P. Gorazd Cetkovský, O.Carm.
11. References to God's Mercy in Therese's Letters
Having thoroughly examined how Therese understood God's mercy and how she spoke about it, let us also go through her letters and try to discover what testimony is hidden within them.1
The earliest mention does not concern God's mercy, but the Virgin Mary. In a letter to Celine dated July 8, 1891 (DT 129), Therese encouraged her sister to persist in praying for the conversion of a fallen barefoot Carmelite named Hyacinthe Loyson,2 that our brother, son of the Holy Mother, might be overcome, return and throw himself under the cloak of the most merciful Mother.
In a letter dated August 13, 1893 (DT 147), Therese wanted to encourage Celine, who was managing their father's household3 and was having difficulties with a maid susceptible to alcoholism. Since Celine had previously prayed for the conversion of this maid's husband, Therese instilled confidence in her regarding the possibility of improvement in the maid. Her mention of mercy is brief: For every sin (there is) mercy. And God is powerful enough to give endurance even to those who have none.
The translation is not easy, as the original wording lacks a verb. Therese wrote: For every sin there is mercy. Therefore, I included the word is in parentheses in the translation. In the Czech book edition of Therese's correspondence, the translation used is: For every sin, mercy applies,4 which, in my opinion, could lead to different interpretations. For example, in the sense that “mercy effectively urges the sinner to amend his ways.” This is certainly true, but it is not the primary statement of this sentence. The Slovak translation omitted the word mercy and reads: For every sin, there is forgiveness.5 However, regarding the maid, it is not about forgiveness of sin, but overcoming vice, so it would be better to retain the word mercy and translate the word sin more loosely. In the sense that every (even the greatest) vice can be overcome by God's mercy, which is even greater and more resilient than it... In summary: the merciful God is willing to forgive every sin and overcome every vice.
In a letter dated July 20, 1895 (DT 178), Therese wrote to her aunt, Mrs. Guérin, that her uncle Guérin, accompanied by their daughter Marie Guérin, visited her at the convent and that Marie decided6 to also enter the Carmel in Lisieux. Therese looked at her uncle with great admiration. Not only did he have to cope with the impending departure of his daughter to the cloister,7 but he was also taking Marie to Caen to pick up Therese's sister Leonie Martin, who was leaving from there for the second time. Therese saw her uncle as a saint. When we saw his calmness, his surrender, our anxieties were dispelled, we felt the support of a father's hand... My beloved aunt! How great is God's mercy towards his poor children!... In this letter, the concept of God's mercy means that God gives weak people the strength they need to surrender to him, bear trials and humiliations, and love and praise him in the process. This emerges from the continuation of the letter. In fact, another aspect of God's mercy applies here, which lies in the fact that from the perspective of the weak, while being wonderfully strengthened by God, we too can draw confidence in our struggles and difficulties.
A very important letter, in which Therese revealed her faith in God's mercy, was written to her sister Marie after Marie read Manuscript B (DT 197 from September 17, 1896). We have dealt with the content of this letter earlier.
Other mentions of God's mercy are found in letters written in 1897, the year Therese died.
In a letter to Abbé Bellier dated February 24, 1897 (DT 220), Therese proposed a short prayer that she wished him to pray for her daily. God is addressed in it as: merciful Father. Therese literally wrote that this prayer summarizes all her wishes. Therefore, the address with which the prayer begins was certainly not chosen by Therese randomly. The full prayer reads: Merciful Father, in the name of our sweet Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, I ask you to ignite my sister with your Spirit of love and grant her the grace to help others to love you greatly. Therese longed to receive love from God, full of merciful love, so that she could burn with love and help others to do the same.
Further mentions of God's mercy are in another letter to Abbé Bellier, which Therese wrote on April 25, 1897 (DT 224). In it, she explained to her spiritual brother that not only great souls live in Carmel, as he imagined, but also ones like her, who sees herself as: a poor, unsightly flower. And in her opinion, this comes from the will of Jesus himself: Jesus wanted in his mercy for small ones to grow among these flowers. This paragraph of her letter is beautiful, so let us recall it in full:
My dear Brother, I must confess to you that something in your letter saddened me, namely that you do not know me as I truly am. It is true that if we want to find great souls, we must go to Carmel. Just as magnificent fragrant flowers grow here in virgin forests, unknown in the world. Jesus wanted in his mercy that among these flowers there would also grow small ones. I shall never be able to thank Him enough for this benevolence. Only thanks to this condescension do I, poor, unsightly flower, find myself in the same bed as my sisters’ roses. Dear Brother, please believe me, God did not give you a great soul as a sister, but quite a small and very imperfect one.
These words of Therese are a declaration of great respect for the Carmelite community, a declaration of inexpressible gratitude for the calling to this community and a testimony of Therese's humility.
In this letter, Therese also briefly summarized her current life and expressed hope that she would soon transition from this world to eternity. And she described this transition with remarkable words: the grace of infinite mercy. In a longer quotation:
I remember that the one who has been forgiven more must love more, therefore I strive to make my life an act of love and I no longer trouble myself that I am just a little soul. On the contrary, I rejoice in it. Therefore, I dare to hope that “my exile will be short”8, but not because I am prepared. I feel that I will never be prepared unless the Lord himself transforms me. He can do it in an instant. After all the graces with which He has surrounded me, I still await the grace of His infinite mercy.
Just as she regarded her entire life as a great chain of expressions of the Lord's mercy, she believed that this chain would end in the greatest – infinitely great – expression of that mercy!
And we find another reference to God's mercy in this letter. When Therese was explaining to Abbé Bellier that the Lord did not grant her the grace of martyrdom, even though she longed for it, she justified it with the words of Saint Paul: “It does not depend on the one who wills or the one who runs, but on God's mercy” (Romans 9:16). Instead of the word mercy, the word mercifulness stands in the French original of her letter. This passage from the Letter to the Romans was very important to her; she also referred to it right at the beginning of Manuscript A. It provided her with an answer to the question of why the life stories of different saints and people in general are so different. The translation of the scriptures she used perhaps further encouraged her interpretation. We could paraphrase it this way: It is not the work of the one who wills or the one who strives, but of God who shows mercy.
A Brief Double digression into the Holy Scripture (Romans 9:1-18 and Exodus 33:19)
Since this passage from the Letter to the Romans was so important to Therese, let us linger on it. Let us summarize what the beginning of chapter 9 of this letter speaks about. Paul is saddened by the Jews. He enumerates seven gifts from God, with which God distinguished and formed His people (vv. 4-5). The Jews still possess these gifts. How then to explain that they refused to believe in the Messiah? Paul points to the stories of the patriarchs and notes that even then, the election was limited to only part of the following generation of descendants. After Abraham, only Isaac was the bearer of God's election, not Ishmael. Although Rebecca gave birth to twins, God chose Jacob as the continuator of the history of His people, while Esau was not. And this election took place even before these twins were born, that is, before the boys could do anything that would merit or not merit God's election. Thus, God always chose only some, and not others. This choice did not depend on the actions of the individuals in question, but solely on God's decision (vv. 6-13).
After this explanation, Paul poses a rhetorical question: Is God unjust? Has He wronged those whom He did not choose by not selecting them? And Paul answers negatively: Absolutely not! And he turns to a citation from the Old Testament, which states that the Lord's decisions are absolutely free, deriving only from His will. The Lord says to Moses: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Exodus 33:19). I quote from the translation of the Letter to the Romans by Father Ivan Hrůša. This translation tries to preserve the exact sense of the Hebrew text by inserting the modal verb: I will. This sense is also confirmed by Paul's words in verse 18: So he has mercy on whom he wants...
Immediately after Paul quotes this Old Testament verse, he adds his commentary to it. And it is Paul’s commentary that was the key word of God for Therese, which she repeatedly referred to: It does not depend on the one who wills or the one who runs, but on God who shows mercy (v. 16).
In the next two verses, Paul adds yet another example from the Scriptures and cites the Lord's word to Pharaoh from Exodus 9:16: “For this very reason I raised you up,9 to show my power in you, so that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” This statement from Scripture confirms that Pharaoh had the role of an instrument that God sovereignly used to accomplish His will. Pharaoh acted freely and yet simultaneously fulfilled God's sovereign decision. Paul concludes his reflection on how God's election works (Romans 9:22-33): in the present time, God has chosen some from the Jews and some from the Gentiles to make His Son Jesus, the Messiah, known to them. This is a completely free decision of God. And the other Jews, who were also supposed to accept the Messiah, refuse to rely on faith in Jesus and still wish to please God only by observing the law of Moses.
The verse quoted by Therese thus contains this content: there are things in life that are not the result of our desire,10 or our efforts (“running,” i.e., striving), but are solely the fruit of God's free decision. They are simply God's gift.
The Apostle Paul related this to the Jews and their conversion to faith in Jesus. Therese applied it to herself in this letter (LT 224): it was because of God's decision that she was not granted the grace of martyrdom. And at the beginning of Manuscript A, she also presented this justification derived from the Letter to the Romans: it was solely through God's free decision that she received such a great amount of grace (AS 15)! After all, even when someone seems to receive so little of God's grace – children who died as infants; savages who have never heard of Christ and could not believe in Him), Therese firmly believed that God is not unjust to anyone. And just as in nature, all seasons are arranged so that on a specified day, the most modest little flower blooms, so everything corresponds to the good of each soul (AS 17).
I do not know if Therese found that passage from the book of Exodus, which the Apostle Paul quoted in Romans 9:15, directly in the Old Testament. Perhaps she did not have the opportunity; however, we mentioned on another occasion that the sisters did not have the whole Bible readily available as we do today. But when we actually find that passage in the Old Testament, it will please us (especially us on the Carmel who long to know the Lord as closely as possible and live in intimate communion with Him) that this statement is taken from the Lord’s conversation with Moses, in which Moses asked to see the face of God, to see God's glory.
The Lord agrees with Moses' request but warns him that it can only be fulfilled on earth to a limited extent. And to His response, the Lord adds the sentences then quoted by Paul, which emphatically declare that God is sovereignly free in what He does – now for Moses, but in general. In connection with how the conversation unfolds, I understand the Lord's words in this way: “Yes, I will fulfill your request, but do not attribute any merit whatsoever to your act in my doing it!” The biblical text reads:
Moses said, “Show me your glory!” The Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” And he added, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”
I cite the biblical verses from Exodus 33:18-23 according to the Czech Catholic translation. This translation adds an interesting note: “The text very deliberately plays with the synonyms ‘glory’ and ‘face’ on one side and the antonyms ‘face’ and ‘back’ on the other.”11 The Lord is sovereign and makes this clear to us. For our good.
(Continued in the next issue.)
