We hear this love burning more brightly as her death at age 24 approaches.
With that love, we see a growing passion for “lost souls” expressed in prayer both for missionary priests and the people they sought to win. We see her embrace of caring for others in her novitiate beginning with her prayers. She discovers that this is a love that is greater than all her weaknesses. She describes the vicissitudes of monastic life and how she learns through each of these to see them as loving gifts from God to form her more deeply in the love of Christ. At last, all relented and she entered at age 15. She recounts her pleas with her priest, bishop, and finally on pilgrimage, the Pope to be allowed to enter the Carmelite order early. She describes her confirmation and chrismation and the joy of knowing herself sealed by Christ’s Spirit. The book speaks of her earliest spiritual memories in her awareness of the love of God for her manifest both in nature and in the Catholic mass.
Yet the theme of the love of Christ and her love for Christ weaves throughout and gives the narrative an underlying coherence. She confesses at times that her writing is “muddled” and indeed it has something of a “stream of consciousness” flow to it moving from an event in her family to reflections to a narrative on caring for novitiates. It is this love, even more than the fact that two of her sisters had preceded her in entering the monastery, that moved her from an early age to long to be “wed” to Christ. It is personal narrative with a single thread throughout: Therese’s intense love for Jesus that was a consequence of her great confidence that she was greatly loved by Jesus. So it seemed only right that at some point I should read her autobiography. I take personal retreats regularly at a center named after Saint Therese. The Autobiography of Saint Therese: The Story of a Soul by Thérèse de Lisieux
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