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Introduction

By Elizabeth Foss

Like the memory of meeting my little sister and the memory of my father telling me to watch the television because a man was going to land on the moon, I remember the day I met Saint Thérèse. A precocious reader, I was five years old, in the bedroom of a friend who went to Catholic school. I picked up her textbook and flipped through until I saw the picture of a lovely young girl bestowing roses all around her. Captivated by the image, I dropped down to sit on the shag carpet and meet the saint who was to become a lifelong friend.

I distinctly remember being struck by the promise of a saint who wanted to spend eternity doing good on earth. Saint Thérèse, I thought, was just sitting up there with God, waiting for me to ask her for favors. As a bonus, I could spend my time on earth keeping watch for roses sent from heaven as signs of her intercession.

Those were the days before the internet, and mine was a Sunday-only Catholic family. Though I never forgot Thérèse, I was not exposed to her again until many years later, when as a young mother-to-be driving to and from midwife appointments, I listened to a rosary CD with carefully curated quotes from Thérèse. This gave me an introduction to the spirituality of this young Carmelite nun who had just been named a Doctor of the Church.

I did not read Story of a Soul until I was nursing my fifth baby. Believe it or not, there is much a mother of five little ones can learn from a young nun. I was on fire for my faith and always a romantic, and her words rang true for me. Like Thérèse, I could feel a holy daring being born within me. The parallels between living with my own band of rowdy children and her challenges with grumpy nuns were obvious to me. The life of a mother at home with her children — in some ways like that of a nun in a cloister — is one of obscurity and hiddenness. Thérèse was the perfect friend for this time in my life.

She exuded joy, and her joy was both contagious and exquisitely simple, anchored in total abandonment to God. She didn’t strive to earn heaven by making herself great. Instead, she entrusted her littleness to God. Content to do small things with great love, she rested in the security that it was Jesus who was responsible for carrying her to heaven. This rich yet simple spirituality is what Thérèse called her “Little Way.”

Despite her sometimes romantic language, Thérèse was not a cartoon princess flitting about talking of flowers and birds in a sing-song voice, without a care in the world. She was a flesh and blood girl, who lost her mother at a young age and suffered tremendously throughout her short life. She felt the sting of God’s absence and her soul experienced dark nights. There were days when she felt as if nothing else existed but the clouds that enveloped her soul and obscured her view of the face of God. She is both a saint of simple joys and a saint for those who suffer.

It was Thérèse who accompanied me when I was surprised by a medical emergency late in pregnancy on the morning of September 30, 2002. I spent much of the day begging for roses, while simultaneously trying and failing to reach my traveling husband. He arrived in time for the emergency c-section and explained that on his way to the airport he’d been inexplicably compelled to stop at the Saint Thérèse shrine outside of Chicago. There, he too befriended the Little Flower (and forgot to turn his phone on again). That is how, on the anniversary of Thérèse’s death, despite all our careful name conversations for the previous nine months, we named our new baby Kirsten Therese. So began the next season of my friendship with Saint Thérèse.

After birthing seven babies in fourteen years, I sank into postpartum depression. No stranger to her own dark days, Thérèse was a friend to me in this time. When confronted with times of despair in her life, she’d held fast to the unwavering belief that no matter how tightly we are enveloped in pain, God offers more love. He can and does reach into our deepest suffering, not always removing pain, but keeping us safe in the harbor of his heart while we suffer. My world, in those years, was indeed a ship on very stormy seas. Thérèse kept reminding me that heaven was home, that Christ would always offer me safe harbor. The pain remained, but she was with me in it, and she showed me that Our Lord was there, too.

Thérèse taught me that when we are depressed, we need a consolation that we cannot exhaust no matter how extensive and long-lasting our need. We need the hope — tangible and true — that doesn’t come with the caveat that we are somehow responsible for making ourselves better. Thérèse teaches tender surrender. She tells us that we can be little in the arms of a loving God, and that he will do the work of lifting us.

When we are struggling — and we will struggle throughout each season of life — we need a patient love. Thérèse knew that love, and she shared it. After an extended season of walking in darkness and letting Thérèse show me light, Karoline Rose was born, and with this lovely flower came a season of remarkable joy. Thérèse, wise doctor of the Church, reminded me to notice the warmth of the sunshine, the fragrance of the flowers, the goodness of a close-knit family. I did, but I wouldn’t pick up my well-worn copy of Story of a Soul again for many years after Karoline was born.

I began to doubt that a young girl like Thérèse could offer much wisdom to the woman I was, now in middle age. The world became smaller as the Internet gave birth to social media. With information came religious doubt. Nothing was simple anymore; indeed, it all seemed rather complicated. We learned of impropriety, of dissent, of complex theological treatises, and the counter-arguments offered to them. Simplicity of a childlike faith was threatened by the information overload of the early twenty-first century.

Then there was scandal. There were the clerical scandals that had unfolded in public during my young adulthood. The people of the Church were still wounded by those. But I was living in the midst of a local clerical scandal, also—one that betrayed our trust, hurt our children, and left me questioning how I could ever have held such a simple, unwavering devotion to the Church. It was with reluctance and because of a professional assignment that I picked up my tattered volume of Thérèse’s writing again. I was no longer young and innocent; the flowery language and romanticism seemed syrupy to my cynical soul. I read with skepticism this time. Could her worlds hold up to my hurt and my disappointment? A younger me had understood the difference between childlike faith and childishness. Now, discouraged and disillusioned, it was much more difficult to grasp the simplicity of her message as a woman who had lived decades longer than Thérèse had.

With this new reading, though, I noticed a passage that had not impressed me before. On pilgrimage to Rome as teenager, Thérèse became aware that, “though [priests’] dignity raises them above the angels, they are nevertheless weak and fragile men.” She understood that her vocation was to pray for priests. My eyes have been similarly opened to the vulnerability of men called to the priesthood (though it certainly took me much longer to understand what she grasped so readily and so young).

The simple wisdom of Thérèse struck me then as it never had previously. She didn’t abandon the Church, or condemn her, because of the weakness she saw in certain members of the clergy. She simply recognized that these imperfect souls were as much in need of her compassionate prayers for their salvation as all the others. She didn’t expect perfection from humanity; she prayed for the broken, beginning with priests. And so did I.

Again, I tucked the book away for a while. As sweet and simple as my “cloistered” season of raising little ones had been, now I found myself in a busy season, out in the world far more than previously. It was a season marked not by happy hellos to new babies, but by bittersweet goodbyes as children left home, and our parents slipped from this earth. I mourned my losses and I worried. How would such leaving affect the tender souls of my youngest children, in particular? While their siblings had all enjoyed welcoming babies and investing deeply in relationships with their grandparents, these little girls were always saying goodbye.

That’s where I found myself again with Thérèse, again on assignment. (I am very grateful that God sends these assignments when he sees that my soul needs them.) This time, I listened to Story of a Soul read aloud with my girls, and we heard Thérèse’s reflection upon learning her sister was leaving to become a Carmelite nun. “In one instant, I understood what life was; until then, I had never seen it so sad; but it appeared to me in all its reality, and I saw it was nothing but continual suffering and separation.” Sarah, my youngest, responded, “She is just like me!”

She is. And she is also like me, though I am now nearly thirty years older than Thérèse was when she died. That is the great mystery of her holy soul. Thérèse knew the joy of suffering and sacrifice, and she translated that for us. The Lord gifted her with wisdom well beyond her years, wisdom most of us never acquire over a lifetime of learning lessons the hard way. He tenderly poured into her fertile soul truths that he intended for her to share with us.

So, we take up this volume for ourselves, no matter what our stations in life. And we find that despite her youth, and despite the century that divides us, and despite the fact that her vocation bears little resemblance to ours, her story can be our story, too.

I planned to sit in an adoration chapel to write this introduction, to inhale the peace of the beloved, blessed Martin family in the chapel at St. Theresa parish. But my vocation doesn’t always afford me expanses of time in quiet, sacred spaces, so instead, I am writing in moments snatched between watching my four daughters on a dance weekend. I look up to see them sparkling and smiling with joy. Those four girls are the living embodiments of the finest roses sent by my dear friend, Thérèse. It seems appropriate that most of my reflection on the gift that is her book was written in the midst of a noisy world. Despite the fact that she composed in the quiet of a convent, she wrote for the world beyond its gate, offering her whole life of quiet contemplation and her whole existence in heaven for workaday people living ordinary lives.

Before I send this missive on its way, I will find time with the Lord in that chapel. Grateful for the fine points he will no doubt offer, for the time to listen in silence instead of straining to hear him above the din, I will know that Thérèse sits with me there, as she always has, offering wisdom, and showing me the simplest way to sanctity.