Back

Tour Schedule

About Thérèse

Gallery

The Organisers

Contact Us

St. Thérèse and the Ireland of our Times

by Bishop Brendan Comiskey, D.D.
Chairperson, Relics Visit Organising Commitee

The land of the Celtic Tiger is not proving to be the happiest of places. In an Irish daily I recently read two pieces on this theme. One columnist, Drapier, wrote of "a strange mood" in today's Ireland. "There is a deep level of discontent and an underlying anger that won't go away. The tribunals are the backdrop and the confirmation of what many people feel."

In the new Irish Times Magazine, Nuala O'Faolain describes as "amazingly liberating" for her a shift in attitude from approaching everything with a view to judging it to a way of looking at something simply as itself. "I began to wonder whether I hadn't been crippling myself by a lifelong habit of judging and displaying how judgmental I was by smart remarks, jokes, ironic comments, getting my retaliation in first – working away in a very Irish manner at deprecating other people and deprecating myself". To write her novel she moved to New York "to borrow from the very air some of the energy and the innocent self-belief of US culture".

Within the Church there is the same kind of negativity where a listing of the faults and failures of others saves one the trouble of presenting one's own vision not to mention the vision and the mind of Christ. One distinguished writer describes what's happening in the church today as a type of "a brawling Christianity".

Forty years before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, Patrick Kavanagh wrote these lines of a far less prosperous Ireland:

We have tested and tasted too much, lover,
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

On Easter Sunday next, the remains of a saint with the soul of a child, Thérèse of Lisieux, arrive in Ireland. What has she to teach us? What have we to learn from her? She has much to teach us, but whether we learn anything depends on whether we possess anything of "the luxury of a child's soul". How many of us will approach her visit "amazingly liberated" from an attitude of bias and prejudice? Another poet, John Deane, made that leap and wrote:

I had thought of her as an insipid saint
standing demurely within her coign of dimness;
they had fenced her round with a dissonance of candles.
... But I have come to see
how she was an island of pain, how God enjoyed
whittling and refashioning her so he could tell
how we are breakable and mortal, how
suffering is a grace and pain a lived pearl.

Soldiers in the trenches wore her image next to their bodies, "they drew strength from her in Auschwitz/they made her protectress-saint in Russia" [Deane]. The Independent of London captioned an article on the visit of her Relics to New York with The Saint Who Stopped the Traffic on 5th Avenue.

Wherever the Relics travel, hundreds of thousands come and reach out to touch the reliquary, whether it be in Russia or much of western Europe, Argentina or Brazil, the United States or Canada, the Philippines. Why? Because God wishes to teach us how much he loves us, not in spite of, but because we are mortal and breakable, that suffering is a grace and pain a lived pearl. And because the Church either hasn't yet learned this or, having learned it, no longer preaches it, or doesn't preach it often enough. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of "failures" reach out to touch the relics of a Saint who was regarded by her sisters-in-religion as so ordinary, such a failure, that they wondered aloud in her hearing how the superior of the community could possibly find enough to fill the requisite one-page entry into the community's list of the dead.

People come in their thousands to touch the remains of the dead Thérèse because they wish to be themselves touched with the living power of God who works through her. Like the thousands of people who reached out to touch Jesus when he walked this earth, they are seeking to make sense out of pain and suffering, cruelty and betrayal, injustice and unfairness, the meanness and unhappiness of life. I doubt if many of these are more concerned about the peace beyond the grave than they are about some kind of relative happiness and contentment and meaning in this life.

To all of these, the young woman, described by Pope Pius X as "the greatest saint in modern times", the youngest of only three women who have been declared "Doctors of the Church", has always the same simple answer re-echoing the Psalmist's words: "Entrust your life to the

Lord, and he will act on your behalf". Simple to understand, very difficult to carry out. But it is the core message of Christ. It is His Way. It is the only way.

The "little way" of Thérèse is little only in the sense that "little people" can understand it, that is, humble people, the poor of God who trust totally in His merciful love alone and not in their own power. It involves trusting God, and one doesn't trust anyone unless one both believes in that person, loves that person, and is convinced that one is loved in return by that person. Applied to our relationship with God, this means that we will never trust Him unless we both believe in him, love Him and are convinced that He "loved us first". Thérèse's so-called "little" way, therefore, is founded upon virtues which are far from "little", namely, the great theological virtues of faith, hope and love.

Personally, I know of only one group of people who speak constantly about "handing over" their lives to God. They talk of going down on their knees every morning and entrusting their lives to Him, and of thanking Him at the end of the day for what He has done in their lives. I have not heard this kind of talk in churches or on pilgrimages but in rooms where people gather to support and be supported by other men and women who are following the 12-step programmes of recovery from a wide variety of addictions and compulsions such as alcoholism, drug addition, compulsive gambling, etc. The first three steps of the AA programme reads:

• We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable.
  
• Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
  
• Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
  

Where else in Ireland today are people admitting that they are powerless over anything, that their lives have become unmanageable, and who have decided that by turning their lives over to God can they be saved? Isn't this "the cry of the poor"?

Thérèse and all who travel along her "little way" are being joined by all kinds of strange and wonderful fellow-travellers these days. Please God, her "little way" will more and more become a highway of those blessed enough to be able to cry out to God out of their experience of failure and powerlessness.

It is going to be an interesting meeting indeed next year, Thérèse and her "little way" with the inhabitants of Tigerland.