Page 30 - Michael 2024 January

u be lost today… Jesus, pardon me if I say anything I You live in poverty, wanting nothing more.
should not say. I only want to give you joy and to con- No rapture, miracle or ecstasy
sole you”. [48] This now leads us to consider another Embellish your life, O Queen of the Elect!…
aspect of the breath of fresh air that is the message of The number of little ones on earth is truly great.
Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. They can raise their eyes to you without trembling.
It’s by the ordinary way, incomparable Mother,
The greatest love in supreme simplicity That you like to walk to guide them to heaven”.
At the end of the Story of a Soul, Therese pre- In the heart of the Church, I shall be Love
sents us with her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love. From Saint Teresa of Avila, Therese inherited a
Once she surrendered completely to the working of great love for the Church and was able to plumb the
the Spirit, she received, quietly and unobtrusively, depths of this mystery. We see this in her discovery
an abundant outpouring of living water: “rivers, or of the “heart of the Church”. In a lengthy prayer to
better, the oceans of graces that flooded my soul”. Jesus, written on September 8, 1896, the sixth anni-
[59] This is the mystical life that, apart from any extra- versary of her religious profession, the saint confided
ordinary phenomena, offers itself to all the faithful as to the Lord that she felt driven by an immense desire,
a daily experience of love. a passion for the Gospel that no vocation, by itself,
Therese practised charity in littleness, in the sim- could satisfy. And so, in seeking her “place” in the
plest things of daily life, and she did so in the com- Church, she turned to chapters 12 and 13 of the First
pany of the Virgin Mary, from whom she learned Letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians.
that “to love is to give everything. It’s to give one- There, in Chapter 12, the apostle employs the
self”. While preachers in those days often celebrated metaphor of the body and its members to explain
Mary’s grandeur in ways that made her seem far re- that the Church embraces a great variety of hierarch-
moved from us, Therese showed, starting with the ically ordered charisms. Yet this description was not
Gospel, that Mary is the greatest in the kingdom of enough for Therese. She continued her search and
heaven because she is the least (cf. Mt 18:4), the one read the “hymn to charity” in Chapter 13. There she
closest to Jesus in his abasement. She saw that, if came upon the eminent answer to her question, and
the apocrypha are full of striking and amazing feats, wrote this memorable page:
the Gospels show us a lowly and poor life lived in the
simplicity of faith. Jesus himself wanted Mary to be “Considering the mystical body of the Church I
the example of a soul that seeks him with a simple had not recognized myself in any of the members
faith. Mary was the first to experience the “little way” described by Saint Paul, or rather I desired to see
in pure faith and humility. Consequently, Therese did myself in them all. Charity gave me the key to my
not hesitate to write: vocation. I understood that if the Church had a body
composed of different members, the most necessary
“Mother full of grace, I know that in Nazareth and most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and
so I understood that the
Church had a Heart, and
that this Heart was burning
with love. I understood it
was love alone that made
the Church’s members act,
that if Love ever became
extinct, apostles would
not preach the Gospel and
martyrs would not shed
their blood.
“I understood that Love
comprised all vocations,
that love was everything,
that it embraced all times
and places… in a word:
that it was eternal! Then, in
the excess of my delirious
joy, I cried out: O Jesus,
my Love... my vocation, at
last I have found it… my
vocation is Love! Yes, I
“Thérèse leaves roses on the first steps of the Infant Jesus.” Watercolour have found my place in the
by Marie du Saint-Esprit, reproducing a painting by Pascal Blanchard.

30 MICHAEL January/February 2024 www.michaeljournal.org