In Carmel - The Early Years - April 9, 1888
On New Year’s day, 1888, the prioress of the Lisieux Carmel advised Thérèse she would be received into the monastery, but that she had to be patient and wait a little bit longer. On April 9, 1888, an emotional and tearful, but determined Thérèse Martin said good-bye to her home and her family. She was going to live “for ever and ever” in the desert with Jesus and twenty-four enclosed companions; she was fifteen years and three months old. The only cloud on her horizon was the worsening condition of her father, Louis, who had developed cerebral arteriosclerosis. Celine remained at home to care for their father during his long and final illness. The good father was growing senile. Once in June of 1888, he wandered from his home at Lisieux and was lost for three days, eventually turning up at Le Havre. In August, after a series of strokes, Louis became paralyzed.
Many years earlier when Thérèse was a little girl, she would peer out of an attic window. Thérèse loved reveling in the glory of the day. One day however while her father was in Alencon on business, she suddenly saw in the garden below the stooped and twisted figure of a man. She froze in terror. “Papa, Papa” she cried out. Her sister, Marie, who was nearby, heard the unmistakable note of panic in Thérèse’s cry and ran to her. The figure in the garden disappeared. Marie assured her it was nothing and told her to forget everything that had happened. But the vision continued to cling like a sad portent in the corner of Thérèse’s mind for the next fourteen years. Now, with her father paralyzed, the meaning of Thérèse’s vision in the garden so long ago had became apparent at last.
Louis however, rallied his strength, and managed to attend the ceremonies of Thérèse’s clothing in the Carmelite habit on January 10, 1889. Shortly thereafter, on February 12th, 1889 Louis was taken to the Bon-Sauveur hospital in Caen after an attack of dementia. Seeing her father’s humiliation hurt Thérèse deeply. “Oh, I do not think I could have suffered more than I did on that Day!!!” With that, Thérèse began to understand the sufferings of the mocked Christ, the Suffering Servant foretold by Isaiah. Thérèse’s father made one last visit to the Carmel in May, 1892. He died peacefully two years later, in 1894, with Celine at his side. Celine then joined her three sisters at the Lisieux Carmel in September of 1894.
Thérèse’s time as a postulant began with her welcome into the Carmel, Monday, April 9, 1888. She felt peace after she received communion that day and later wrote, “At last my desires were realized, and I cannot describe the deep sweet peace which filled my soul. This peace has remained with me during the eight and a half years of my life here, and has never left me even amid the greatest trials”.
From her childhood, Thérèse had dreamed of the desert to which God would some day lead her. Now she had entered that desert. Though she was now reunited with Marie and Pauline, from the very first day she began her struggle to win and keep her distance from her sisters. Right at the start Marie de Gonzague, the prioress, had turned the postulant Thérèse over to her eldest sister Marie, who was to teach her to follow the Divine Office. Later she appointed Thérèse assistant to Pauline in the refectory. When her cousin Marie Guerin also entered, she employed the two together in the sacristy.
Thérèse adhered strictly to the rule which forbade all superfluous talk during work. She saw her sisters together only in the hours of common recreation after meals. At such times she would sit down beside whomever she happened to be near, or beside a nun whom she had observed to be downcast, disregarding the tacit and sometimes expressed sensitivity and even jealousy of her biological sisters. “We must apologize to the others for our being four under one roof”, she was in the habit of remarking. “When I am dead, you must be very careful not to lead a family life with one another. I did not come to Carmel to be with my sisters; on the contrary, I saw clearly that their presence would cost me dear, for I was determined not to give way to nature.”
The end of Thérèse’s time as a postulant arrived on January 10, 1889, with her taking of the habit. From that time she wore the “rough 
homespun and brown scapular, white wimple and veil, leather belt with rosary, woolen ‘stockings’, and rope sandals”. Her father’s health having temporarily stabilized allowed him to attend, though twelve days after her ceremony her father suffered a stroke and was taken to a private sanatorium, the Bon Sauveur at Caen, where he remained for three years before returning to Lisieux in 1892. During this period Thérèse deepened the sense of her vocation; to lead a hidden life, to pray and offer her suffering for priests, to forget herself, to increase discreet acts of charity. She wrote, “I applied myself especially to practice little virtues, not having the facility to perform great ones”. In her letters from this period of her novitiate, Thérèse returned over and over to the theme of littleness, referring to herself as a “grain of sand”, an image she borrowed from Pauline. “Always littler, lighter, in order to be lifted more easily by the breeze of love”. The remainder of her life would be defined by retreat and subtraction. Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus was happy with her lot, but everyday life in the Carmel had its problems too. The clashes of communal life, the cold, the new diet and the difficulties of prayer (two hours prayer and four and a half of liturgy). First a postulant and then a novice, she took the Carmelite habit on January 10, 1889 after a retreat marked by a deep sense of inner barrenness. She had her own good reasons for adding “of the Holy Face” to her religious name.
Thérèse was also affected by the spiritual atmosphere in the community, which was still tainted by Jansenism and the vision of an avenging God. Some of the sisters feared divine justice and suffered badly from scruples. Even after her general confession in May 1888 to Father Pichon, her Jesuit spiritual director, Thérèse was still uneasy. But a great peace came over her when she at last made her profession on September 8, 1890, although taking the black veil (a public ceremony) on September 24th was a day “veiled in tears”.
It was the reading of St. John of the Cross, an unusual choice at the time, which brought her relief. In the Spiritual Canticle and the Living Flame of Love, she discovered “the true Saint of Love”. This she felt was the path she was meant to follow. During a community retreat (October 1891), a Franciscan, Father Alexis Prou, launched her on those “waves of confidence and love” on which she had previously been afraid to venture.
St. Thérèse and the Priesthood - 1895-96
On the eve of her Profession, Thérèse solemnly declared “I came (to the Carmel) to save souls and most of all, to pray for priests”.
I will help priests, missionaries, the whole Church (July 13, 1897) “. This is why, in the wake of the two “spiritual brothers” entrusted to her care in 1895 and 1896, many priests have sought her protection and tried to follow in her path.
The first “spiritual brother”, Father Maurice Belliére, a 21-year old seminarian, asked her to pray for his vocation. He became a “White Father” and went to Nyasaland (now Malawi), before returning to France where he died at the age of 33, in the Bon Sauveur hospital at Caen in 1907. Thérèse’s correspondence helped him greatly. She wrote him eleven important letters.
The second, Father Adolphe Roulland, of the Paris Foreign Missions, went to Sutchuen in China. He began corresponding with Thérèse after having celebrated his first Mass in the Lisieux Carmel and talking with her sister. Thérèse wrote him six letters. He died in France in 1934.
Her contacts with these two young priests broadened Thérèse’s horizons to take in the whole world. Even when she was seriously ill she remained deeply conscious of her own missionary role.
After her death, many priests and nuns found their vocations when they encountered Thérèse. She kept her promise. A host of priests and missionaries placed their ministry under her protection. Founded in 1929, the Sacerdotal Union of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux brings together priests from all over the world who follow her path, entrusting themselves and their ministry to her.
PRAYER FOR FATHER BELLIÉRE
O my Jesus! I thank You for fulfilling one of my dearest wishes, that of having a brother, priest, and apostle. I feel very unworthy of this favor, but as You deign to give Your poor little spouse the grace to work specially for the sanctification of a soul destined for the priesthood, I gladly offer You, for that soul, all the prayers and sacrifices of which I am capable; I ask You, O my God, to look not at what I am, but what I should and want to be, a nun wholly consumed by the fire of Your love.
You know, Lord, that my sole ambition is to make You known and loved; and now my wish will be fulfilled. I can only pray and suffer, but the soul with which You deign to unite me, through the sweet bonds of charity, will go down onto the plain as a warrior to win hearts for You, and I on the Mount of Carmel, will implore You to give him victory.
Divine Jesus, hear my prayer for the one who wishes to become Your missionary, keep him safe amidst the dangers of the world, make him feel increasingly the emptiness and vanity of passing things and the happiness of disdaining them for love of You. Let his sublime apostolate already work on those around him, let him be an apostle worthy of Your Sacred Heart. O Mary! Sweet Queen of Carmel, to your care I entrust the soul of this future priest, whose unworthy little sister I am. Deign to show him the love with which you touched the Holy Infant Jesus and dressed Him in swaddling clothes, so that He may one day ascend to the Sacred Altar and bear the King of Heaven in his hands.
I also beseech you to keep him always within the shadow of your virgin’s cloak, until the happy day when, leaving this vale of tears behind, he beholds your splendor and enjoys, for all eternity, the fruits of his glorious apostolate.
The Trial of Faith - 1896
At Eastertime 1896, Thérèse sank into a darkness which lasted the eighteen months leading up to her death. She accepted this darkness so that unbelievers might see the light.
” …. then suddenly the fog which surrounds me becomes more dense; it penetrates my soul and envelops it in such a way that it is impossible to discover within it the sweet image of my Fatherland, everything has disappeared! When I want to rest my heart, fatigued by the darkness which surrounds it, by remembering the luminous country to which I aspire, my torment redoubles; it seems that the darkness, borrowing the voice of sinners, says mockingly to me, you are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest perfumes; you are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels; you believe that one day you will walk out of this fog which surrounds you! Advance, advance; rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness”.
“Dear Mother, the image I tried to give you of the darkness that obscures my soul is as imperfect as a sketch is to the model; however, I don’t want to write any longer about it; I fear I might blaspheme… I fear that I have already said too much… Ah! May Jesus pardon me if I have caused Him any pain, but He knows very well that while I do not have the joy of faith, I am trying to carry out its work at least. I believe I have made more acts of faith in this past year than through my whole life”.
Nearing the End
At age eleven, on May 8, 1884, she received her first “kiss of love”; a sense of being “united” with Jesus, of His giving Himself to her as she gave herself to Him. Her eucharistic hunger made her long for daily communion. Confirmation, “the sacrament of love”, which she received on June 14, 1884, filled her with ecstasy. Holidays in Trouville and Saint-Ouen-le-Pin were followed however by a retreat which triggered a crisis of scruples, lasting seventeen months. Her sister Marie helped her to overcome it. But Marie in her turn entered the Lisieux Carmel on October 15, 1886.
This was too much for the adolescent Thérèse, who had now lost a third mother. She was nearly fourteen and already strikingly good-looking, 1.62 meters tall with magnificent eyes and long hair. She attracted notice on the beach in Trouville where people nicknamed her “the tall English girl”. But she was tormented by an inner anguish which found relief, only when in November 1886, she appealed to her brothers and sisters in heaven to intercede for her. Even then, she remained hypersensitive, weak-willed, “crying at having cried”. How could she in this pitiful state possibly enter the Carmel; something she had dreamed of since the age of nine as a way of living with Jesus?
Christmas Conversion
Afflicted for months by a sore throat which stubbornly resisted treatment, Thérèse suffered two hemorrhages during Holy Week of 1896. Far from panicking, she saw this as a summons from her Spouse and looked forward to joining Him soon. But sudden anguish overwhelmed her at Easter and she fell into a dark night of the soul, an “underground labyrinth”, a “fog”. Heaven seemed to have shut its gates against her. This trial of faith and hope, which made her participate in Christ’s Passion, was to last, with a few brief periods of respite, to the end of her life. But she turned the test into a redemptive one, agreeing to remain alone in the darkness so that atheists might receive the Light.
Thérèse’s final years were marked by a steady decline that she bore resolutely and without complaint. Tuberculosis was the key element of Thérèse’s final suffering, but she saw that as part of her spiritual journey. After observing a rigorous Lenten fast in 1896, she went to bed on the eve of Good Friday and felt a joyous sensation. She wrote: “Oh! how sweet this memory really is! I had scarcely laid my head upon the pillow when I felt something like a bubbling stream mounting to my lips. I didn’t know what it was.” The next morning her handkerchief was soaked in blood and she understood her fate. Coughing up of blood meant tuberculosis, and tuberculosis meant death. She wrote, “I thought immediately of the joyful thing that I had to learn, so I went over to the window. I was able to see that I was not mistaken. Ah! my soul was filled with a great consolation; I was interiorly persuaded that Jesus, on the anniversary of His own death, wanted to have me hear His first call!” While she was praying in the church that summer, strange and powerful desires started to torment her. She wanted to become a priest, a prophet, a Doctor of the Church, a missionary, a martyr. Chancing on a passage in Saint Paul, she discovered her true vocation at the age of twenty-two. “In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love. This way, I shall be everything”. Writing down these confidences for her sister and godmother, Marie of the Sacred Heart, in September 1896, she gave the world a spiritual masterpiece (Manuscript B). The wish to “save souls” never left her, and she was seriously thinking of leaving for the Carmel founded in Saigon by the Lisieux sisters.
But tuberculosis was gaining ground undetected. Early in 1897, Thérèse began to feel that “her course would not be a long one”. In April, worn out, she was forced to abandon community life, remaining either in her cell or in the garden. In June, Pauline realized that her death was imminent. In a panic, she implored Mother Marie de Gonzague to let Thérèse finish putting down her recollections. Burning with fever, Thérèse wrote a further 36 pages in a little black notebook. Exhausted, she went to the infirmary on July 8th. For a month, she coughed blood, slept little and was unable to eat, while the tuberculosis began to affect her intestines. Doctor de Corniéres treated her with the methods of the time, but they could do nothing to help her.
Her sisters took turns keeping vigil at her bedside. Since April, Pauline had been writing down everything she said. More than 850 recorded utterances were later to be published as the Last Conversations. In this short work, Thérèse suffers, prays, weeps, makes jokes to distract her sisters and speaks of her own short life.
A prey to constant darkness, she came to understand the temptations of suicide, but lived in trust and love until the very end. She identified herself with the suffering Jesus and offered everything “for sinners”. She felt an overwhelming desire “to do good after her death”. With great difficulty, she wrote last letters to her spiritual brothers, Fathers Belliére and Roulland.
The appalling pain she suffered wore her out, but she never lost her smile or her deep-seated serenity. A brief remission was followed by a 48 hour agony. She died on Thursday September 30, 1897 whispering “My God, I love You!” Her face was radiant.
She died unknown, just as she had lived unknown in a provincial Carmel, of tuberculosis, but also of “Love”, as she herself had wanted. She wrote to Father Belliére, “I am not dying, I am entering into Life”. This was just the beginning.