Pélerinage thérésien I

After celebrating the Easter Triduum at Notre Dame des Victoires, we left Paris for good and headed out into the Norman countryside. We had decided to spend the first week of Easter on a Theresian pilgrimage - that's St. Therese of Lisieux - so after cleaning up and packing our bags, we went to pick up our rental car at the Carrousel du Louvre. The woman at the counter handed us the keys with a knowing smile, assuring us that we were going to like the car. She was right. So after loading it up, we were off. First stop, cows.

 Second stop, Lisieux. 

That's the Basilica of Therese of Lisieux in the background. In France she is known as "la petite Therese" to distinguish her from "la grande Therese," St. Teresa of Avila, a famous sixteenth-century Carmelite nun, spiritual writer, and reformer of the order. But there is nothing "petite" about the Basilica in Lisieux, or about devotion to Therese in France.

 

Crypt church of the Basilica.

Garden behind the Basilica, on a wooded hillside.

Therese is also called "little" because she called herself "little" very often in her spiritual autobiography, The History of a Soul, which she wrote at the request of her religious superiors. The book was published soon after her death and quickly became hugely popular. In it she recounts what has been known as her "little way," a way of confidence in and love of God, expressed through making simple sacrifices joyfully and doing daily tasks with great love. Here's a small excerpt:

"I have always wanted to become a saint. Unfortunately when I have compared myself with the saints, I have always found that there is the same difference between the saints and me as there is between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and a humble grain of sand trodden underfoot by passers-by. Instead of being discouraged, I told myself: God would not make me wish for something impossible and so, in spite of my littleness, I can aim at being a saint. It is impossible for me to grow bigger, so I put up with myself as I am, with all my countless faults. But I will look for some means of going to heaven by a little way which is very short and very straight, a little way that is quite new."

"We live in an age of inventions. We need no longer climb laboriously up flights of stairs; in well-to-do houses there are lifts. And I was determined to find a lift to carry me to Jesus, for I was far too small to climb the steep stairs of perfection. So I sought in holy Scripture some idea of what this life I wanted would be, and I read these words: "Whosoever is a little one, come to me." It is your arms, Jesus, that are the lift to carry me to heaven. And so there is no need for me to grow up: I must stay little and become less and less."

Devotion to Therese spread so quickly that she was canonized only 28 years after her death. And in 1997 she was proclaimed a doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II. Therese is the youngest doctor of the Church, one of only four women, and had pretty much no formal training in theology or philosophy (she's just that awesome).

Therese lived in Lisieux for most of her life, but of course the Basilica wasn't there at the time. We visited the Cathedrale Sainte-Pierre, where she attended mass with her family before entering the Carmelite monastery.

 

The church was dressed for Easter. 

Therese's father donated this altar to the church.

 The church was built in the 12th-13th centuries; it's earlier-Gothic than many we've seen.

Therese's parents, Louis and Zelie Martin, have also been recognized as blessed, and will soon be canonized--the first modern married couple to be so recognized. Of their nine children, four died in infancy or early childhood, and all the others became nuns ("you will know the tree by its fruit"). Zelie died when Therese was only four, and Louis then moved the family from Alençon to Lisieux, to be nearer to relatives.

We visited the house where they lived in Lisieux, "Les Buissonets."

Here we are in Therese's bedroom next to the statue which has come to be known as Our Lady of the Smile. When Therese was very sick as a child, her father wrote to the priests of Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris to have a novena of masses said for her recovery. Afterward, while she and her sisters were praying together in her bedroom, Therese gazed up at the statue and had a vision of a beautiful woman smiling down on her. From that point she began to recover from her fever. Later she and her father traveled to Paris to give thanks at the shrine of Our Lady of Victories, where we often prayed ourselves. The statue in Therese's bedroom is absolutely beautiful, and the whole house is full of flowers. Therese would have liked that. She called herself "the little flower," since she thought that although she could never be like the great saints, lilies and roses and all, she could still be a small wildflower, like the ones that spring up between the cracks of stones.

Therese entered the Carmelite monastery in Lisieux while still a teenager, and died there before her twenty-fifth birthday. We made a visit there, too, and to the home where she was born in Alençon, but that's a story for another day.