Happy Birthday, St. Therese!

In his spiritual memoir My Life With the Saints, Father Jim Martin talks about different saints and how they have infleunced his life, from Joan of Arc to John XXIII. The saints, he points out, are friends who can help us along our own spiritual journeys. On my own spiritual path, a saint who’s helped me a lot is Therese of Lisieux, whose birthday we celebrate today. As Jim points out, she’s a saint who gets dismissed too easily as a “Little Flower” adorning holy cards. But this was one tough woman. She knew exactly what she wanted in life, to be a Carmelite nun like her sisters, and she had no problem going straight to the pope with that intent. At age fifteen, she got what she wanted, and she spent the last nine years of her life in the monastery until tuberculosis took her at age 24. Life in the convent wasn’t always easy, but she didn’t see life as something sad. This woman had a tremendous in God even through the darkest hours of her illness, what some of her biographers call a “confidence” in God. I think that word “confidence” is what resides with me the most, and in trouble I ask Therese to pray for me, that I have more confidence in God, and be more fully, as she herself put it, what “He wills us to be.” So Happy Birthday, Therese, and thanks for the help!