The Little Flower

  St. Thérèse of Lisieux, known to Catholics as the Little Flower or St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus & the Holy Face, entered my life in the late 1990s. I had passed Lisieux, where her Carmelite congregation of nuns remains, in 1995, but knew little about her. But in 2000 her remains were brought to the United States in an attempt to shore up faith here. For Catholics, a saint is someone who has a more active life after death than before it. They aren't canonized because they simply showed holiness -- many people show holiness -- but because in addition to holiness, they continue the ministry, often even expanding it, that they had while they were in their bodies.

   Three or four years ago, as my mother's lung problems forced her to retire, I asked St. Thérèse to take care of her soul & body. Perhaps had she wholly quit smoking, St. Thérèse might have worked a miracle of healing; but even saints have limited power to heal when those they pray for refuse to change their unhealthy behavior.

   But she certainlty took care of my mother's soul. Mom had remained religiously neutral her whole life. Her best friends growing up were Catholic, but her mother had left the Church as a girl and her father had extreme antipathy for the Church. As a result, she stayed, when she could, in the least controversial form of worship, and she only had sporadic outbreaks of those. She went to a local church with my father when they needed to patch up their marriage; and after he died, she left that behind after a couple of years. She had a short span of attending another nearby church; but once the pastor there left, she likewise departed.

   When she was taken, unconscious and barely breathing, to a local hospital, the prognosis was bad from the outset. But a eucharistic minister arrived from our parish asking whether she wanted communion while she was still in the Emergency unit. "She's not Catholic" I said. "She's on my list" he responded. I was stunned. She must have put herself down on one of her last visits to the hospital. My sister later said "Oh yes, when some nice old ladies came by to ask her what minister she wanted if she needed, she said 'Put me with the Catholics' ". That evening, I asked a priest to come by to give her extreme unction (I hate the 'anointing of the sick' neologism) & he did. When he finished he said quietly "She is going to God now." When she died a couple days later, a wheelchair bound priest who had been ordained before she was born gave her final prayers and anointing.

   This was all the doing of a young woman who died young and became a globally-recognized saint. Confined to her small scope in life, she is indefatigable now. I began to become attached to the Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, and this deepened the devotion I already had to St. Thérèse. To know that my mother, who avoided all theology and all controversy and all definite religious questions in her life, asked to be "put with the Catholics" was astonishing. For her, that was the equivalent of an enyclical, or even of the Summa Theologica, and truly exemplifies St. Thérèse's "little way".