Thérèse’s Hope

1. The Point of Departure

Never before in the history of the Church has hope so emphatically marked Christian thought as it does today. It was above all Jewish thinkers who first discovered the “principle of hope” as the all⁠-⁠powerful driving force of existence. Only then did their Christian counterparts follow suit with the proposal of a seemingly quite novel “theology of hope.” In reality, though, the decisive breakthrough had already occurred earlier—at the end of the nineteenth century in an out⁠-⁠of⁠-⁠the⁠-⁠way Carmelite convent hidden in the French countryside. Was Thérèse Martin,In the original German text, the autobiographical works of Saint Thérèse are mostly cited according to the German editions published by Johannes Verlag, the publishing house founded by Hans Urs von Balthasar. In the present translation, however, we indicate instead the references to the volumes of the Édition critique des œuvres complètes de sainte Thérèse de l’Enfant⁠-⁠Jésus et de la Sainte⁠-⁠Face, Paris, Cerf / DDB, 1992², using the following abbreviations: Man = Manuscrits autobiographiques; Corr = Correspondance générale (2 vols.); DerEnt = Derniers entretiens avec ses sœurs; DerPar = Dernières paroles; RecPri = Récréations pieuses — Prières; Po = Poésies. As is well known, what was published after the Saint’s death under the title Story of a Soul results from the compilation of several autobiographical manuscripts, together with appendices of documents and testimonies; the latter have not been fully incorporated into the critical edition and are therefore cited according to: Sainte Thérèse de l’Enfant⁠-⁠Jésus, Histoire d’une Âme, Office Central de Lisieux, 1946, using the abbreviation HA (chapter in Roman numerals, page in Arabic numerals). In a handful of cases, the translation of the quotations, which has been checked against the French text, differs slightly from the German version. who was given to make this breakthrough, aware of her achievement? Many of her bold statements, which reveal how astonished she was at herself, would seem to suggest she was.

It was high time for this shift. In the Church’s official theology, hope was largely neglected in favor of faith and charity. We could list many reasons for this comparative neglect. One was that theology had increasingly become a static structure, a fixed body of doctrinal knowledge, that left little room for hope’s dynamic élan. There was surely a weightier reason, too: the fact that, at least since the time of Augustine, it was taken as certain that only a limited number of predestined human beings went to heaven, while the rest did not. Since, moreover, this was supposedly a matter of faith, set in stone by God himself, the believer—it was thought—could really only hope for salvation for himself alone, not for others.Augustine, Enchiridion, 2.8 (BKV 49, 396⁠-⁠397); 27.103 (BKV 49, 486f).

Significantly, these unevangelical restrictions on Christian hope had encountered the protest of a whole series of holy women, Medieval and modern, who, alongside the guild of professional theologians, had bold⁠-⁠heartedly developed a theology out of their own immediate access to the mysteries of Revelation. Let us mention just the greatest of them: Hildegard, Gertrude, Mechtild of Hackeborn, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and—later—Marie de l’Incarnation (and, let us not forget, Madame Guyon). This theology done by women was never really taken quite seriously by the guild; it never occurred to anyone to study it, to gather its insights into the treasury of ecclesial Tradition. Today, at least, when the entire structure of theology is being renovated from the ground up, it would make sense to exploit this hitherto missed opportunity. Shouldn’t we have expected that, if God was going to unlock the deepest secrets of his heart down through the ages, he would confide them to his saints? And why should he favor holy women any less than holy men (like Benedict or Francis of Assisi, who have so enduringly fertilized the mind of the Church)? Don’t women figure in the Gospels as privileged receivers and keepers of God’s Word?

The fact that Thérèse of Lisieux was burdened with very little academic theology—indeed, with hardly any reading at all—was to her advantage. It freed her intelligent, intuitive, and resourceful mind for the essential things God wished to show her. People like to insist today that Thérèse was stuck in a bourgeois Catholicism; that she grew up, lived, and died in a stiflingly overheated atmosphere of conventional piety, first in her family home, then in her boarding school, and even, finally, in her convent. This is a grave misrepresentation. In order to correct it, we need only open our minds to the astoundingly rich parade of poetic images, similes, and ideas that flow from her pen. These attest to her originality, her faculty for seeing the things of God with fresh, unspoiled eyes, as well as to her almost defiant, often arch⁠-⁠sounding, refusal to adopt many inherited opinions concerning theology, spirituality, ascetical practice, and mysticism that were taken for granted at the time. Then there is the almost unimaginable audacity with which, despite all her sincere reverence for the great Carmelite reformers, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, she departs from them as well. Yes, all of this is wrapped in the flowery style of an adolescent girl, but why should that be surprising? Where is she supposed to have learned to speak like Péguy or Bernanos? It’s all the more amazing, then, that her style doesn’t affect the freshness and novelty of her thought in the slightest.

The traditional Catholicism she imbibed with her mother’s milk had another feature as well, a very positive one we need to highlight at the outset because it is so pertinent to our topic: This Catholic form of life already held together, in an unquestioned, lived unity, all the elements that others—including, perhaps, moderns like us—must first laboriously drag into one place. We may even pride ourselves on how many “problems” we have, squandering our vital energies in an effort to remove obstacles, so that, at long last, we can arrive at the starting⁠-⁠post of the Christian race. For Thérèse, who awakens to the world in a lived faith, these problems create no obstacles because they don’t exist in the first place. She simply marches ahead.

Let us name just three of these problems that don’t exist for her, as doing so will introduce us directly into our topic.

1. For Thérèse, the compatibility of love of God and love of neighbor is not a problem Christians need to struggle with. It never even occurred to her to worry that, if she offered her heart entirely to God and Christ, there might be too little room left over for her fellow men. This way of problematizing love would have seemed completely foolish to her. She simply took it for granted, as an obvious Christian truth, that, the more deeply she understood, and opened herself to, God’s love, the more efficaciously she would be able to invest herself for the sake of the world.

2. Thérèse never had any doubts regarding the articles of faith. She never wondered whether this or that article might be over⁠-⁠emphasized, or whether it was of secondary importance, or perhaps a relic of the past, nor did she feel the need to situate it in the “hierarchy of truths,” or to apply to it a distinction between the content of faith and the form of its expression. When she is told that Christ is really present in the Eucharist, she believes literally in the mystery without troubling herself in the least about how it is possible or worrying about the nature of transubstantiation. She has the infinite advantage of always sticking to the reality itself, and not to the propositional formulation of it: “actus credentis non terminatur ad enuntiabile, sed ad rem”The act of faith, however, does not terminate with the proposition, but with the reality. (S.Th., II⁠-⁠II, q. 1, a. 2, ad 3).

3. Thérèse also never separated the act of faith from the act of love, since the entire truth of the Christian faith, in all its aspects, spoke to her of one thing only: God’s love for the world and, therein, for her; the very idea of an article of faith that didn’t bring this love closer wouldn’t have made any sense to her at all. The one and only principle of her meditative exegesis is this: How do I learn from this sentence of Scripture, or this saying of a saint, something new, something deeper, about God’s love? For her, in fact, the only credible thing is love, which means: God’s love, so that the faith at work in man, the faith by which he apprehends this love of God, can only be just that: answering love. To cite Thomas again, “fides non operatur per dilectionem sicut per instrumentum . . . sed sicut per formam propriam”Faith operates through love, not as through an instrument, but as through its own form. (S. Th., II⁠-⁠II, q. 23, a. 6, ad 2).

The foregoing puts us in the right place to start addressing our topic. The point is that the new theology of hope we see emerging with Thérèse unfolds out of the heart of Christian faith and Christian love. Hope is not an appendix to faith and love, as though these were the important priorities, while hope was a less central priority relegated to third place alongside them. No, Péguy got it right when, writing his Portal of the Mystery of Hope fourteen years after Thérèse’s death, he says the following near the beginning of the poem:

This is Thérèse’s view, too: Hope is an elementary force, one bursting forth from the very center of faith and love (which are one for her), even as these empower hope for its “folie,” its crazy demand. This is the first point. But hope’s claim rises up to stand face⁠-⁠to⁠-⁠face with the demand God places on man, which is why, in second place, we will need to consider this divine demand itself. Finally, insofar as Thérèse’s demand stands up in the face of God’s demand, her hope must also be ready to withstand, to pay the price. This is our third point.

The foregoing suggests the following structure: 1. the measure and gamble of hope; 2. the locus of hope; 3. the price of hope. On all three points, Thérèse will have something new and original to say to us.

2. The Measure and Gamble of Hope

Thérèse knows in faith that God is love. Why, then, should the believer place limits on his hope? Anyone who embraces this article of faith with total seriousness—and so draws all its implications for himself—ought to have a limitless hope. This is why she can write as follows: “Believe the truth of my words: One can never have too much confidence in the good Lord, who is so powerful and so merciful. One receives from him as much as one hopes for.”HA XII, 202. “We can never hope for too much of God. . . . We will receive from Him precisely as much as we confidently expect of Him.”I. F. Görres, Das verborgene Antlitz (Basel⁠-⁠Freiburg, 1947), 294; English translation: The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Therese of Lisieux (London 1959), 280. Cited as Görres in what follows. Thérèse is familiar with the Lord’s words to Saint Mechtild [of Hackeborn]: “I tell you that it gives Me great joy when men expect great things of Me. Great as their faith and their boldness may be, I shall give to them far beyond their merits. It is indeed not possible that men shall fail to receive all that they have hoped of My power and My mercy.”Text from the acts of the processes of beatification and canonization, second summary (1920), as cited in Görres, 293 (English 279⁠-⁠280). To be sure, Thérèse knows that her hope will be tested for its authenticity: “I believe,” she says, that God and the saints “are on the lookout to see how far my confidence will go. But Job’s words have not penetrated into my heart in vain: ‘Even if you slay me, I will hope in you.’”HA XII, 194⁠-⁠195. Cf. DerPar 106⁠-⁠107: «Cette parole de Job: Quand même Dieu me tuerâit j’espèrarais encore en lui, m’a ravie de mon enfance». Looking ahead to her mission from heaven, she says: “All my expectations will be more than fulfilled. Yes, the Lord will do wonders for me infinitely exceeding my boundless desires!”Görres, 294 (English 280). She excuses the “audacity” of her devoted surrenderCf. Man 309 and 311 (Manuscript B, 5r); 413 and 419 (Manuscript C, 34v and 36v). by appealing, on the one hand, to the “madness” of divine love, which the saints requited with “deeds of madness,”«Les Saints ont fait aussi des folies»: Man 313⁠-⁠314 (Manuscript B, 5v). and, on the other hand, to the fact that she is a child who can’t precisely gauge the full significance of her words. When she recalls Elisha’s request for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, she sees no reason not to address the same request to the angels and saints: “Please be so kind as to grant my petition; I know it’s a bold one, but I dare to ask you, obtain for me your double love. Jesus, I can’t fully fathom my petition . . . My excuse is that I am a child, and children don’t think about the significance of their words.”Man 302⁠-⁠303 (Manuscript B, 4r).

Yet Thérèse is not quite so naïve as she makes out. In one of her poems, she has Jesus turn away the “angel of vengeance” with a scolding: “It’s not your place to judge. . . . No one but me shall be judge over the world—and Jesus is my name! . . . Every soul will find forgiveness.”RecPri 105⁠-⁠109. In this poem, justice is represented by an angel, whereas Jesus the Redeemer personifies God’s mercy. Nevertheless, Thérèse regards it as her special mission to take seriously the teaching of the New Testament that “God is love” and to interpret all of God’s attributes—not excepting justice itself—as modes of his love. It is only through his “infinite mercy that I behold and adore the other divine perfections! In this light, they all appear to me radiant with love, even justice (and, perhaps, justice more than any other) appears to me clothed in love. What a sweet joy to think that God is just, that is, that he does justice to our weakness.”Man 270 (Manuscript A, 83v). Cf. Letter 226 to P. Roulland, 9 May 1897 (Corr 982⁠-⁠986).

Isn’t Thérèse being presumptuous, mistakenly closing her ears to the other half of biblical revelation? Isn’t she blind to a point the Gospel places in such a clear light for us? Thérèse is happy to risk the charge of blindness; she herself speaks of “the blind hope I have in his mercy.”Corr 895. She also appeals to Paul’s “hope against all hope.”Man 200 (Manuscript A, 64v). And if the Redeemer whom the Father sent died for sinners, for all sinners; if, in so doing, he renounced joy and experienced sorrow to the point of death,Corr 895. then this deed constitutes a fact that no word of his or of his Apostles can definitively gainsay. No matter which words of the Bible (or its expositors) she may cite, she always bases her case for hope on the deed in which—as she believes—God’s heart has defenselessly revealed itself. She doesn’t take God at his word, but at his deed and at his heart. This brings us to the second point: the locus of hope.

3. The Locus of Hope

The locus of hope is a spiritual one. Thérèse speaks about it only haltingly, as if it were the mystery par excellence, which all Christians ought to know about, but which only very few are interested in becoming acquainted with. The love of God, they think, is an absolute love, a love that is therefore assured and steadfast, a love from which a man in need of help can draw the necessary strength in his time of affliction. But what if the Lord’s word from the Cross, “I thirst,” unveiled the real depth of this love: Could the God who is rich be poor in relation to us? “Ah, I feel it more than ever: Jesus thirsts. He meets only with ungrateful and indifferent men . . . among his disciples . . . he finds so few . . . who understand the whole tenderness of his infinite love.”Man 286 (Manuscript B, 1v). “‘His face was hidden.’ This is still the case today. No one understands his tears. . . . Being forgotten: That, I think, is what pains him most.”Corr 539f. Thérèse takes the name “of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face”: This face is her icon, the icon she kneels before in contemplation. Precisely on the Feast of the Transfiguration she likes to venerate it in a special way, since it’s in Christ’s tears that she sees most clearly the glory of divine love. She speaks constantly of his “fascinating eyes,” his “downcast, exhausted look,” his “child’s eyes, closed now, that will open in eternity,” his “luminous face,” which “shines only with a hidden light.” And, like Veronica, she wishes to “dry your dear face.” And, “in order to quench the thirst that consumes you, this thirst of love, we would wish to have an infinite love.”HA 251f. = Consécration à la sainte Face (RecPri 522). So long as there are sinners, Thérèse thinks, the Passion is not an item of the past but a present event. Indeed, it is even more present than sinners themselves, since it comprehends them from underneath.

The meaning of Carmel, the meaning of every form of religious life in general, would be to step into the locus of this confrontation between the sin of the world and God’s suffering love. Into this hidden place, this place that is lost for the world. “I, too, desired to be without glamor, without beauty, to tread the winepress alone, unknown to every creature.”DerPar 249. “In order to find what is hidden, one must hide oneself. Our love is meant to be a secret.”Corr 715. Thus concealed, she might manage to draw the Lord’s gaze, to coax a smile from him. It is her “sole desire to capture your divine eye by veiling our face, too, so that no one here below recognizes us.”HA 252 = Consécration à la sainte Face (RecPri 522). To be sure, language—indeed, thought itself—falters here: Can one even say such things in the first place? “There are things that lose their fragrance as soon as they are exposed to the air. There are thoughts of the soul that can’t be clothed in words of this world without losing their secret heavenly meaning.”Man 111 (Manuscript A, 35r). But there is no suppressing the question: Why does the Lord abase himself to the point of wanting to be dependent on us? “Ah, because he nurtures such an incomprehensible love for us that he wants to give us a share in his saving work for souls. He doesn’t want to do anything without us.”Corr 663. God hopes in us.

It is here, then, in this worldless place that only God’s love for us and our love for him can define, that everything truly essential occurs. Utterly naked before God, with no other desire but to exist for his crucified love, the soul becomes a bride and is made fruitful by the fecundity of that love—and this for the salvation of the world: “To be your bride, O Jesus, to be a Carmelite, by my union with you to be a Mother of souls.”Man 294 (Manuscript B, 2v). In order for these words to be filled with truth, two things have to happen: the complete emptying of one’s own willing, thinking, and being so as to be nothing but a welcoming womb—and the reception in that womb of God’s attitude towards all one’s fellow human beings. Neither of these things bears any resemblance to what we usually take to be (leisurely) “contemplation.” Both amount to a supremely strenuous effort that spares itself nothing, that does not cheat or indulge in reverie, but that devotes itself to plain, hard work. We’ll return to this point later.

For the moment, though, let us stick with the fundamental act (whose effects are then meant to permeate everything else). Thérèse realizes she has discovered something new and centrally important here. She knows she has been chosen as a victim—not, however, of God’s justice, but of his mercy. It’s not that God wants to hurl down the lightning⁠-⁠bolt of his wrath on some scapegoat. No, the problem is that pure love wants to pour itself out but finds no room in which to do so. “If you could find souls that offered themselves as holocausts to your love, you would, I think, quickly consume them. You would be happy if you no longer had to hold back the torrents of infinite tenderness that are in you.”Man 271 (Manuscript A, 84r). What will fill the sought⁠-⁠after vessel, though, is love crucified, dishonored, and abandoned. Thérèse does receive a share in what she has longed for—a thing every human being must naturally find horrifying: deprivation of all feeling of protection in God’s presence; immersion in a faith without vision or feeling, a faith increasingly under attack, a faith finally obliged to defend itself (successfully) against violent temptations to despair and suicide.

Carmel is not the laborious scaling of a mountain peak with a spectacular view. Carmel means being led ever deeper into a “dark, subterranean passageway,”Corr 557f., 564, 571. or, to use other images: into the helplessness of the fledgling bird, which, lacking the strength to lift itself with its own wings, must flutter about on the groundMan 307⁠-⁠309 (Manuscript B, 4v⁠-⁠5r).; or, again, into the helplessness of the infant that tries in vain to climb the first step of the stairwell.HA 213 (Conseils et souvenirs). The point is the systematic expropriation of all “spiritual riches, which make you unjust when you rest complacently in them”Corr 894.; the point is the ever more complete relinquishment of everything usually called “merit” or “reward.”HA 214⁠-⁠215. The effort—and effort is required!—is supposed to come up empty: Thérèse wants to meet God with “empty hands.” In the state of total dispossession where one no longer refers anything to oneself, one attains the total openness corresponding to God’s plans and needs for the world, the openness of the “ecce ancilla.” At this point, there’s nothing left to grasp: “I am like a child whom they’re always promising a piece of cake. They show it to him from a certain distance, and then, when he reaches out to grasp it, the hand is withdrawn.”DerEnt 211. In this helpless situation, one has to simulate courage: “What does it matter whether you have courage or not? The important thing is to act as if you had some.”HA 227.

The thing is and remains an extreme paradox: We act efficaciously precisely when we know and feel that we are at the end of our strength. We console when we are stripped of all consolation. We are like a ball that delights the divine child when it’s punctured and finally left forgotten in a corner.Corr 428. We enter the most influential place in the heart of the Church when we renounce every particular charism.Man 294⁠-⁠300 (Manuscript B, 2v⁠-⁠3v). This is precisely because the initiative for every work starts with God: “I know, my God: The more you wish to give, the more you increase the desire.”HA 250 = Acte d’offrande à l’amour miséricordieux (RecPri, Prière 6). “In order for love to be fully satisfied, it must lower itself, lower itself down to nothing, and transform this nothing into fire.”Man 301 (Manuscript B, 3v). There is a paradoxical relation of all and nothing here: “Let everything be his, everything! And if I had nothing to offer him, then let him have this very nothing itself.”Corr 432f. “Marie, when you are nothing, don’t forget that Jesus is all.”H 307 = Letter 109, to her cousin Marie Guérin (Corr 548). This paradox is the soil in which Thérèse’s hope grows and thrives.

4. The Price of Hope

All of this might seem like the over⁠-⁠heated, febrile fantasy of an overwrought girl who also happened to be terminally ill. But every word is backed up by the gold currency of an order of life that was soberly chosen and unbendingly adhered to. Thérèse doesn’t just map out her “little way,” but, at every step, practices what she preaches. As novice mistress, she applies it to others as well as to herself. And, strangely enough, the way stands the test. The poetry survives translation into everyday prose. And, even more strangely: This prose becomes an astonishingly clear, unvarnished, and convincing exegesis of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It also puts the spotlight back on Paul’s teaching about faith and works without falling into certain one⁠-⁠sided emphases of the Reformation. The veneer of false solemnity has been entirely scraped off. One feels at home. “I am meek and humble of heart”; “his commandments are not burdensome.” Everything is summed up in a single commandment, but this commandment demands the entire man. We’re not asked to perform any special works, but to refrain from approaching God with our reservations, which is an even harder demand. We’re supposed to make ourselves as light as a feather, but how heavily we insist on our own importance! The point is to offer God everything and not be surprised when he takes us at our word. When we’re thrust out into the open, we shouldn’t wonder why it’s draughty and cold. Thérèse is honestly indignant when a novice tells her that, from now on, the only shoulder she will cry on will be God’s. “The very idea! You’ve even less right to let God see you’re sad than you do with other people. . . . Frankly, that is not selfless love! It is our job to console the Lord, not his job to console us.”HA 222f. “Tell him,” Thérèse asks the Lord’s Mother, “not to bother himself about me. Dis⁠-⁠lui de ne jamais se gêner avec moi.”Po 246.

This healthy realism, which day by day passes the test of ordinary life and its trivialities, is the foundation on which the lofty tower of Theresian hope is erected. This is a solid hope in eternal life, not a precarious hope for some earthly future. It is solidarity with all sinners, sustained through thick and thin; real action and not mere talk. “Your child is ready, Lord, to eat the bread of sufferings, so long as you will it, and she will not get up from this table laden with bitterness, the table where poor sinners eat, before the day you’ve decided. . . . Have mercy on us, Lord, for we are poor sinners! When you dismiss us, let us go forth justified.”Man 337 (Manuscript C, 6r). Relying on this solidarity, Thérèse can imagine the Lord saying that “every soul will obtain pardon,”RecPri 105. since “by his profound humiliation” the Son of the Father has “given” the whole creation “the gift of re⁠-⁠birth.”RecPri 65.

5. Transparency to God

All of this makes clear the extent to which Thérèse thinks hope is bound up with faith and love. Because her faith never wavers—in spite of every attack—, she can hope for everything from God with child⁠-⁠like audacity. And because her relation to God is one of unclouded love, she can take this hope for granted. Thérèse thus reveals the point where Christian hope essentially differs from all other forms human hoping: both from natural hope, which always includes an aspect of uncertainty—in paganism, after all, hope is an ambivalent, often deceptive gift of the gods—and from the hope of the Old Testament, which, for all its reliance on God’s truthful fidelity, is still awaiting an as yet non⁠-⁠existent future. Christian hope is different: It is rooted—in an ineliminably paradoxical manner—in the presence of the definitive and eternal salvation God has already bestowed in Christ.

This presence now granted us in faith, under the cloud⁠-⁠cover of non⁠-⁠vision, is the same presence promised us in open vision when the veil of time and mortality will be drawn aside. This identity gives Christian hope its unique tension—a tension that brings joy while at the same time almost unendurably tearing us in two. Thérèse intensely experienced the tension even as a little girl. Her first letters are full of passages that speak of this kind of yearning for heaven: “My heart felt earth to be an exile . . . I sighed for the eternal rest of heaven, for the Sunday with no evening in the homeland.”Man 69 (Manuscript A, 17v); cf. Letter 56 (Corr 382). During her early years in the convent she is almost obsessed with the transitoriness of life: “Another year has passed away, away, away, and will never come again. And as this year has passed away, our life will pass away, and we will soon say ‘it is over.’ Let us not waste our time. Eternity is about to dawn.”Corr 516. This transitoriness reveals the world’s nullity in comparison with the one and only reality—God. And thus requires shifting the entire weight of existence into him: From now on, Thérèse will seek “only heavenly joys, joys in which the whole of creation, which is nothing, yields to the Uncreated, which is the reality.”Corr 574. “Jesus alone is, everything else is not.”Corr 504. Doesn’t this annihilation of temporal existence sound almost Buddhist? Aren’t we dealing with a pure negation of the world? We would be if Thérèse didn’t at the same time experience and express the necessary complement, namely, that the definitive truth and reality of the creature will be secured and guaranteed in God. What eternally abides isn’t to be found beyond the passing moment, but already lies hidden within the moment itself. It’s this presence, moreover, that gives even the dark, painful moment its eternal weight and divine worth: “A day is dawning when the shadows pass away and only bliss remains. . . . Let’s use this unique moment of suffering, let us look only at the moment. The moment is a treasure.”Corr 478. For the same reason, Thérèse can say that “life is not sad. On the contrary, it is very joyful. If you had said that exile is sad, I would have understood you quite well. It’s only for heaven, which knows no death, that we should use this beautiful word, and, since we already enjoy heaven here below, life is not sad, but joyful, very joyful.”HA 242.

Suffering and joy, then, characterize the fleeting, precious earthly moment. Faith knows that this moment holds eternity hidden in the depths of its temporal form. To have faith, in fact, means to see earthly things with God’s eyes, to contemplate them from God’s perspective, which is the reverse of how man usually sees. But there was never a time when God hadn’t already seen in things the share in eternal life he graciously placed in them. And this share is all that matters to him. Thérèse audaciously looks at the world from God’s perspective: “I ask myself: What is the point of time? Time is only a mirage, a dream. God sees us in glory, he rejoices in our eternal bliss. How beneficial this thought is for my soul! It helps me understand why God doesn’t spare us.”Corr 539. Just as she consoles Jesus in the passage cited above, she now excuses God for the suffering of the world. However profound it may appear and may be, this suffering is an insubstantial flux. It is not what abides, not what God sees in the world: the eternal fruits temporal suffering produces. Even the almost Buddhist idea of the insubstantiality of suffering, then, can receive a Christian complement: the resolute will to bear the task of suffering imposed on us and, in so doing, to draw out in full the eternal core of the moment: “The moment is a treasure.”

When we take the moment and its burden seriously, though, our vision can become so obscured that we no longer see through to the moment’s divine content. Faith can be thrust into the night, and passing time can come to seem unendurably drawn out. Thérèse feels like a little child waiting for its parents at a railway platform: “They don’t come and the train is leaving.”DerEnt 226. “I think I will have to muster up patience for my death, as I have done for the other major events in my life. You see, I entered Carmel at a young age, but, after everything had finally been decided, I had to wait three months longer. The same for my clothing, the same for my profession. Well, it will be the same for death: It will come soon enough, but I must still wait before it arrives.”DerEnt 238. At first, time moved too quickly for her; now it seems to move too slowly. At first, everything seemed transparent to God’s eternity; now that the transition approaches, a veil closes ever more tightly about her. This is the way it should be; Thérèse knows that. And when a tiny ray of light does penetrate the encircling darkness with a sudden flash, the remembrance of it “only makes my gloom even thicker.”Man 343 (Manuscript C, 7v). She disagrees with a Carmelite tradition holding that a sister is supposed to die in an ecstasy of love: “Our Lord died as a sacrifice of love, and you see what an agony it was for him!”DerEnt 219. And she says the following concerning herself: “It is naked agony, without any admixture of consolation. The chalice is full to the brim. I would never have believed that it was possible to suffer so much.”HA 208. She herself chose this. Didn’t she enter Carmel “to save souls and above all to pray for priests” and to offer herself for the intentions of the Church?Man 216 (Manuscript A, 69v); Görres 216 (English 205). Cf. also Man 410 (Manuscript C, 33v). She is taken at her word, and the Lord himself fills her last weeks of suffering with the burden of sin and alienation from God she asked for. It’s amazing how much found room in the life of a twenty⁠-⁠four⁠-⁠year⁠-⁠old! When an old sister remarks that a long life spent in fidelity to God is worth more than a short one, Thérèse responds “Oh, no, I disagree.”DerPar 51. “Love can outweigh a long life. The Lord doesn’t consider time, since there is none any longer in Heaven. He looks only at love.”Corr 567.

Thérèse’s existence is suspended, with no fixed abode, between heaven and earth; and this is the suspension every Christian has to live in. After all, he has died and been buried with Christ; he has been crucified with him; he is hidden with him in God, and, having died in this way, he can be sent out into the world anew by God. He is a stranger, yet he loves the world more deeply than anyone else can: In its impurity, he beholds the purity of God, and with God’s eyes he sees its redeemed condition. “Yes, we behold God already on earth, where nothing is pure, but where all creatures become clear and transparent when they are contemplated through the countenance” of God.Corr 530. Thérèse strains from earth to heaven, but she strains just as energetically from heaven to earth, since she wishes to spend her heaven showing love to men on earth. For the Christian, the distance between heaven and earth has already been removed, yet it continues to make its effects felt. In the Church of the saints, the Sancta, Immaculata, and Infallibilis, the Handmaid of the Lord who does the Lord’s entire will, heaven is already on earth and earth is already taken up into heaven. But even this holy Church must stand between heaven and earth, crying aloud in labor pains, so that she can bear all the brothers of Jesus to the end of the world. And, while the songs of victory resound in heaven, the Logos is fighting the final battle between heaven and earth along with his faithful people. This, precisely this, is the situation of Christian hope: the situation of being sent from the super⁠-⁠luminous mercy of God, indeed, by it, into the thick of the battle where visibility dwindles to zero. Thérèse’s favorite saint was Joan of Arc: the courageous sword—and the fire that she does not cast but that consumes her. Joan marches out in what, from a human point of view, is a presumptuous, insane hope, a hope that finds its superabundant fulfillment as she is burning at the stake. Thérèse risks the full un⁠-⁠limitation of Christian hope, and her final agony is the seal of authenticity placed on this hope by God himself.

“Through Jesus Christ we have obtained by faith access to the grace in which we live, and we boast of hope in God’s glory. Even more than that, we boast even of affliction, because we know that affliction produces patience, patience endurance, endurance hope. But hope cannot disappoint, for God’s love has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:2⁠-⁠5). “Neither death nor life . . . neither present things nor future ones . . . nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38f).