“I Need a Heart…”
(from a poem)
There is something like a “hunger” with which we come into the world and which stays with us our whole life. Thérèse expressed it in words: “I need a heart that burns for me with tender love…” That this hunger for love must be constantly fed is especially visible in the so-called “nursing period,” when between mother and child everything is almost “in flow.” At that time, we not only drank our mother’s milk but also her thoughts, her feelings, her life focuses “flowed” into us. Thus, we are shaped in soul, spirit, and body by our mother. Blessed is he who had a mother who can say in retrospect: She was always there for me and always stood by me! Many must add to that: She cried a lot for me, had to scold me often, was strict, often said “no.” Yet, blessed once more is he who can nevertheless say: But I always had the basic feeling that she loves me! And what came from her was not a desire for power, for self-assertion, for possessions, but benevolent love.
However, even in the case that I did not experience this in my childhood – God can still save me and stabilize me in this important basic feeling, which we humans so deeply need. Thérèse is convinced of this from experience. In one of the eight stanzas of her poem from 1895, focused on the Heart of Jesus, she confesses:
I need a heart that burns with tenderness;
that gives me support and never falters.
And that loves my weaknesses almost more than my strengths
and never abandons me day or night.
But because I see each creature as mortal,
only God, who becomes man,
can help me,
becomes my brother and knows how to suffer.
Thérèse managed to say: “I need…!” Thus she found God, of whom she knew: He is always there for me, and I can go to Him in every state of misfortune. The important thing is only that I come. And finally only He – in the measure that I dedicate to Him – can save what must be redeemed in my life.
P. Theophan Beierle OCD
“Mary is More Mother than Queen”
(Last Conversations, August 21, 1897)
Thérèse’s relationship with Mary was, from the perspective of the religious environment of her time, remarkably clear and simple. What she certainly does not need is an abstract, doctrinal approach craving miracles. Even on her sickbed, several months before her death, she elucidates to her sisters (we have records from several witnesses) that she would like to observe Mary’s life “as it really was, not a fictional life.” She wishes from the preachers that they “present her true life as it is seen in the Gospel.”
And yet – or precisely because of that? – Thérèse’s relationship with Mary is extraordinarily warm and alive. In her eyes, she is not a queen, a sovereign and ruler – Marian titles that were very much used at that time; Mary is, as she emphasizes once again before her death, “more mother than queen,” and that very concretely for Thérèse herself. Yes, she is unashamed to confess: “I understood that she watched over me, that I was her child. Therefore, I could only call her ‘Mama,’ ‘little mom,’ because it seemed to me gentler than ‘Mother.’”
How did Thérèse come to such a deep love relationship with Mary? An important factor in this respect – otherwise her significance cannot be overstated – must be considered the event she experienced as a ten-year-old in front of the statue of Our Lady in their family home. In a severe, years-long childhood depression, Thérèse prayed before this image and found relief in her psychological distress: “Suddenly the Blessed Virgin seemed beautiful, so beautiful that I had never seen anything more beautiful. Her face expressed ineffable goodness and tenderness. What, however, penetrated to the depth of my heart was the captivating smile of the Blessed Virgin.” Since then, Thérèse knows that she is loved by her “Mama Mary” and will never forget this “smile” for the rest of her life; it will remain deeply engraved in her heart.
The second reason is perhaps the characteristic similarity between both of these women. In Mary, as described by the Gospels, Thérèse found her “archetype,” in which she could recognize her own being. Focused on Mary, she gradually found her way throughout her life to approach God, the “little way” of immediacy and directness to God and the refreshing and vital encounter with Him and with people. She expresses this clearly in her last and longest poem “Why I Love You, Mary” (May 1897). Mary is described there as one who lives humble everyday virtues. Especially her humility, as standing in the truth, speaks to Thérèse.
Both aspects outlined here substantially belong to Thérèse’s image of Mary. Mary is for her a mother with the deepest understanding – and at the same time a completely human woman from Nazareth, imitable by everyone. The inner greatness of the Carmelite from Lisieux at the end of her short life can certainly also be considered a fruit of this Marian devotion, focused on the Gospel and at the same time personally heartfelt Marian piety.
It should also be pointed out that Mary was never degraded by Thérèse to a mere executor of her wishes. On her sickbed, she impresses upon her sisters: “When we prayed to the Blessed Virgin for something and she does not heed us, it is a sign that she does not want to. Then we must let her do what she wants, and we must not trouble her with further requests.” We must let Mary have freedom; she knows better what is good for us; nothing matters to her more than that we grow into fellowship with Christ, which is the fullness of life.
Fr. Michael Jakel OCD
“He Gave Me Strength and Courage”
(Autobiographical Writings, 95)
It is justly claimed that most people are unable, throughout their lives, to fully accept themselves. Thus, many live with great or small feelings of inferiority. And those who have not learned to accept themselves will also not become any great lovers, those who will try to accept their neighbor in every situation, whether they “deserved” it or not; as we know, according to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we will only be full children of God when we also let our “sun of love” rise anew each day on the evil and the good (cf. Mt 5:45).
In order to dare to accept oneself, a person needs a deep awareness in their heart that someone loves them completely and entirely just for who they are. What a blessing it is to have such people!
The ultimate acceptance, so to speak, healing every complex of inferiority at its root, can only be given – this is the experience of Little Thérèse – by the one who is love in person. Thérèse experienced this root healing at Christmas 1886. She writes, looking back: “Thérèse was no longer the same. Jesus transformed her heart.” She experiences it and describes it almost as a miracle that at the age of 14 she was able to finally accept herself completely, literally overnight. A small experience allows her to confess: I may be myself and thus remain, I am loved, just as I am! I do not have to change at all! Jesus became a weak child at Christmas so that I, precisely for my weakness, could feel loved and in the future seek all power and strength from Him. “On that night when dear God became weak and suffering for love of me, He made me strong and courageous.”
From that Christmas, Thérèse is liberated from her view of herself, she is suddenly released from the un-Christian school of self-perfection and self-sanctification. She knows: Jesus must correct me. She can say to Him: You, Jesus, must work everything in me and you will do it!” – And anyone who no longer has to care for themselves is freed for love: “Yes, I felt that love had entered my heart, the necessity to forget myself to make others happy, and since then I have been happy!…”
Her father and four siblings could not entirely love her before.
The “new” Thérèse, who now develops, will, seen from the outside, become the freest person imaginable, on whom nothing constricted can be found. Her new style of life can be observed: she is calm within herself. In every situation, she anchors herself in Christ and thus can boldly step out of herself and embrace everyone deeply: “The more I am united with Jesus, the more fervently I love my sisters.” Life makes sense when I am loving and I become it more and more. This is where true piety wants to lead. What makes the process so painful – to approach even difficult people, to let oneself be penetrated by the cross, to lend life – is painful. Thérèse “managed” this by looking at Jesus, who was to be her Redeemer and Savior from morning till evening.
Thérèse's autobiography has therefore become a “great runner” in the spiritual literature of our century and an ever-unattainable bestseller, because in it everyone, from the simplest believers to the most learned theologians, can experience how a being originally neurotic-egoistic and once again neurotic due to bad religious upbringing is transformed by God into the greatest lover and the greatest “missionary” of our century.
When asked about her farewell word, Thérèse responds: “I have said everything: Only love counts!” And one of her last words, shortly before her death by asphyxiation: “I do not regret having committed myself to love, no, I do not regret it!”
P. Theophan Beierle OCD
Thérèse of the Child Jesus resembles a person who, with all her might, fights against something of which we see neither the exact form nor special enmity. Only in recent years, when she understood herself that she had won, does the face of the adversary reveal itself: it is the lie. The lie in all its forms that it can take on in Christianity, masked by falsehood, half-hearted truth, transitions where holiness and bigotry, art and kitsch, genuine dullness and weakness deserving contempt form an entangled mass. Thérèse’s fate is to live on this edge, to be not only continually – in life and after death – misunderstood, but also often incomprehensible; to fight with the weapons of the time against that time, to have to struggle with words and images of kitsch for life and death against the lie of kitsch, to shed the false skin with all the strength she had without being able to leave her prescribed environment, without being able to, without wanting to… She penetrates all the charms and forgeries to the simple, naked truth of the Gospel…
And what kitsch has done in mariology! What Thérèse brazenly pushes aside here, a little as if cracking the whip while clearing the temple, is the pious, well-intentioned untruth piled around Our Lady that ultimately leaves souls empty and prevents them from drinking from the fountain of truth.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
(Sisters in Spirit, Einsiedeln 1979)
Kernworte der hl. Theresia von Lisieux (2),
Karmelimpulse II/1993.
Translated by Dr. Vojtěch Pola.
