On Wednesday we celebrated the feast of All Saints, which is really our feast, as it is what we are destined for. Everyone in heaven is a saint, which means that all of our loved ones who are now in heaven are saints, but we also focus on the canonized saints, as models of holiness for us to follow. The lives of the saints are also a wonderful reminder of what God can do through a human being. The saints became holy, not so much because they were extraordinary people—although some of them were—but because they were open to God and so God did extraordinary things through them. It was God’s work, not theirs.
There are two things that often come across from reading the lives of the saints. First, they were mostly very ordinary people and not the kind of people you would choose for an extraordinary mission. A bishop said about St. Theresa of Calcutta, that he wouldn’t have put her in charge of the sacristy! And yet look what God did through her. Second, all of them suffered a great deal. This shows us that this is part of the path to heaven.
I would like to talk about one saint in particular, whom I believe is really a saint for our times. St. Thérèse of Lisieux was a little-known woman until after her death at the age of 24, in 1897. She grew up in a large family with four older sisters, four younger ones having died, in the town of Lisieux, in northern France. Her parents were very devout Catholics and very protective of their children. Her older sister Pauline wasn’t allowed to read the papers, even at the age of eighteen. The whole family were very focused on God and their faith. Her four older sisters all went into religious life.
At the age of 15 Thérèse got special permission to enter the Carmelite convent in Lisieux, where three of her older sisters already were. The normal starting age was at least 16.
During her time there, she was not considered anything special and said the same in her own autobiography, Story of a Soul. When she was dying she accidentally overheard two of the other sisters talking about her. One was saying to the other, “I wonder what will mother Abbess say about Thérèse when she dies, as she never really did anything!” Even among her own religious sisters, she wasn’t considered anything special.
She wrote that she would love to have been a priest, or a martyr, a missionary, or apostle, but here she was in a small Carmelite convent in the north of France, hidden from the world. She also says that she was very much aware of her own limitations. She knew she was not capable of doing great fasts, or penances, just ordinary things. However God showed her something very profound.
Thérèse felt that she had a vocation within a vocation, which is common for many people. She read through the Scriptures searching for some guidance from the Lord. She came to the piece in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians where he talks about love and the necessity for love to be at the heart of everything. St. Paul concludes by saying, ‘In the end there are three things that last: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.’ (1 Cor 13:13). When she read this she realized that love was the most important thing that had to be at the heart of the Church. Everything must come from love, if it is to be from God and pleasing to God. She felt that God was showing her that her mission was to be love at the heart of the Church. In practical terms this meant that she must live everything, down to the smallest of actions, out of love. She called it the Little Way. It is ‘little’ because it comes down to the very ordinary small things that everyone is faced with each day. The smallest annoyances and sacrifices, if done out of love, become a great force within the Church. She knew she wasn’t capable of doing great things, but she realized that she could do all the small things with great love.
This may not seem like a particularly extraordinary insight, but it is one that many people miss. We tend to focus on the big achievements that everyone looks at with admiration. But the smallest actions done with love are just as important, if not more so. The fact that they are hidden makes them more pleasing to God. And what is especially important is that everyone is capable of doing small things with great love, regardless of their life circumstances. The leader of a country and the man living on the street, are both as capable of doing this and this is what is truly pleasing to God.
Thérèse also suffered greatly both physically and spiritually. During the last eighteen months of her life, she became very sick having contracted tuberculosis. For the most part it was misdiagnosed and she wasn’t treated for it properly. As a result she went through various treatments which only caused her more suffering. To add to her misery, she got little sympathy from the other sisters as several of them thought she was faking it, in order to avoid work. Inside, the TB was gradually eating away at her body until she was finally reduced to half of one lung. She wrote that she never realized that physical suffering could be so bad. She asked the sisters not to leave any medication near her, as she was afraid she might try and take her own life, as the pain was so bad.
Around the same time as she became very ill, she also began to suffer spiritually as her faith seemed to disappear. She wrote that she had never believed that atheists were being sincere when they said they didn’t believe in God, but now she had the same experience herself. She clung on to what she believed intellectually, which feeling nothing inside. God seemed to disappear.
Why would God do this to someone who had had such a lively faith, especially when she was suffering so much physically? She was going through what is often called the dark night of the soul. This is a time of purification, where God helps a person to grow in their faith to a much higher degree. It is easy to be faithful when we experience consolations and the Scriptures are alive and speaking to us. It is much harder to believe and be faithful when we feel nothing. But persevering during times of dryness is when our faith really grows. It is the same in a relationship. It is easy to be faithful to your spouse when things are sweet and you feel great love for each other. It is much harder when you are going through times of dryness and tension, but this is when love really grows. It is also one of the reasons why we take marriage vows and religious vows. The vows we take help us to keep going during the more difficult times.
God knows the potential that each of us have and He wants us to reach our full potential. That is why we go through so many trials of one kind or another. Each time we are struggling we have the choice to persevere, or to give up; to love God, or to curse God. Hopefully we will continually choose the good and in turn we will grow as people, both spiritually and emotionally.
Looking back at the lives of the saints, we see this happening to all of them. The trials they went through were what helped them to grow in their faith. God kept bringing them forward as long as they remained open. God doesn’t need our greatness, rather an open heart.
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