating with her entrance into the convent. The only extraordinary event during that period was her illness in 1883, six years after the family had moved from Alençon to the small Norman town of Lisieux. For three months she suffered a strange mélange of convulsions, hallucinations, and comas, and it was feared that the ten-year-old child would die. However, she was cured almost instantly after the family prayed to the Blessed Virgin for her, and Thérèse always maintained that she actually saw a small statue of the Virgin in her room smile at her. She was a deeply religious child, and she stated near the end of her life: "From the age of three I have never refused anything to the good God." Her religious concepts matured in her early teens, and she developed an intense interest in the apostolate, and for that reason decided to enter the Carmelite convent so she could pray for souls and priests.
She was fourteen when she applied to the Carmel of Lisieux where her two sisters, Pauline and Marie, had preceded her, but there was some hesitancy on the part of the ecclesiastical superiors about accepting such a young girl. During the period when the matter was under consideration, she made a pilgrimage to Rome with her father, and in the course of a general audience with Pope Leo XIII, she hurriedly asked him to permit her entrance into Carmel, despite a prohibition against speaking directly to the pope. He gently assured her that she would enter if it were God's will, and when she continued to plead her case the papal guards lifted her away. Leo placed his fingers on her lips and then blessed her, his eyes following her kindly as she left the chamber.
On April 9, 1888, Thérèse entered the red brick convent on the rue de Liverot where she spent the remaining nine and one-half years of her life. She took the name Thérèse of the Infant Jesus. She was a relatively tall girl, about five feet six inches, and she had blonde hair, and her eyes were what the French call pers, something had a pleasant smile which gave her the appearance of a charming, approaching blue-gray. Her features were even and pretty, and the pleasant girl from the provinces. She was somewhat quiet and re- served, but on occasion she could be quite spirited and frolicsome, and she intrigued the nuns in the convent with her gift for mimicry. What was not immediately evident, however, was her sheer wil power and her rugged determination.
The prioress at the Lisieux Carmel was Marie de Gonzague, a strange woman of mercurial temperament who craved attention and flattery and stood on petty ceremonies. There was a split of two factions in the community about the prioress' qualities for office, and some biographers have eagerly grasped at this situation in an attempt to inject some drama in Thérèse's life. However, Thérèse seemed to abstain from the inner politics of the community, re- maining aloof from the petty discussions which took place par- ticularly around the time of elections. She quietly went her way, performed her duties, and remained unerringly faithful to the rule- but in such an undemonstrative way that many of the nuns had no comprehension of the profound nature of her sanctity until her memoirs were posthumously published.
Thérèse was appointed acting novice mistress in 1893, and during that time she had the opportunity to articulate some of her own religious insights, especially the doctrine she called her “little way," a somewhat coy phrase which expressed the nature of her relationship with God. She explained her "little way":
"It is to recognize one's own nothingness, to expect everything from the good God as a child expects everything from its father. It is to be concerned about nothing, not even about making one's fortune....I remain a child with no other occupation than gathering flowers, the flowers of love and sacrifice, and offering them to the good God for his pleasure...Finally it means never being discouraged by your faults, because children fall frequently but are too small to hurt themselves."
Thérèse's thought stands out, bright and challenging: an invitation to a daring love. She said; "My way is a way of love and confidence.'
In March of 1896 Thérèse experienced the first manifestations of the tubercular condition which would take her life in eighteen months. She continued the conventual observance as well as she could for over a year until she was finally placed in the convent infirmary. During her final illness she was plagued with fatigue, racked with pain, and cast in a bitter temptation against faith, but she remained bright and cheerful until the end. She died on the evening of September 30, 1897, at the age of twenty-four. Her final words were: "My God, I love you."
She had written her memoirs in three sections during the last few years of her life, all at the command of her superiors. These manuscripts were collated after her death, corrected, and published exactly one year from the date of her death. Then there occurred what Pius XI called “a hurricane of glory": additional copies were requested, new editions published, and in the next fifteen years more than a million copies were distributed. The Story of a Soul has enjoyed an amazing and a continuing popularity: it is an astonishingly candid human document, and it describes, despite the difficulties of the Victorian style, Thérèse's own religious experience. her death because she could hold a pen no longer, and written in In the last few lines of the book, composed in pencil shortly before burdened with every possible sin, I would still cast myself into Jesus' arms, my heart bursting with repentance, for I know how He cherishes the prodigal child who returns to Him."
And then in the final sentence of the book she says: "I fly to him on wings of confidence and love." It is this deep experience of the God and her audaious trust in Him that has made her so popular and important in the modern world.
Thérèse of Lisieux was beatified in 1923, canonized in 1925, and declared copatroness of the missions in 1927. In the bull of canon-ization, Pius XI placed her firmly in a historical perspective when he stated that she fulfilled her vocation and achieved sanctity "without going beyond the common order of things." And that has been her genius-to show that even persons like her, unknown, unim portant, removed from the large dramas of life, can achieve sanctity and union with the living God. In the full stream of the Carmelite tradition, she was a witness par excellence.
At the age of three
At the age of three