“I do not intend to remain inactive in heaven. I wish to go on working for the Church and for souls. After my death I will let fall a shower of roses. I feel that my mission is soon to begin, my mission to make others love the good God as I love Him… to teach my little way to souls. I wish to spend my heaven in doing good upon earth.” (St. Therese of the Child Jesus)
On this feast day of St. Therese, I share an excerpt below from her book, "The Story of a Soul." In it, she shares her heart’s desire to make a return to God for the love He had shown her. May it be an inspiration to us all.
"To be Your Spouse, my Jesus; to be a Carmelite; to be, through my union with You, a mother of souls, surely this should be enough? Yet I feel the call of more vocations still; I want to be a warrior, a priest, an apostle, a doctor of the Church, a martyr -- there is no heroic deed I do not wish to perform. I feel as daring as a crusader, ready to die for the Church upon the battlefield.
If only I were a priest! How lovingly I would bear You in my hands, my Jesus, when my voice had brought You down from Heaven. How lovingly I would give You to souls! Yet while wanting to be a priest, I admire St. Francis of Assisi and envy his humility, longing to imitate him in refusing this sublime dignity. Such contradictions! How can they be reconciled?
I long to bring light to souls, like the prophets and doctors; to go to the ends of the earth to preach Your name, to plant Your glorious Cross, my Beloved, on pagan shores. One mission field alone would never be enough; all the world, even its remotest islands, must be my mission field. Nor would my mission last a few short years, but from the beginning of the world to the end of time.
But to be a martyr is what I long for most of all. Martyrdom! I dreamed of it when I was young, and the dream has grown up with me in my little cell in Carmel. I am just as foolish about this because I do not desire any one kind of torture; I would be satisfied only with them all. I want to be scourged and crucified like You, my Spouse; flayed alive like St. Bartholomew; thrown into boiling oil like St. John; and ground by the teeth of wild beasts like St. Ignatius of Antioch, so that I might become bread worthy of God. Like St. Agnes and St. Cecilia, I want to offer my neck to the executioner's sword, and like John of Arc, murmur the name of Jesus at the burning stake. My heart thrills at the thought of the undreamed-of torments which will be the lot of Christians in the time of Anti-Christ! I want them all to be my lot!
Open the Book of Life, my Jesus; see all the deeds recorded of the Saints! All these I want to perform for You! What can You say in the face of all this foolishness of mine, for surely I am the littlest and the weakest soul on earth? Yet just because I am so weak, You have been pleased to grant my childish little desires, and now You will grant the rest, other desires far greater than the universe.
These desires became a real martyrdom to me, and so one day, hoping to find alleviation, I opened the Epistles of St. Paul. My eyes lighted on Chapters XII and XIII of his First Epistle to the Corinthians, where he says we cannot all be apostles, prophets and doctors, that the Church is made up of a number of different members, and the eye cannot also be the hand. The answer was clear enough, but it did not satisfy my desires nor bring me any peace.
'Descending to the depths of my own nothingness, I was then so raised up that I attained my goal' (from poem of St. John of the Cross). For without being discouraged, I went on reading, and found relief in the following advice: 'Be zealous for the better gifts. And I show unto you a yet more excellent way.' (1 Cor. 12:31) The Apostle goes on to explain that the most perfect gifts are worth nothing without love, and this more excellent way of going to God is charity.
At last I was at rest! As I thought about the Church's Mystical Body, I could not see myself in any of the members mentioned by St. Paul, or rather, I wanted to see myself in all of them. Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I saw that if the Church was a body made up of different members, the most essential and important one of all would not be lacking; I saw that the Church must have a heart, that this heart must be on fire with love. I saw that it was love alone which moved her other members, and that were this love to fail, apostles would no longer spread the Gospel, and martyrs would refuse to shed their blood. I saw that all vocations are summed up in love and that love is all in all, embracing every time and place because it is eternal. In a transport of ecstatic joy I cried: 'Jesus, my Love, I have at last found my vocation; it is love!'"
CALL TO ACTION: Recognize that living in this age of Antichrist is a privilege!
Photo by Tushar Jain