October 1st is the feast day of Saint Therese of Lisieux.
A feast day in the Catholic Church is a day to celebrate the life of a saint who lived an extraordinary life, or to celebrate a holy aspect of the Christian faith like the Nativity of Christ. Many extraordinary saints like the apostles, Saint Joan of Arc, Maximilian Kolbe, Chiara Badano, Therese of Lisieux have feast days in the Catholic Church calendar where we make a point to learn about their lives, remember them, and contemplate the sacrifices they made for Jesus – “wow, they really lived for Christ to the fullest #inspired”. Saints are more alive than we are because they are in heaven! They are our role models in many ways because we can look to them for motivation and encouragement to live the fullness of the Christian life. Many Catholics feel that they can relate to the story or struggles of particular saints, and they will ask those saints to intercede for them in prayer. The intercession of fellow Christians – which is what the saints in heaven are – does not interfere with Christ’s unique mediatorship between us and the Father. St. Paul told Christians to intercede for one another (1 Tim. 2:1-4). The saints in heaven truly do intercede for us! (Revelation 5:8). Praying on behalf of someone else or “intercessory prayer” – just like Christians on earth do for one another - is something that is good and pleasing to God. Okay, okay. I’m getting away from the point. Today is the feast day of Saint Therese of Lisieux. She was a young girl born in Lisieux, France. From a young age, Therese had a deep love of God. She was a romantic, head in the clouds, type of girl. She spent her days day-dreaming during school about God and longed to receive the sacraments when she first was able to understand the Eucharist. Therese loved to pray, and she would spend hours at a time praying to Jesus in her bedroom. She had to lobby the pope for years before he gave her special permission to enter the Carmelite convent at age 16. Her sisters who were also nuns urged her to write an autobiography of her life before she died at 26 of tuberculosis in 1897. Her autobiography “Story of a Soul” has sold thousands of copies all over the world. She is well known for her philosophy of the “Little Way”: doing little menial tasks with great love for God. Therese said many times in her autobiography that she would become a saint for loving God with all her heart in little tasks, not by any great heroic feat. I have never felt a connection to Therese because she seems so unrelatable. #cantrelate #thisisawkward But I decided to read her autobiography because so many other people CAN relate to her, or have found beauty in her relationship with Christ. I read her autobiography because I thought to myself – “I have never, ever felt the desire to be a nun, and I have always found Therese so annoyingly unrelatable.” It is always a good idea to try to understand someone. After reading it, I still maintain that I am not like Therese of Lisieux. As I read her autobiography, I felt myself imagining and picturing her personality: a romantic, day-dreaming, slow-moving, not very smart girl who loved God with all her heart. I began to recognize that I was annoyed with how impractical her personality was. I am now asking myself – who is the modern-day Saint Therese in my life? Who is the person who just doesn’t “click” with me? Who do I have trouble loving and appreciating? God is challenging me to love even the people who may feel hard to love because He created them. And those people are capable of holiness and becoming saints! We are all called to be saints! There are so many diverse personalities of people in the world. And God created each of us. There is beauty in each of our quirky, idiosyncratic personalities. How do we use our individuality to love God? Do we embrace our uniqueness? Do we even like ourselves? Do we offer ourselves as a gift to God, our Creator, every day? Sometimes my prayer to Jesus goes a lot like this: "Jesus, teach me to love me as You love me." Or contemplating the prayer of Saint Francis: Lord make me an instrument of your peace Where there is hatred let me sow love Where there is injury, pardon Where there is doubt, faith Where there is despair, hope Where there is darkness, light And where there is sadness, joy O divine master grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console to be understood as to understand To be loved as to love For it is in giving that we receive it is in pardoning that we are pardoned And it's in dying that we are born to eternal life Amen When we become who God created us to be, we will be immeasureably happy. I am finding that Jesus is asking me to love and serve Him in different ways than He asked Therese to do. I am so appreciative of, and I admire the women who do live as nuns because it is a life where they find deep intimacy with Christ. The pursuit of growing in holiness looks different on all of us because we are all different people. But no matter what our talents, skills, careers, and interests… Jesus asks us all to do little things with great love of Him. --- Check out Saint Therese's autobiography here. What do you think? Leave a comment of your own thoughts.
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Thanks for stopping by! I'm Madeleine, and I write about how I think and why I do the things I do as a Catholic. Archives
October 2018
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