Therese & the Divine Prisoner

Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Body & Blood of Christ! My mind always goes to my beloved Saint Therese on days like today, who held such a personal and beautiful devotion to the Lord in the Eucharist, from her youngest days!

Saint Therese came to discover the centrality of the Eucharist one Sunday in July of 1887. At the end of Mass, a picture of the Crucified Christ was sticking out of her prayer book and she was struck by the idea that His Blood was falling to the ground without anyone thinking of collecting it.  She decided at that moment that she would remain at the foot of the cross for the rest of her life to receive and tend to his precious blood for the sake of sinners. She writes that at that tender age of only 13 years old, she thought immediately of Jesus words from the cross: “I thirst.” She didn’t even consider that he wanted something to drink, she immediately identified them as the words of a lover to his beloved – that he was crying out for her, saying: I thirst…I thirst for YOU.

It is this experience, perhaps better than any other, which describes the life and mission of St. Therese so perfectly. She understood Jesus to be (and frequently called him) her divine spouse –her only true love, to whom she would give her entire life – just as he had given his life for her- and it was in the Blessed Sacrament that she found the ability to enter into that intimate experience of him, where she fell madly in love with Jesus. We often repeat her quote where she promised to “shower roses” on the earth from heaven. The roses she scatters are the graces and mercies of the love of Jesus that she collected from the Eucharist.

Her love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament began as a little girl. Each morning as a child her parents got up from bed at 5am to attend the early weekday Mass, and her father attended overnight Eucharistic Adoration monthly. When at 4 years old her mother died of breast cancer, Therese knew that her mother’s love was with her still in the Eucharist, because no member of the Body of Christ can be separated from the head of that body.

Of her childhood Therese wrote “Every afternoon I went for a little walk with papa.  Together we would visit the Blessed Sacrament, each day visiting a new church,” While the other children spent their afternoons talking with their teachers, little Therese spent many hours chatting with the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus in the chapel.  She knew that is was only His Living and True Heart that could fulfill her desires, her emptiness, and her experience of loss.  In her own words, He was her “only Friend.”

Her first priority in life became preparation for her First Holy Communion, when she would receive the Lord for the first time. Reflecting on the experience after she said, “It was a kiss of love, I felt myself loved, and I replied, ‘I love You and I give myself to You forever,” In her little notebook Therese made a note of each time she received Jesus in Holy Communion.  Her subsequent meetings with Jesus were equally as intimate, calling each occasion a wedding. 

When she was a teenager, her sister Pauline gave her a prayer card, which had painted on it a little flower growing towards Jesus in the tabernacle.  Pauline had written her name on the stem of the flower.  Wishing to emulate this, Therese said, “The little flower of the Divine Prisoner told me so many things that I was immersed in them.  Seeing Pauline’s name written at the bottom of the little flower, I wished my name could be there too and so I offered myself to Jesus to be His little flower forever.” 

Powerful language: the divine prisoner. For Therese, her beloved was a prisoner, as she recognized that Jesus remains alone behind the closed door of the Tabernacle. She wrote of how the grill of the convent reminded her of the barrier between her Eucharistic Lord and his creation that he loves so relentlessly. In one of her letters to her sisters she wrote, “The Divine Prisoner of the tabernacle awaits the visit and the gratitude of his creatures who abandon him!  He knocks at the door of our heart to make of it a tabernacle where he can rest.” Incredible, powerful, and poignant.

The life of Therese of Lisieux can be described as nothing less than an absolute masterpiece of Christ’s Love, and that is thanks entirely to her relationship with the living Jesus in the Eucharist. Her words echo and boom to us across history with the very same call. If our lives are to be a similar work of art the path that has been mapped out for us is clear: we too must pour out and empty ourselves in the Eucharistic experience. We too must come before this open door between heaven and earth, and let our entire life be poured forth as an offering of love to our divine spouse. There is no other way.

A passionate relationship of intimate love with Jesus is one of mutual self-sacrificial love. For Therese it was impossible to discern where the giving ends and the receiving begins: this is the same type of love that makes up the very substance of God…and we are invited to drown in that love!

In the Eucharist Therese poured out her hurt, her suffering, her loss, and her frustrations: so that they could be nailed to the cross with Christ, redeemed by him, and resurrected to glorious new life. Therese understood that the Eucharist encapsulates the entire Church: that in the love that is given and received in the Blessed Sacrament is the singular thing that matters in this created world. In that tabernacle day in and day out, the eternal and glorious God pours out his love for each and every one of us: if we encounter him there we find mutual rest- he in us, and us in him.

We are defined by our splendid Eucharist – where the heart of the living and triumphant Jesus Christ beats. It beats for you and for me. It beats for the LGBT Community, for the divorced, the developmentally disabled, the addict, and the poor. It beats for those we like and those we dislike. It beats for those who come to be with him, and those who don’t. It beats on the days we care, and the days we don’t.

I leave you with Therese’ own words. They should rest heavily in all of our hearts who hear them: “Do you realize that Jesus is there in the tabernacle expressly for you - for you alone? He burns with the desire to come into your heart...don't listen to the demon, laugh at him, and go without fear to receive the Jesus of peace and love...Receive Communion often, very often...there you have the sole remedy, if you want to be cured. Jesus has not put this attraction in your heart for nothing...This guest of our soul knows our misery; He comes to find an empty tent within us - that is all He asks.”