Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face

Three Wounds Thérèse Took to the Grave

On her death bed, Thérèse said that most of the saints in heaven wouldn’t recognize what we have made of them. She was more interested in a saint’s “real” life, not in the small details we have chosen to preserve and the analysis we’re left with that has become their legacy. She herself has been re-imagined as a sentimental woman, a “sweet” and innocuous saint. But beneath the sea of sentimentality she was a flesh-and-blood human being who struggled with scruples, the loss of her mother, her father's mental-health challenges, her crisis of faith, and doubts about eternal life. She lived with difficult people and died a painful death.

Of all these wounds, we’ll focus on three that Thérèse took to the grave. She struggled with them her whole life and was never completely free of them.

1. The death of her mother
2. Scrupulosity
3. Trial of Faith

These life-long wounds made her rely on the grace of God. 

Introduction

Experiences of Separation and Loss. When Thérèse’s mother, Zélie, died, Thérèse was only 4½ years old. She was then sent to a Benedictine boarding school, where she stayed for 5 years. When Pauline (her second mother) entered the Carmel, Thérèse suffered another deep loss and she was bereft. She also suffered a major act of scruples, which led her to experience much suffering. Her lack of faith in her final years of life made suicide a very real temptation for her. At one point she asked her sister to remove all the medicine that was on a table by her bedside, for fear that in a moment of weakness she might take all the drugs. Even the saints know what it means to want it all to be over with!

To some of the nuns that lived with her, Thérèse was a mediocre nun. They never saw her virtues. Thérèse kept her good deeds hidden. This is a lesson for us as well: Keep your good deeds hidden.

The Death of Zélie (Thérèse’s Mother)

The death of her mother, cut Thérèse’s life into “before” and “after”. It was so traumatic that Thérèse defined her life to that before-and-after event. Zélie‘s death was the inner emotional turning point of Thérèse’s life.

Her early childhood separations fed her feeling of abandonment. When she was a baby, Thérèse was given to a wet nurse named Rose to nurse her for 11 months because Zélie did not produce enough milk to sustain her child. Thérèse became very attached to Rose and bonded with Rose as if she were her mother. In her 11-month-old mind, Rose was “mother.” Even Zélie recognized the bond. At 11 months, Thérèse was weaned and returned to Zélie. This separation from Rose gave Thérese a sense of loss and a fear of being abandoned again. She felt the loss of Rose very deeply, as if she’d lost her mother. Out of her sense of loss she became very attached to Zélie. She clung to Zélie in an obsessive way. She was nervous and apprehensive. Zélie remarked that Thérése was different from her other children. When Zélie died a few years later, that was Thérése’s worst nightmare. It led to an intensification of her previous feeling of abandonment.

Thérèse responded by clinging to her family. She disliked strangers and felt safe only with her family. Her sister Pauline became Thérèse’s second mother. When Pauline left to join Carmel, Thérèse (age 11) was so traumatized that she became bedridden. After three months, Thérèse was cured almost instantly by the Blessed Virgin, whose statue, Thérèse said, smiled at her at the moment of her cure. Her inclination to cling to mother figures was something Thérèse had to fight all her life. It was a deep form of separation anxiety that she did not give in to. She chose to cling to Jesus instead.

This emotional scar was not an obstacle. It became a conduit to holiness because Thérése refused to be controlled by her emotions and desire to cling to mother figures. Thérése was also overly sensitive and she realized it as a drawback.

At the age of 14, she received the grace to leave childhood behind her. Thérèse’s “Christmas conversion” marked the end of her childhood and the beginning of adulthood. Jesus changed her heart, and so began the third period of her life. It gave her the strength to control her feelings. She realized it was more important to love others than give in to her own feelings.

Growth in holiness doesn’t depend on a change in our feelings. It depends on our response to the grace God gives us to deal with them. Love is a choice. Accept the death of your feelings in order to walk through the door to holiness. Thank God for the grace to master your emotions and grow in virtue. Thérèse never got beyond her feelings. They continued to exist and torment her. But she controlled them and put her complete trust in Jesus.

Moral: We don’t have to be emotionally healed to grow in holiness.

Scrupulosity

Thérése grew up in a time when Jansenism was rampant in the France. This movement proposed a life of moral rigor and asceticism. Jansenists preached that only a chosen few are to be saved and that you need to live a life of severe penance to be saved. It encourages an excessive introspection that inevitably leads to insipient scrupulosity. Thérése had a hard time believing that she was forgiven. In Chapter 4 of Story of a Soul she describes her difficulties. She remained scrupulous all her life. During the first years after she entered Carmel, a priest gave a sermon that troubled her deeply. The priest said that it was easy to offend God. Thérèse took this to heart, thinking that she had offended God in almost everything she did or thought. In Chapter 8 of Story of a Soul, she tells about another sermon by a different priest that highlighted a different message.

He said that her sins did not offend God. He emphasized God’s love. But Thérèse still suffered from scruples and her doubts about being in the state of grace. Her internal battle was between two conflicting ideas: Believing God is merciful vs. feeling that God is merciful. Even though she did not “feel” God’s mercy, she believed in it by sheer strength of her will. She never really got beyond the wounds caused by her childhood and culture, but abandoned herself entirely to God in spite of her wounds.

Moral: Don’t judge your spiritual life with an emotional yardstick.

Question for us: Am I going to act on my faith in a merciful God or am I going to act on my feelings?

Trial of Faith

At one point in her final months of earthly life, Thérèse confessed, “I don’t believe in eternal life.” But her spirituality expanded. Everything is a grace from God, even the gift of faith. It wasn’t a matter of getting beyond the darkness but of how she dealt with being in the darkness. There are two kinds of faith:

    1. One kind of faith is willing to jump into the darkness.
    2. A second kind of faith is the willingness to sit in the darkness as long as God wills it.

By persisting in darkness, we can help others. Thérèse died in a state of temptation to abandon faith but in this context her faith persevered. When I do God’s will in an atmosphere of darkness, I am only being consumed by love. I see and feel Him without any support. Continue to say “yes” to God when it is beyond your ability to believe.

Thérèse chose to love her neighbor without feeling love. She chose to believe in God’s love without feeling loved. She chose to die in darkness without the confidence of God’s presence.

Moral: Faith, Hope, and Love are not emotions. They are actions.

FOR FURTHER STUDY:

Apostolic Exhortation: C’est La Confiance by Pope Francis

St. Thérèse teaches simplicity, love, trust, pope says in document by Cindy Wooden

“The Context of Holiness: Psychological and Spiritual Reflections on the Life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux” by Marc Foley. ICS Publications; Revised edition (January 4, 2021); ISBN-10: 1939272882; ISBN-13: 978-1939272881