Sanctity for nobodies

By Madeline Pecora Nugent

The American poet Emily Dickinson has a poem that goes;

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - Too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise - you know!
How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog.
To tell one’s name - the livelong June

A more recent American poet, e. e. cummings has similar thoughts in his poem, anyone lived in a pretty how town. In this short, dancing lyric, ‘anyone’ and ‘noone’ (no-one) fall in love, share their lives, and die while ‘busy folk’ buried them ‘side by side’ and someones married their every-ones. Dickinson and cummings are capturing the essence of most people’s lives. In the world’s eyes, we are nameless nobodies who live, die, and are forgotten.

Are we really so insignificant?
Saint Therese of the Child Jesus is a saint for us nobodies. She tells us our true worth, reflected in the love of Christ. Compare the sentiment in this letter of St. Therese’s, her idea of Jesus’ own advice to us, with that of the poems.

A message from Jesus

Do thank the good God for all the graces He grants you, and do not be so ungrateful as not to recognise them. You seem to me like a little village girl to whom a mighty king proposes marriage, and who dares not accept, because she is not rich enough, nor trained enough in the usage of the court; she does not reflect that her royal suitor knows her quality and her weakness much better than she knows it herself.. If you are nothing, you must not forget that Jesus is all, so you must lose your little nothing in His infinite all and from now on think only of that uniquely loveable all... Jesus delights to teach (me), as He taught St. Paul, the science of glorying in one’s infirmities; that is a great grace, and I beg Jesus to teach it to you, for in it alone is found peace and rest for the heart. Seeing yourself so worthless, you no longer wish to look at yourself, you look only at the sole Beloved!...

For my part I know of no other means to arrive at perfection save love... Jesus is sick for love, and one must realise that the sickness of love is cured only by love... Give all your heart to Jesus, He is athirst for it, hungry for it; your heart, to have that is His ambition... What a mystery of love!

(Collected Letters of Saint Therese of Lisieux, ed. the Abbé Comes, trans. F.J. Sheed)

A universally known nobody

Emily Dickinson and e.e. cummings were lauded poets of their times. Therese of the Child Jesus was an unknown, cloistered Carmelite who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. Yet this nobody nun’s name is known world-wide; her statues grace countless churches; her face lights up endless holy cards; people pray novena after novena to this saint called the ‘Little Flower’ who promised to send a shower of roses to those whose prayers would be answered through her own intercessions. Now it appears that the Pope may name St. Therese a Doctor of the Church. How is all this possible?

This making of a nobody nun into a somebody saint came about because of the publication of St. Therese’s autobiography The Story of a Soul, written under obedience to her superiors while she was ill. At first circulated to Carmelite convents, the slender volume made its way into the public arena where her story and her faith touched the hearts of all the nobodies who read it.

Therese entered Carmel at the age of fifteen. She died there nine years later. During most of that time, she experienced what St. John of the Cross came to call the dark night of the soul. Without spiritual consolations or meditative insights into the things of God, Therese held onto her faith because she knew that it was real. Ecstasies, insights, miracles, prophecies, knowledge, eloquence eluded her. Nor did she try for these lofty spiritual gifts. Therese saw herself as a ‘little ball’ that the Child Jesus could play with, ignore, or abuse at will or a ‘little flower’, content to emit its tiny fragrance in the corner of God’s eternal garden.

The joys of anonymity

Therese had no illusions about herself. Yet knowing that she was a nobody never depressed her. Rather, it delighted her much as Emily Dickinson was delighted with her own nobody status. Being a nobody brought its own joys as it brought them to ‘anyone’ and ‘noone’ of e.e. cumming’s rhyme. Those joys were knowing that she could sacrifice in little ways for Jesus, and only He would know. Therese perfected the way of obscurity. She would accept blame for things that she did not do. She would remain silent when falsely accused. She would choose disagreeable tasks and do them with love so that everyone else in the convent actually believed that she had chosen what she most desired. She even learned how to die without comforts that might have been given to others in terminal illness. Theresa’s reward was not in this life, but in the next.

Therese’s letters to her family’s friend Marie Guerin lays out the secrets of holiness, the secrets that only a Doctor of the Church would understand and embody. Indeed, the title ‘Doctor of the Church’ is given only to those great men and women of God who made important contributions to explaining the faith and who practised what they preached. Thus, Catherine of Siena, Thomas Aquinas, and Anthony of Padua are some of several ‘Doctors of the Church’. Some people find it astounding, and perhaps a bit scandalous, that a twenty-four year old nobody nun could share the limelight with these other well known preachers of the faith. Yet Therese deserves this title.

St. Therese of Lisieux continues to preach through the little volume she wrote. Her writings have been read by more people than those of many other Doctors of the Church. That’s because Therese reduced sanctity to simplicity. Only saints can do this. Therese reminds us that sanctity is not complicated. Jesus summed it up in one sentence, Love God with your whole heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments are based the law and the prophets as well.

All and nothing

How does one learn to love? First a person must realise his or her own loveableness. This is done by seeing with God’s eyes, not the world’s. To the world, most people are nobodies. But to God, nobody is a nobody. Everybody is a somebody because God made each and every one of us in love. To know and appreciate one’s uniqueness and loveableness is the first step toward loving God.

Secondly, one must know that he or she owns nothing but his or her sins, as St. Francis said. This Therese knew in a profound way. Not only was she content with this knowledge, she delighted in it. She was nothing. God was All.

Then, one must realise that the All died for the nothing so that the nothing would come to possess the All. Through no merits of ours, Christ left heaven to assume human nature—the All becoming a nobody—to die as a nobody so that we who are nobodies to the world might possess all that is possible in heaven. Who can match this Love? Who cannot love this Love? And only this Eternal Love can love us more than we can possibly love Him.

When a person loves the All with a total love, nothing becomes too difficult or unbearable. Everything that happens is embraced, not because everything is agreeable or understandable but because everything comes from God who is Love. And Love is only able to give what is good, whether we see or comprehend the good or not. In the great vortex of Love, God can transform everything into our good. God can use everything to promote our sanctity and our union with Him. We need only become a trusting flower in the hand of Almighty God or a little ball that He may play with or lay aside at will. To trust in this Almighty God of Love and to totally love Him is the secret of Therese’s sanctity. It is the way for all the everybodies and somebodies, all the no-ones and anyones, to become someones with a big ‘S’ - to become saints.