From the eighth chapter of Ste. Therese of Lisieux's "The Story of a Soul", translated by John Beevers, and written to the superior of Ste. Therese's order:
In 1895 I was enabled to understand more clearly than ever before how Jesus longs to be loved. I was thinking of those souls who offer themselves as victims to the justice of God, so that, drawing it down on themselves, they turn aside the punishment due to sinners. I thought this a noble and generous offer, but I was a long way from feeling that I should make it myself. From the depths of my heart, I cried: "O my divine Master, must it be only Your justice which has its victims? Hasn't your merciful love need of them too? It is everywhere rejected and ignored. Those on whom You long to lavish it seek a wretched, fleeting happiness in other creatures instead of flinging themselves into Your arms and welcoming the flames of Your divine love. Must Your rejected love stay shut up in Your heart? It seems to me that if You found souls offering themselves as sacrificial victims of Your love, You would consume them speedily and would rejoice to unloose those torrents of infinite tenderness You hold within Yourself. If Your justice must spend itself, though it is concerned only with the earth, how much more must Your merciful love long to inflame souls since 'Thy mercy reacheth even to the heavens.' O Jesus, let me be Your eager victim and consume Your little sacrifice in the fire of divine love."
You, Mother, let me make this offering of myself to God, and you know what flames -- or rather what oceans of grace -- flooded my soul immediately after I gave myself on June 9. Ah, since that day I have been soaked and engulfed in love. There is not a second when this merciful love does not renew and cleanse me, sweeping every trace of sin from my heart. It's impossible for me to fear purgatory. I know I do not deserve even to enter that place of expiation, but I know also that the fire of love cleanses me more than the flames of purgatory. I know too that Jesus does not want us to suffer uselessly, and that He would not inspire me with such desires unless he meant to fulfill them...
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4 comments:
Why are you reading this again?
btw, icu hatin.
Because I read Thomas Merton's autobio and he has some nice things to say about it - that its content was so deep, that it made you realize how its French bourgeois style was completely unimportant though aesthetes would viscerally react against it and on the basis of this unnecessarily dismiss the whole book.
Victim of love instead of victim of justice. Therein lies the genius of her spirituality and is what attracts us to her. She experienced that God Is Love.
If you discount the veil of bourgeois sentimentality, you see that she is giving the same teaching that Saint John of the Cross did. Hers is the Nada made accessible to simple loving souls.
Father Paul
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