Story of a Soul

"I’m not Catholic so I had never heard of St Therese, which is like not knowing about the Beatles. She’s a superstar saint. I had been reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain , his own spiritual memoir, and he mentioned “the little flower”. I was so surprised that this macho grouchy guy wrote with reverence about this young woman. She lived in a cloistered convent in France where several of her biological sisters became nuns. Therese talked about how she wanted to do great deeds but she couldn’t because she was a young nun so she had to do little things. Mother Theresa, who did enormous good in the world, took her name from Therese, not from Theresa of Avila, because she identified with the little flower. Therese explains in her introduction that great souls are like roses or lilies but little flowers in the field are also pleasing to Jesus. Story of a Soul is her spiritual memoir. She was a great writer and very, very funny which is surprising in a saint. One of my favourite, favourite lines about happiness comes from her. She said, “For love of god and my sisters so charitable toward me, I take care to appear happy and especially to be so”. This quotation gets at a key to happiness. Another person’s happiness can affect our own happiness and one of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy ourselves. Although her last days were filled with agonising pain associated with TB, those who saw her said she seemed happy. Yes, she rocketed to sainthood in violation of all the rules. There was so much popular support for her and so much belief in her spiritual gifts. Her memoir was published for other convents after she died and it just spread. She died an unknown but within a few years of her death, they had to put guards around her grave because people were coming in and trying to get relics. There was so much enthusiasm that the Church felt they needed to fast-track her."