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<\/h2>\n<\/h2>\nToday we celebrate the 128th anniversary of the Dies Natalis<\/i> of a most dear secondary patron of our monastery. St. Th\u00e9r\u00e8se died at 7:20 PM on September 30th, 1897. She was 24 years old. Her body radiated joy and innocence after her death, and her sisters were astonished both at how beautiful she was and how young she looked. They said she looked after death like she was thirteen.<\/p>\n
Yet this was not the way it seemed before she passed away. C\u00e9line Martin, St. Th\u00e9r\u00e8se’s sister, had accompanied their father, St. Louis Martin, to his happy death. At the time, she had been edified by how beautiful a good death could be. The same sister, however, burst out into the night sky weeping after her sister died, crying within herself how ugly death was. The sky itself seemed to reflect this, so full of clouds. And she said to herself, if only I could at least see the sky and the stars!<\/i> When, all at once, the clouds broke and the stars shone through.<\/p>\n
Yet it was not St. Th\u00e9r\u00e8se’s death that lacked beauty. It was commented that it was the most beautiful death that Carmel had ever seen. Her radiant gaze and her last words, “Oh! I love Him….My God, I love You!”, stayed forever with all the sisters who witnessed it. It was, rather, the intensity of her participation in Christ’s Passion. A year earlier, she had quoted to her sister Marie the words of P\u00e8re Pichon that had stayed with her for a decade: “The martyrs suffered with joy, and the King of Martyrs suffered with sadness.” She may have still been reflecting on this when, on July 4, a few months before she died, she said: “Our Lord died on the Cross in agony, and yet this is the most beautiful death of love. This is the only one that was seen; no one saw that of the Blessed Virgin. To die of love is not to die in transports. I tell you frankly, it seems to me that this is what I am experiencing.\u201d<\/p>\n
She herself predicted that her death would not be one of peaceful radiance. One day, three months before her death, when she was peaceful and her face radiant, she told her sisters: “You mustn\u2019t expect to see me like this at the moment of death.”<\/p>\n
Her death, indeed, was very different from that peace, right up until the last minute.<\/p>\n
St. Th\u00e9r\u00e8se’s cousin, Sr. Marie of the Eucharist, asked the Saint a few months before her death if she ever refused God anything. She recalls:<\/p>\n
I asked her the other day: \u201cDid you sometimes refuse God anything?\u201d She said: \u201cNo, l don\u2019t remember refusing Him anything. Even when I was very little, at the age of three, I began to refuse God nothing He was asking from me.\u201d –Last Conversations<\/i><\/a><\/small><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
St. Francis de Sales’ favourite prayer was said to be simply: “Yes, Father. Yes, and always yes.” It was this prayer that, whether knowingly or not, St. Th\u00e9r\u00e8se made her own at every moment of her conscious life, and at every moment of her carrying of her own Cross.<\/p>\n
“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Mt 16:24-26).<\/p>\n
These words of the Lord could have been spoken of St. Th\u00e9r\u00e8se.<\/p>\n
I Really Will It<\/h2>\n
On the day when her beautiful soul would wing its way to God, St. Th\u00e9r\u00e8se testified about herself: \u201cOh!…it\u2019s the agony, really, without any mixture of consolation.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Lord permitted her to feel that this would last forever. It seemed to her that death would never come. “I no longer believe in death for me. . . . I believe only in suffering. . . . Well, so much the better! . . .”<\/p>\n
It was that “So much the better” that summarized her donation of her entire self, a gift that would know no refusal.<\/p>\n