For when you are small and know it, and are tired of trying to be big. She was ill, thin-skinned and unremarkable, entered a convent at fifteen, did nothing anyone noticed for nine years, and died at twenty-four. The book she was ordered to write made her a Doctor of the Church.
O Jesus, my Love, at last I have found my vocation: my vocation is Love.
Saint Thérèse, pray for us.
Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, born at Alençon in 1873, the ninth child of a watchmaker and a lacemaker; five of the nine lived. Her mother died when she was four. The sister who became her second mother, Pauline, left for the Carmel at Lisieux when Thérèse was nine, and Thérèse fell into an illness nobody could name, from which she said she was cured by a statue's smile. She was, by her own account, unbearable — in tears at everything, and then in tears at having cried.
On Christmas night 1886, coming home from midnight Mass at thirteen, she overheard her tired father say something sharp about the childish custom of her shoes by the fire. She did not cry. She wrote later that Jesus made her strong in that instant, and that the second half of her life began that night. A year later she asked the pope in person, at a public audience in Rome, to let her enter Carmel at fifteen. He said to do what the superiors decided. They let her in.
Nine years followed of nothing. Laundry, choir, an irritating sister in the next stall, a novice-mistress's duties. Tuberculosis showed itself on Good Friday 1896. From that Easter she lived in a darkness in which she could not feel her faith at all, and kept it. Her sister, now her prioress, ordered her to write down her childhood memories. She died on the thirtieth of September 1897.
She went in a girl who cried at everything and came out, nine years later, someone who had learned to love the people who irritated her most — and she says exactly how. There was a sister whose habit of rattling her rosary in choir drove her to distraction; she chose to listen to it as if it were music. There was another who splashed her at the laundry; she chose not to move. She sought out the nun who was hardest to like, and smiled at her so steadily that the woman asked what it was about her that Thérèse found so attractive. The point was not that she had stopped feeling it. It was that she had stopped letting it decide.
She had no gift for great penances and knew it. So she went looking, in scripture, for a way up that did not require climbing, and found it: whosoever is a little one, let him come to me. She wrote that the lift which must raise her to heaven was the arms of Jesus, and that she need not grow up — rather the reverse. That is the little way in a sentence, and it is why people who will never do anything remarkable have kept her book by the bed for a century.
And then the words on this page. She had asked what her vocation was — she wanted to be everything, priest, apostle, martyr — and found her answer in Paul's chapter on charity: that love was the vocation that contained all the others. My vocation is Love. She wrote that in September 1896, in the dark, dying, and she meant it as a discovery, not a consolation.
Story of a Soul was printed a year after her death, edited by her sisters, and sent to other Carmels. Within ten years it had gone around the world. She was canonized in 1925, twenty-eight years after she died, in front of a crowd the square could not hold; in 1997 John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church — the youngest by decades, on the strength of one exercise book. She is patron of the missions, and never left the convent.
Lisieux is the second most visited place of pilgrimage in France after Lourdes. The Carmel holds her relics; the basilica on the hill was built for the crowds; Les Buissonnets, the family house, is kept as it was. Alençon has the house she was born in. Her sister Céline's photographs of her — Céline had a camera, which was unusual for a nun — are why hers is one of the few saints' faces we actually know.