Thursday, 1 October 2015

Saint Therese of the Child of Jesus 'Sent like Lambs'


Thursday 0f the Twenty Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
Night Office: from Ida Gorres.


Introduction to Mass
St Therese of the Child Jesus (1 October 2015) – Fr Hugh

Our Lord has told us that unless we become like little children we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  Childlike not childish.  St Therese exemplified this.

One of the characteristics of a child is a sense of wonder.

At Confirmation the prayer over the candidates asks that they may receive the Spirit of Wonder and Awe at God’s presence.  This is one of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit – Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety and Wonder and Awe at God’s Presence (also called Fear of the Lord.).

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Poem from St. Therese
. A LAMB.
Would you charm the Lamb of God?
In the path that He hath trod
Tread to-day with willing feet!
Leaving all things here below,
Seek alone His will to know;
Do His will surpassing sweet!

 cf. Lk. 10:3 'out like lambs'

A Reading about St. Teresa of Lisieux, from a Book by Ida Gorres*

IN Teresa herself, during every hour of her life, the sustaining foundation of the Church was made manifest. The details of this fabric were too small individually to be singled out by the eye; but together they formed the ground out of which everything else grew.

Teresa thought and talked like a nun of her period. She had amazingly little understanding of "the world", of the natural, ordinary life outside the convent walls. But she lived the sanctity and transparency of ordinary human life. Her essential experiences of God, her conclusions from them, were not founded upon or inspired by the special insights of the mystics, nor upon the tradition of the Carmelite Order. They derived from the homely traditions of a good family, from the simple everyday, catechism-nourished devotion of father and mother. Thus she became–like Francis de Sales, her great spiritual ancestor–a teacher of that lay spirituality which is so much discussed nowadays; just as, conversely, all monastic piety has always been nourished by the primordial example of marital and parental love. Only God knows the number of souls who share in the honour and the reward of this one saint. In her glorification there is revealed, as through a rent in the curtain, both as consolation and promise, and comprehensible to the earthly heart, a gleam of that which awaits the lowliest in our Father's House.

St. Pius X is said to have prophetically called Teresa, whose full rise to fame he did not live to witness, the greatest saint of the century. May we be permitted to understand him in that way. He, the saintly Pope who restored to the ordinary Christian the forgotten heritage which for centuries had been the privilege only of the clergy or of the most devout–free access to the Eucharist; he who again recognized that the participation of the laity was the lifeblood of the liturgy and thus broke down the artificial dividing wall between clergy and people~ act of enormous significance may well have understood that this little Carmelite stands for innumerable souls, for the legions of those to whom she revealed it for the first time. Therefore she stands precisely on the crossroads between the "old" and the "new" piety. She is a remarkable example of the invincible powers of renewal in the Mystical Body of Christ, of the activity of the Holy Spirit, whose creative power is ever at work. And she is all that precisely because she lived so apart from and so innocent of all the discussions and disputes over reform and rebirth.

It is a, source of deepest...happiness to see in the Church this process of self-purification for once not manifesting itself in the form of protest against abuses, or conflict and strife with the world, but welling up from the clear spring of a child's soul.

In Teresa there gathered and became purified the deep, intimate essential unchanging elements of the Faith and of Love. As the perfected butterfly, breaks out of the chrysalis, so she emerges transformed from the shrivelling shell of her period and appears before us as the pure embodiment of Christian reality.
To be sure, she represents also a perfection of the period's religious ideal; but in fulfilling the law of her own being, she overcomes it. She who knew only obedience, only listening, unquestionably accepted the highly questionable elements in her contemporaries' piety. But the pruning purity of her touch melted away all the old slag. What she grasped and what she embodied is one again the beginning, the core, the original meaning. We see in her girlish face the hidden face of the Church, the Face of the Hidden Church, which in the chaos of time flowers, eternally young and beautiful, to greet the re­turning Lord.

* The Hidden Face, New York 1969, 412-414.
   
SAINT THERESE OF LISIEUX
MEDITATION      OF THE       DAY
From Magnificat com
Sent Like Lambs
O my Jesus! I love you! I love the Church, my Mother!
I recall that "the smallest act of PURE LOVE is of more value to her than all other works together" (Saint John of the Cross). But is PURE LOVE in my heart? Are my measure­less desires only but a dream, a folly? Ah if this be so, Jesus, then enlighten me, for you know I am seeking only the truth. If my desires are rash, then make them disappear, for these desires are the greatest martyrdom to me. However, I feel, 0 Jesus, that after having aspired to the most lofty heights of Love, if one day I am not to attain them, I feel that I shall have tasted more sweetness in my martyrdom and my folly than I shall taste in the bosom of the joy of the Fatherland, unless you take away the memory of these earthly hopes through a miracle. Allow me, then, during my exile, the delights of love. Allow me to taste the sweet bitterness of my martyrdom.

Jesus, 0 Jesus, if the desire of loving you is so delightful, what will it be to possess and enjoy this Love?

How can a soul as imperfect as mine aspire to the possession of the plenitude of Love? 0 Jesus, my first and only Friend, you whom I love UNIQUELY, explain this mystery to me! Why do you not reserve these great aspirations for great souls, for the eagles that soar in the heights?

I look upon myself as a weak little bird, with only a light down as covering. I am not an eagle, but I have only an eagle's EYES AND HEART. In spite of my extreme littleness I still dare to gaze upon the divine Sun, the Sun of Love, and my heart feels within it all the aspi­rations of an eagle.

SAINT THERESE OF LISIEUX Saint Therese of Lisieux (+ 1897) was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997.
Prayer for the Evening

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