Today is the memorial of my favorite saint, Therese of Lisieux. I am drawn to her story, "Story of a Soul", for her determination and spirit to make meaning out of a life of seeming invisibility in her church communion (Roman Catholic tradition) and her world at the time.
She was a woman of extraordinary faith, hope and most of all love, whose ordinary daily works attending to her sisters at the Carmelite monastery in the small town of Lisieux, held within them a vast attendance to the church and the world at work around her. She saw her vocation as one of "love", where all her words in the quotidian, no matter how seemingly small, invisible and 'boring' to the observer, done with love, had the power to reverberate and extend out to the world with love, and transform in secret. It also offered her assurance of profound belonging to her beloved church. She says it this way,
"Since my longing for martyrdom was powerful and unsettling, I turned to the epistles of Saint Paul in the hope of finally finding an answer. By chance the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the first epistle to the Corinthians caught my attention, and in the first section I read that not everyone can be an apostle, prophet, or teacher, that the Church is composed of a variety of members, and that the eye cannot be the hand. Even with such an answer revealed before me, I was not satisfied and did not find peace.
I persevered in the reading and did let not my mind wander until I found this encouraging theme: Set your desires on the greater gifts. And I will now show you the way which surpasses all others. For the Apostle insists that the greater gifts are nothing at all without love and that this same love is surely the best path leading directly to God. At length I had found peace of mind.
When I had looked upon the mystical body of the Church, I recognized myself in none of the members which St. Paul described, and what is more, I desired to distinguish myself more favorably within the whole body. Love appeared to me to be the hinge for my vocation. Indeed I knew that the Church had a body composed of various members, but in this body the necessary and more noble member was not lacking; I knew that the church had a heart and that such a heart appeared to be aflame with love. I knew that one love drove the members of the church to action, that if this love were extinguished, the apostles would have proclaimed the Gospel no longer, the martyrs would have shed their blood no more. I saw and realized that love sets off the bounds of all vocations, that love is everything, that this same love embraces every time and every place. In one word, that love is everlasting.
Then, nearly ecstatic with the supreme joy in my soul, I proclaimed: O Jesus, my love, at last I have found my calling; my call is love. Certainly I have found my proper place in the church, and you gave me that very place, my God. In the heart of the church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things, as my desire finds its direction." (Therese of Lisieux: Story of a Soul)
It strikes me now, more than when I first read Therese 40 years ago, how grand a soul she has and how it speaks into the desire of women today in their invisibility and their works of motherly love. Whether we want to find a place of belonging and meaning in our Church or not, Therese witnesses to women of faith that the core of all belonging and acceptance is a love willing to die for others and only then will we be seen and heard inside of the Christ and the Triune God's self-giving love. Like for her, it will take our own martyrdom of the soul, loving this Church and the world it serves, to make a difference and to bring transformation to our own times.
I see Therese now, smiling down on women everywhere, on her beloved, broken church and world, letting us know, it's time for women to shine, invisibly.
I cry out to be seen, to be known,
to fit in, to belong, not as I might have it.
I wrestle with the Word, to discover myself as I am in the truth of the One in Three,
the dance of life poured out creatively
in every moment martyred on a cross,
like Mary. A long, lonely, joyful, martyrdom.
Like a woman's gift of long labor
over a lifetime of loving
with or without reward
holding her peace within, whatever the outcome of birth;
stillbirth, different birth, beautiful birth, Messiah's birth,
carrying on with loving still
creating
blessing, forgiving, healing, welcoming while
washing clothes and making meals and growing gardens and picking fruit,
donning the clothes of the Kurdish fighter, or the scarf of Ukrainian resistance, or
feeding the poor, defending the helpless, protecting and guarding the hearth,
Women at the tomb,
and the first to tell the Good News.
