St. Therese: My Heavenly Friend

I first met St Therese as a 7 year old girl at bedtime, when my babysitter was telling my younger sisters and I bedtime stories of the saints. I remembered being interested in a lot of the female saints she talked about, like St. Cecilia, patron saint of music and St. Agnes, the patron saint of young girls. But when my babysitter introduced me to St. Therese, and shared with me one of her favourite St Therese quotes, I felt something different. In this quote, and maybe you’ve heard it before, St Therese say’s “When I die, I will send down a shower of roses from the heavens, I will spend my heaven doing good on earth”. Maybe I felt different because the idea of sending roses down from heaven was so intriguing, or maybe it just felt like more of a real and tangible way to relate to this “heavenly friend”, as my babysitter called them. Either way, I went to sleep that night and couldn’t get the story of St. Therese off my mind.

A few days later, my babysitter presented me with a small St. Therese statue, which was previously hers, telling me that St Therese wanted to be my friend. And I, as a 7 year old girl, staring at this small, smiling face, decided that I wanted to be her friend too.

My friendship with St. Therese has progressed in this way ever since. Her seeking me out, and me responding and eager to learn more about her. I read her story in my little saint books a million times, and despite the fact that she had lived a century and a half before me, I felt that I could relate to her in a truly human way.

Let’s admit it, some of the saints in our Catholic faith seem easier to admire than imitate - so towering in their supernatural strength and wisdom. It makes the idea of knowing the saints as “friends” seem almost impossible, or just something unachievable. In contrast, St Therese is thoroughly un-intimidating. One of the reasons for that is that we actually have photos of her! Just to bring you into this, here is one of my favourite photos of St. Therese.

Can you believe that this young woman has one of the biggest fan clubs going in the Catholic Church! This woman was truly a weakling by nature - an association she personally describes herself as and a description we know to be true from what we know about her life.

St. Therese was the youngest of 5 girls, and was truly a pampered youngest sister. She was coddled by her mother and father, and when her mother tragically died when she was only 4, she was even more pampered by her oldest sister Pauline who became like a second mother. She truly was treated like a “little princess”, and she was the first to admit it. St Therese in her writing tells us that she wouldn’t help with the housework - simply making her bed was, in her mind, a huge favour! She had a very hard time taking criticism, and cried all the time - then, would cry more simply because she was crying! St Therese would get frustrated when things didn’t go her way, she would get very angry when people wouldn’t give her the attention she felt she deserved. These incredibly human emotions and human weaknesses defined St Therese’s early life and her relationship with Christ. At 15, when she desired to follow her sister's lead and join the Carmelite Convent, she was told that she first had to control her emotional outbursts in order to be able to enter. Ultimately, she did, and this weak, young woman was transformed through her vocation into a true warrior for Christ - not by doing big things, but by doing small things with great love.

St. Therese is the first to admit her own weaknesses and shortcomings. We know about her emotional outbursts and her coddled upbringing from her own writings and stories! She knew she was weak and imperfect and yet, her decision to enter the convent was more importantly, a decision to have a daring confidence in Christ - that she could be strong in Him. That He was bigger than her faults and failures. That He desired her to be a saint.

Therese is an example of an ordinary person who so trusted in God that He did extraordinary things in her soul. Because she is “so human” and relatable in her weaknesses, she has the biggest fan club because she makes holiness attainable! What sets Therese apart is truly this unshakable confidence in God. She says this in her writing:

“For me, to become greater is impossible; I must put up with myself just as I am with all my imperfections...We are in a century of inventions: now one does not even have to take the trouble to climb the steps of a stairway...an elevator replaces them nicely. I too would like to find an elevator to lift me to Jesus, for I am too little to climb the rough stairway of perfection… For I do not need to grow; on the contrary, I must necessarily remain small, become smaller and smaller”.

St Therese found her “elevator” to Jesus knowing, in humility, how weak and small she was, but, in confidence, how great God was in comparison. She lived what she called the “little way” of love out of this great confidence every day in her Carmelite convent. She relied totally and wholly on Him, rather than herself. She thus became a reflection of His love with her sisters - living out that radical confidence in Jesus’ love for her by giving sacrificially in her work around the convent and with her sisters.

In 1896, at 23 years of age. St Therese first coughed up blood. She hid her growing pain and suffering for an entire year, but, only a year later, she died, on September 30th, at the age of 24. This woman who, only a few years before was unable to make it through even the littlest of pains without intense emotion hid for a year the development of a brutal case of tuberculosis. On her death bed she spoke the words, “I do not regret giving myself to God”, and promised that promise which had made her so real to me as a young girl, a promise to send down a shower of roses from heaven.

Those simple words, that she did not regret giving herself to God, is an invitation to you and to me today. St Therese tells us, by her words and through her life, that when we respond to God’s invitation to be His, at the end of our life, there is no regret. The things of this world that we so often define ourselves by and seek fulfillment in ultimately leave us empty because, when we die, we cannot take them with us. The only thing we can take with us is love. The love we give, and the love we receive. The Lord raised St Therese high, even though she was so small on earth, because of this great love.

In my own life, I see so much of St Therese in myself. I often feel that my personal weaknesses, my imperfections, make me unworthy of love. The years of living out of this lie made it hard for me to live out of this great confidence that St. Therese had. I believed that my weaknesses, my imperfections were so much that God could never truly love me. That I wasn’t deserving of the love He offered me. And so I kept God at an arm's length. Because if He saw my heart, my heart that was stained and bruised, my heart that was bandaged so tightly with bandaids over the wounds and scars I didn’t want Him or anyone else to see, then He wouldn’t truly love me.

It wasn’t until I was on a mission trip with Catholic Christian Outreach in Scotland in the spring of 2019 that this finally changed, and it is all thanks to, you guessed it, our good friend St. Therese. Little confession, for a few years leading up to this point - specifically in my first year of University as a varsity lacrosse player, I kind of forgot about St. Therese. Oops. She kind of felt like the friend that after high school you lose touch with, and maybe grab coffee with when you both are home for Christmas or a spring break. Anyways, we were about halfway into the mission, and I was sharing with a missionary that I really loved St Therese growing up. That missionary then said “well, that's not surprising, St. Therese is the patron saint of missions! And here you are!”. I was dumbfounded. I actually, up to this point, had never heard that about her, and, because we had sort of “lost touch”, if you will, felt sort of embarrassed that I had forgotten her in all this.

That night, I looked up a St Therese novena, a 9 day prayer for a specific intention, and gave St Therese a challenge. A challenge to send down roses from heaven, on the 9th day of the novena, to show me that Jesus truly wanted my heart, and wanted me here on mission. I remember praying the words “St Therese, I want an actual, real rose. I need to know Jesus’ love for me”. So, the 9 days go by, and on the 9th day, we are visiting the nearby bishop's house with a beautiful garden in the back. We were walking through praying the rosary and…… suddenly, I notice….. Nothing. Not a single rose of ANYTHING in the whole garden. And I looked everywhere. I was so disappointed and honestly, mad, that I had even allowed myself to believe that after all this time, St. Therese would show up for me. We walk back through the house and as we are on our way out, the bishop stops us to ask if we would like to see the saint relics in his possession. Of course, we say yes. Out of this big wooden box he starts pulling out relics from some of the most famous saints of all time, St Anthony of Padua, St. Bernadette of Lourdes, some of the apostles ( I have no idea how he got those) and so many more. While we are all in awe of this experience, I suddenly hear him say, “and here is a relic of St Therese of Lisieux, the little flower”. I jump out of my seat, and as the relic finally gets passed to me, I burst into tears - a mix of joy, elation, and just pure gratitude. Because to answer my prayer, St Therese didn’t just send me a rose, she sent me herself. She personally wanted to be the one to remind me that Jesus’s love for me was whole, steadfast and secure. That He wanted to be enough for me, and wanted to set me free from the lies I believed about how I was meant to be loved. That I was worthy of love, and that love was freely offered to me - a love I could be confident in, like St. Therese was so fiercely throughout her life and now, in heaven.

Friends, you and I can have that same, daring confidence in Christ Jesus that St Therese had - a confidence that God will give you the power you need to overcome any lies you believe about yourself, to overcome any addiction, to overcome any fear or doubt. A humble confidence that God can and will use the parts of yourself you believe are weak or imperfect, and use those to become strengths. A daring confidence that God desires for you to be a saint, and wants to love you, as you are, right now. This God of the Universe is inviting you to let Him in. This God who couldn’t love you more than He does right now, who would die on the cross for you even if you were the only person left on earth. He wants you. I invite you to step out in confidence, and give Him your yes. In the words of St. Therese:

"I’m not relying on my own merits, as I have none, but I put my hope in Him who is goodness and holiness Himself. To limit your desires and your hopes is to misunderstand God’s infinite goodness! We can never have too much confidence in the good God… As we hope in Him so shall we receive”.