Thérèse of Lisieux

St Therese of Lisieux intrigues me. I read her autobiography several times in my youth and, whereas others found it inspiring, it seemed cloying to the point of nausea to me and she was not a saint I would have chosen to imitate (although her 'little way' was very appealing). 

Nonetheless, there is something about this saint which still has enormous meaning for me (although I am no longer a Catholic) and it doesn’t surprise me that she was a major influence in the lives of such diverse people as Vita Sackville-West (who wrote a book about her) and Edith Piaf – both of whose lives were very far removed from that of a ‘little’ nun in an enclosed convent!! According to Wikipedia:   

"Shortly after her birth Edith developed a cataract. She was blind for almost three years. Her grandmother, Louise, took her to Lisieux. She saw. It was a real miracle for Edith. She always believed this. Since that time she had a real devotion to St Thérèse of the Child Jesus...she always had a small picture of the saint on her bedside table."

Many years ago, I spent the summers working in Lourdes. The first time I went to work there, I was just eighteen and had not been abroad alone before. Being the only English person in the place where I was working, I initially felt extremely lonely and wondered how I would get through another 2 1/2 months of it. I wandered, almost by chance, into the underground basilica where there is a small chapel dedicated to Therese and I sat there for a few minutes, just looking at her picture and thinking how lonely I was. Five minutes later, as I left the basilica, a group of Italian people from the place I was working happened to be passing and they asked me to go with them for a walk. All the way there they spoke in English (simply because I was English and didn’t speak Italian – how delightful the Italian people are!!) and laughed and laughed about all kinds of things and within 10 minutes I could not imagine how I could have felt at all lonely. From then on, I absolutely loved every moment that I worked there – it was one of the happiest times of my life and I often think back to it, and how truly miraculously my whole attitude changed after just 5 minutes or so in Therese’s 'company.'

I firmly believe that there are many ‘non-physical’ beings – angels, saints or simply ‘friends in high places’ – who are ever ready to help anyone in any circumstance and one’s religion, beliefs, spirituality etc. etc. (or lack thereof) and way of life are totally irrelevant to them. I think it is only humans who judge by such outwards trappings.

Fascinating, too, is the way in which Therese's autobiography became an almost overnight bestseller - one of the least likely books to do so, one would have thought. I have to say that as someone who received countless rejections from publishers before my books suddenly started to sell well, that, too, always fascinated me and I have no doubt that these 'friends in high places' help facilitate it for me!

Here is a little tribute to the saint for which I wrote the words, and Tony Croft wrote the music. The song was performed by a local primary school, dedicated to St Therese.  I hope you like it...

Relics and Underwear

What would Queen Victoria make of the fact that her bloomers have once again appeared on the news! It appears that her underwear, embroidered with the royal crest, is now a 'national treasure' and her waist and bust measurements are put out for all the world to see. It's an amusing story and one that I think might possibly amuse Queen Victoria. Perhaps it's a sign of a faithless or bankrupt nation that such intimate items are stored as national treasures, and, on the other hand, perhaps it's a sign of English quirkiness and it is something we can all relate to and it is both humorous and respectful...

Yesterday I watched the footage of the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the founding of Grand Duchess Elizabeth's Convent of Martha and Mary. Expecting a beautiful celebration of the loveliness she intended to create, I found it horrifying and revolting to see her bones being paraded around. I have absolutely no desire to offend the Orthodox religion, for which I have great respect, but would love someone to explain to me why such macabre displays are viewed as pious. Perhaps it is the English mentality (the mentality that laughs with and yet honours an old monarch's underwear) that considers such clothing intimate and worthy of a news report, but to actually take someone's bones and parade them about is horrendous to me. Please, some kind Orthodox person, explain it to me!

Having been raised as a Catholic, I am familiar with the skeletons reverenced in Italy - including the skeleton of St. Frances of Rome; have seen the bodies of Sts. Vincent de Paul and Catherine Laboure in Paris; the relics of saints even in my school chapel; the bits of fingers, the toes, the fragments of corpses, and even the bits of cloth that had touched those bones. At this time, the relics of Therese of Lisieux are being paraded around England. There was a time when I would have found this pious. Now I find it revolting. Much is written in Christian history of the macabre practices of pagans; horror stories are made of mad men digging up bones in the night....and yet these are the relics that are paraded about in the name of piety??

It might sound like I am scoffing at someone else's beliefs or being flippant. and, please believe me, I am not! I just think that Queen Victoria's undergarments are a little closer to the person who is being honoured, and are far less intrusive, than a macabre ritual of bones in boxes...

Saints and Suffering - an oxymoron!

As a child, I loved reading the lives of the saints. They intrigued, inspired and utterly fascinated and absorbed me but something always bothered me: so many of them suffered from horrendous and grotesque illnesses. Those who weren't mauled by lions for the entertainment of the Roman mob, or hanged,drawn and quartered, or cannibalized or crucified upside down, or flayed alive or beheaded, often developed mysterious growths, tuberculosis and consumption and a large percentage of them died at a young age. Of course, the books and the images - young men pierced by arrows or saintly virgins holding their eyes (or even their breasts!) on a platter to show the means of martyrdom! - were quick to point out, that these saintly people were so holy because they participated in the suffering of Christ.

It's a heady concoction for a child. To go several times a week into a church and see the crucified Jesus with nails protruding from his hands, his body writhing in agony, and then to be told, "This is because you are a sinner and God loves you so much!" To hear that 'He gives His crown of thorns to his friends" creates the weirdest notions of Love and of who or what God is. This loving Father, whom we were to worship, somehow can only be appeased by suffering? This God who is omnipotent, somehow requires His children to endure all kinds of agony in order to be cleansed? When my mother wanted me to be cleansed, she put me in a bath and quoted poetry to me, then hugged me dry in a towel. But the Supreme Parent saw His (there was never any Her in it) children as needing cleansing by feeling such guilt that they could only assuage it by tremendous physical suffering.

Good grief! What an utterly nasty and unnecessary concoction that was! Look what it did: the child abuse scandals coming from various parts of the world, instigated by those in positions of religious authority! The burning and murder of many men and women as witches. The burning of heretics. The massacre of Jewish people not only by Hitler's holocaust, but by other so-called Christian nations - even here in the north of England (with a timely excuse for a scapegoat that 'the Jews killed Christ' while quite forgetting that Jesus was Jewish! The centuries of religious feuding and wars. And not one single word of it comes from the mouth of any of the truly spiritual founders of any of the most prominent religions. Had suffering been something required, would Jesus, for example, have cured so many people? Of course not, he would have patted them on the head and said, "Your suffering is good and holy!"

To this day, all the time, I hear 'religious' people saying, "Those who suffer are close to God.." and so many well-meaning people resign themselves to the will of a tyrannical God and think that is good, while others pander to the illness and think it is a sign of sanctity. Well, I utterly refute it! God is synonymous with Life. Does Life ever think it needs to destroy itself? It wouldn't make sense. The saints who suffered and died young, did so because they believed it was holy to do that. They brought their own illnesses on themselves by the belief that it was what God wanted. To my mind Life is Life. Life is the freedom to express our gifts fully, without any need to appease a stroppy Deity. That Life, the Life that lives through us, that expresses so purely and beautifully in Nature, in the love between people, in all that is healthy and pure and whole is what we call God. Surely, this whole notion of God was born of a series of minds that had so many issues of their own about guilt, and somehow they infiltrated the whole religious world and led people to suffer or inflict suffering on others through some totally bizarre notion that that is pleasing to this idol, who bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Buddha's vision or to Jesus' vision or Mohammed's vision, or to the vision of the great Sikh, Hindu or Judaic visionaries.

There is nothing holy or 'whole' in suffering. It is surely not the Divine view at all. Well...I watch the ducks on the lake at Temple Newsam and this is how it seems to me...