Little Flower

   Today -- well, yesterday now -- is the traditional date of the celebration of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Carmelite nun born Thérèse Martin & who died unknown outside her community at the age 24, but knew before she died that she was going to be known across the globe.

    She embodies what's invisible, ungraspable outside the gambit of faith or the willingness to accept the gambit: that the real relations in the world are not at all what we can begin to calculate, even with the aid of all the nanocircuits across the globe and over it. A saint is someone who takes the Church & the world equally by surprise, as Sister Thérèse Martin did following her death. No clerics or prelates were asking for or pushing her as a saint; if anything, the theological & canonical experts could, at first, found what she wrote mundane and even a bit sentimental, put off by initial appearances.

All that is gold does not glitter
   Not all those who wander are lost,
The old that is strong does not wither,
   Deep roots are not reached from the frost --