A vivid memory of my seminary days is being present in St Peter’s Square in October 1997 when Pope John Paul II declared Thérèse of Lisieux a Doctor of the Church. White-cloaked Carmelites carried the golden casket containing Thérèse’s relics in procession. At the end of Mass her words were read aloud: “At last I had found my vocation: to be love at the heart of the Church.”
Amid a huge assembly of hierarchy and laity in the Eternal City, the little girl who had once made an embarrassing scene in front of Pope Leo XIII now emerged in her true stature as someone whose “Little Way” of confidence in God’s love, and self-sacrifice in pursuit of that grace for itself and for the saving of souls more even than for her own progress, was a teaching of perennial importance.
Perhaps because I have been several times to her shrine this year, Thérèse sent me a special gift: that of celebrating her feast when ordinarily it is replaced liturgically by the Sunday celebration. For the Sisters of Maria Stella Matutina, who are themselves contemplatives of French origin, her feast is kept as a solemnity and they are permitted to celebrate it on the actual date. They invited me for Mass, so I headed down to their convent in Grayshott, Hampshire, on October 1.
These nuns have been in Portsmouth diocese for two years. Their convent is a former presbytery which is homely – though, I suspect, a little small for their needs. I get to see it when we bless the house after Mass, the Sisters singing the Litany of the Saints, me plying the holy water. Their order seeks to live in priories of between seven and 15 Sisters, so that their life is a balance of silent contemplation and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, community prayer and life in common, and a less strict enclosure that allows them to work for the new evangelisation. Later this month, for example, they will host a Newman weekend in which they will invite young women to share their life of prayer and study.
After Mass, some time of prayer, Confessions and the blessing of the convent, we sit down to a simple and delicious lunch cooked by the French superior. The conversation flows easily as we talk of Thérèse, and I share how I have discovered the different members of the Martin family recently. The Sisters clearly relish Thérèse’s accounts of her struggles with community life for their complete authenticity and recognise only too well the struggles she experienced, and the humility and humour with which she acknowledged them.
The Sisters speak about how their lives are enriched by the celebration of feasts and how routine is lightened by the little things that Thérèse would recognise and rejoice in so well: a certain number of candles on the altar according to the importance of the feast, the flowers and the customs for different feasts. Anyone who knows about love knows this truth, that it is expressed in routine, where simple things impart such joy when done with care and forethought for a nobler end than utility.
Lunch ends with a festive game called tirage in French, partly because it’s hard to think of a good English equivalent. It’s not unlike holy fortune cookies, but instead of a cookie you take a card. On All Saints, for example, the card will bear the name of the saint whose intercession you will then seek for the year. Today for the tirage small photos of St Thérèse are arranged on a plate decorated with rose petals. As the guest, I get to do the tirage-ing, (as they don’t say in French), and choose one for each person.
I get my favourite picture, which is the one cropped from a group shot in which Thérèse, aged about 18, looks straight at the camera with an intense gaze. As well as different photos each has a different quotation on the back from The Story of a Soul. So with a childlike delight not in the power of chance but the direction of the Holy Spirit, the Sisters explain that this is the point of the game: each receives a teaching of Thérèse particular to their state. Mine was: “I entrust to Jesus my failings; I tell him all about them and I think – so bold is my trust – that in this way I will acquire more power over his heart and to myself an even greater abidance of his love.” Nothing random about that – except that it’s taken me 20 years to learn it.
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