Saint Thérèse, Martyr of Love, 128 Years (Part II)
A Little Victim to Merciful Love
Yesterday, for the 128th anniversary of Saint Thérèse’s holy death, we posted in Part I of this article about Saint Thérèse’s visible conformity to Jesus in the last hours of her life. Particularly striking in this regard are the events of 3pm, the hour Our Lord died. Another description of this event (in addition to the one from Bishop Guy Gaucher that we quoted in the previous article) comes from Saint Thérèse’s sister Céline, as published in Last Conversations:
This was the last day of my dear little Thérèse’s exile. On the day of her death, in the afternoon, Mother Agnes of Jesus and I were with her, and our dear little Saint called us over to help her. She was suffering extremely in all her muscles, and, placing one arm on Mother Agnes’ shoulder and the other on mine, she remained thus her arms in the form of a cross. At that very moment, three o’clock sounded, and the thought of Jesus on the Cross came to our mind: was not our poor little martyr a living image of Him?
Today we wish to reflect on the relationship between the suffering of her final hours and Saint Thérèse’s holocaust to merciful love. We quoted part of the text of her Act of Oblation in our recent post on Padre Pio and priests. Her final conformity to the Crucified was the last consummation of this oblation to merciful love. Yet what are we to make of the extent of her suffering? She herself explains that she suffered so much because of her ardent desires to console Jesus by saving souls through her suffering. Mother Agnes recorded an episode from about 2 or 3 hours before she died that illustrates this well:
[Thérèse] repeated once more: “All I wrote about my desires for suffering. Oh! it’s true just the same!” “And I am not sorry for delivering myself up to Love.”
With insistence: “Oh! no, I’m not sorry; on the contrary!”
A little later: “Never would I have believed it was possible to suffer so much!never! never! I cannot explain this except by the ardent desires I have had to save souls.”
Were her sufferings the result of her oblation? If so, should we not fear to make the same offering? No. Although her desires to save souls and console Jesus caused her to love her cross and endure great sufferings, she is, in another place, quick to assure us that those who consecrate themselves to merciful love will not suffer more as a result, only it will transform their sufferings. Then too, she wanted joys, and not just sufferings, to be offered to Jesus through this oblation.
But how are we to explain that Saint Thérèse suffered so much when she assured us that to be a victim of love does not mean asking for suffering? Her sister, Céline, explains that this offering was made for a “legion” of souls, and not a chosen few:
Saint Thérèse dared to offer her Act of Oblation to her chosen “legion” of “little souls” because she did not identify the martyrdom of love with that call to suffering which distinguishes the victims of God’s justice. To help weak souls, Thérèse appeals to the mercy of the Heart of God, to His paternal condescension. She holds up before Him their very misery to invite His holy compassion. She calls on Him to regard their insignificance with pity, for she is convinced that “love to be fully satisfied must stoop even to nothingness.”
It was His love, that love which she had made her own, which Thérèse yearned to contemplate in her God. She knew that God’s love was fully satisfied only when it had abased itself to nothingness . . . “in order to transform that nothingness into fire.” She believed herself to be too small to reach up to God, but that He in His Mercy would reach down and lift her up to Himself. Cradled in His Arms she would be transformed by His light, absolved of every fault, purified of every imperfection. “At every moment,” she tells us, “this merciful love renews and purifies me, leaving in my soul no trace of sin.” God cannot be satisfied she says, until He has raised to His Sacred Heart even the least of us; and there, like a runaway lamb, at the shepherd’s bosom we may rest, held tenderly captive, victims of His divine love.
Yet the last words of Saint Thérèse gave Céline pause for thought. Céline expresses this in her own words the book My Sister, Saint Thérèse:
Had I probed into Thérèse’s own attitude to her poignant interior trial of faith and to her intolerable physical sufferings, I think I should have learned that she might have been tempted, if only for a moment, to wonder in anguish if the sufferings of the victims of love were not, after all, the same as those of the victims of God’s justice. That one agonizing instant past, however, I would have heard her answer assuringly :
“No, I could never have believed it possible to have suffered so much . . . never, never! I can only explain it by my intense desire to save souls.”
I heard my holy little sister affirm on her death-bed: “Fortunately I did not ask for suffering, for if I had prayed for it, then it would be my own suffering and I should fear not to have the strength to endure it.” We must conclude from this that Thérèse was not identifying her desires of a life-time [for suffering] with a formal petition which should have bound her irrevocably. The distinction is inescapable. The soul offering herself to love is not asking for suffering, but in yielding herself up entirely to the designs of love, she is accepting in advance all that divine Providence will be pleased to send her by way of joys, labours and trials; at the same time, she counts on infinite mercy to enable her to sanctify her crosses by an enduring spirit of joy.
When the Liturgical Office of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus was given to the Church, the summarized ninth lesson of Matins contained these words: “. . . inflamed with the desire of suffering, she offered herself, two years before her death, as a victim to the merciful love of God.” But Mère Agnès de Jésus (our sister) had no rest until she obtained, from the Sacred Congregation of Rites, a modification of this text. It was solely due to her intervention that, finally, on May 2, 1932, the substitute phrase was published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis “. . . on fire with divine love . . .” which is a faithful expression of Thérèsian thought.
