Saint Therese of the Child Jesus was born in Alencon, France in 1873. She entered the Carmelite in Lisieux when she was 15 years old. She lived a life of simplicity, humility and trust in God and taught these virtues to the novices. Her spiritual autobiography, The Story of a Soul spread devotion to her “little way” of simplicity, abandonment to God and the accomplishment of small duties as a way to God. She died from tuberculosis aged 24 in 1897. She was canonised in 1925.
REFLECTION – THE EUCHARIST AS THE SOURCE OF MISSION – THE MISSIONARY IMPULSE:
The sense in which Therese of Lisieux is patroness of missions may help us to understand in what way that is meant.
Therese never set foot in a missionary territory and was never able to practice any missionary activity directly. Yet she did grasp that the Church has a heart, and she grasped that love is this heart. She understood that the Apostles can no longer preach and the martyrs no longer shed their blood if this heart is no longer burning. She grasped that love is all, that it reaches beyond times and places. And she understood that she herself, the little nun behind the grille of a Carmel in a provincial town in France, could be present everywhere, because as a loving person she was there with Christ in the heart of the Church. Is not the exhaustion of the missionary impulse in the last thirty years the result of our thinking only of external activities while having almost forgotten that all this activity must constantly be nourished from a deeper center? This center, which Therese calls simply “heart” and “love”, is the Eucharist. For the Eucharist is not only the enduring presence of the divine and human love of Jesus Christ, which is always the source and origin of the Church and without which she would founder, would be overcome by the gates of hell. As the presence of the divine and human love of Christ, it is also always the channel open from the man Jesus to the people who are his “members” themselves becoming a Eucharist and thereby themselves a “heart” and a “love” for the Church. As Therese says, if this heart is not beating, then the apostles can no longer preach, the sisters can no longer console and heal, the laymen no longer lead the world toward the Kingdom of God. The heart must remain the heart, that through the heart the other organs may serve aright. It is at that point, when the Eucharist is being celebrated aright “in the upper room”, in the inner sphere of reverent faith, and without any aim or purpose beyond that of pleasing God, that faith springs forth from it: that faith which is the dynamic origin of mission, in which the world becomes a living sacrificial gift, a holy city in which there is no longer any temple, because God the ruler of all is himself her temple, as is the Lamb. “And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22f).
(Taken from Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Ignatius Press)
