'My vocation is love': St. Thérèse writes her answer at Lisieux

LISIEUX, Normandy, September 1896 AD — Behind the wall of the Carmel at Lisieux, in Normandy, a nun of twenty-three has spent part of this month writing a few pages for her eldest sister. She is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. In religion she is Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, and she entered this house at fifteen, on April 9, 1888 AD. A Carmel is an enclosed monastery: the women in it do not go out, they meet visitors through a grille, and their day is prayer, the Divine Office and work. St. Thérèse has been inside this one for eight years.

Two things have happened to her since the spring. In the night before Good Friday, April 3, 1896 AD, she felt a hot stream rise to her lips, and in the morning found her handkerchief soaked with blood. She said nothing that would have excused her, and got permission to keep the full Good Friday fast. A novice saw her that afternoon cleaning windows with a livid face. Then, in the Easter days that followed, the trial of faith began. The thought of heaven had consoled her since she was a child; now it tortured her. She writes of her soul in the pages she has just finished: “The storm had raged there ever since Easter, the glorious feast of Thy triumph, until, in the month of May, there shone through the darkness of my night one bright ray of grace.” She has hidden it well: she is still in choir, still teaching the novices, still keeping the Rule.

She wrote the pages on retreat this month, and she wrote them because she was asked to. Her eldest sister, Marie Martin, has been a Carmelite of this same house since 1886 AD, in religion Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart. She is twelve years older than St. Thérèse and was her godmother at her baptism in 1873 AD. She asked St. Thérèse to put down in writing what she had been saying about her way. The retreat was a private one of ten days, and it produced a run of letters between the two sisters before the writing was finished. The Church numbers these pages as her Manuscript B.

She starts by asking permission to write the whole thing as an address to Jesus. “If you will allow me, it is to Jesus I will address myself,” she writes at the head of the pages, “for in this way I shall speak more easily.” Then she warns that the pages will sound overdone: “You may find my expressions somewhat exaggerated, but I assure you there is no exaggeration in my heart — there all is calm and peace.”

What follows is a list of things she wants and cannot have. She writes that she feels called to the priesthood and to the apostolate. She would be a martyr and a doctor of the Church. One mission would not be enough for her, and she would carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth. Then she names the wanting for what it is: “But this too is folly, since I do not sigh for one torment; I need them all to slake my thirst.” She has not been outside these walls in eight years.

The desires had become, she says, a real martyrdom of their own, and to get relief from them she opened the letters of St. Paul. Her eye fell on the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. There she read that not everyone can be an apostle, a prophet or a doctor; that the Church is made of different members; that the eye cannot also be the hand. It did not settle anything for her: “The answer was clear, but it did not fulfil my desires, or give to me the peace I sought.”

So she kept reading, into the last verse of the twelfth chapter, and stopped at a promise: “Be zealous for the better gifts. And I show unto you a yet more excellent way.” St. Paul’s more excellent way is charity, and St. Thérèse writes: “At last I had found rest.”

The argument she then makes runs in short steps, each one leaning on the one before. The Church is a body made of different members, so the noblest and most necessary organ of all cannot be missing from it. The Church therefore has a heart, and that heart burns with love. Love alone is what makes the members act. “I knew that if this love were extinguished,” she writes, “the Apostles would no longer preach the Gospel, and the Martyrs would refuse to shed their blood.” And so love takes in every vocation there is, reaching through every age and to the ends of the earth, because it is eternal.

Then comes the sentence the whole passage has been walking toward. St. Thérèse wrote it in French: “Alors, dans l’excès de ma joie délirante, je me suis écriée: « O Jésus, mon amour! ma vocation, enfin je l’ai trouvée! ma vocation, c’est l’amour! Oui, j’ai trouvé ma place au sein de l’Eglise, et cette place, ô mon Dieu, c’est vous qui me l’avez donnée: dans le cœur de l’Eglise ma Mère, je serai l’amour!.. Ainsi je serai tout; ainsi mon rêve sera réalisé! »” In English the whole cry runs: “Then, beside myself with joy, I cried out: ‘O Jesus, my Love, at last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love! Yes, I have found my place in the bosom of the Church, and this place, O my God, Thou hast Thyself given to me: in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be LOVE!.. Thus I shall be all things: thus will my dream be realised…’”

The next thing she does is take one word of it back. “Why do I say I am beside myself with joy?” she writes. “This does not convey my thought. Rather is it peace which has become my portion — the calm peace of the sailor when he catches sight of the beacon which lights him to port.”

The Church has since put these pages at the centre of what it teaches about her. The apostolic letter declaring her a Doctor says Manuscript B “contains some of the most beautiful, best known and oft-quoted passages” she wrote. On October 19, 1997 AD, World Mission Sunday, Pope John Paul II proclaimed St. Thérèse a Doctor of the universal Church. In the homily Pope John Paul II said that of everything in her doctrine, this account of how she discovered her vocation “can be considered its high point”. He read the passage aloud, down to the cry, and cited it by the page it stands on, “Ms B, 3v°.” He called it “a wonderful passage which suffices itself to show” that the Gospel read at that Mass applies to St. Thérèse. That Gospel ran: “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes.” A little further on in the same homily, Pope John Paul II said of her: “Thérèse of Lisieux did not only grasp and describe the profound truth of Love as the centre and heart of the Church, but in her short life she lived it intensely.”