Julian of Norwich and Other Tibetan Lamas

In 1887, the fourteenth year-old Thérèse Martin, who is now known at Saint Thérèse of Lisieux or the Little Flower of Jesus, her Celine and their father, Louis, made a pilgrimage to Rome. ₁ During the trip, this small band of French pilgrims visited the holy sites of the Eternal City, and the sites linked to the early martyrs of the Church seem to have stirred a particularly fervent devotion in young Thérèse, as she writes in her autobiography, Story of a Soul: “One of the sweetest memories was the one that filled me with delight when I saw the Colosseum. I was finally gazing upon that arena where so many martyrs had shed their blood for Jesus. I was already preparing to kneel down and kiss the soil that they had made holy …” However, Thérèse’s heart fell when the tour guide explained that the ground upon which they stood was not the actual ground upon which the early martyrs sacrificed everything; that ground was buried many feet below. Then, perceiving a possibility to venerate as she so desired, Thérèse beckoned to her sister, and together they stooped and entered an opening in the barrier that guarded the site of excavations of the Colosseum’s ancient past. And based on information that had been shared earlier by their guide, the sisters found the cross-marked place “where the martyrs had fought.” With their brief but daring quest fulfilled, the pair reverenced the scene:

[W]e … threw ourselves on our knees on this sacred soil, and our souls were united in the same prayer. My heart was beating hard when my lips touched the dust stained with the blood of the first Christians. I asked for the grace of being a martyr for Jesus and felt that my prayer was answered! ₂

After the Coliseum, the three pilgrims visited the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere and the tomb of early female martyr, Cecilia:

Before my trip to Rome I didn’t have any special devotion to this saint, but when I visited her house transformed into a church, the site of her martyrdom, when learning that she was proclaimed patroness of music not because of her beautiful voice or her talent for music, but in memory of the virginal song she sang to her heavenly Spouse in the hidden depths of her heart. She became my saint of predilection, my intimate confidante. Everything in her thrilled me, especially her abandonment, her limitless confidence … ₃  

By the time she wrote Story of a Soul, Therese’s understanding of martyrdom would evolve and expand. In a chapter of that text, entitled “My Vocation is Love,” the young Carmelite writes:  

Martyrdom was the dream of my youth and this dream has grown with me within Carmel’s cloisters. But here again, I feel that my dream is a folly, for I cannot confine myself to desiring one kind of martyrdom. To satisfy me I need all. Like You, my Adorable Spouse, I would be scourged and crucified …. I would undergo all the tortures inflicted upon the martyrs. With St. Agnes and St. Cecilia, I would present my neck to the sword, and like Joan of Arc, my dear sister, I would whisper at the stake Your Name, O JESUS. ₄

The “all” kinds of martyrdom to which Thérèse refers would come to include the challenges of intensive community living, mental affliction and illness, suffering dryness in her spiritual life, and the aggressively consumptive disease that would ultimately claim her life. ₅ Indeed, on September 30, 1897, Thérèse died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. ₆

On October 8, 1941, TM wrote of Thérèse in his journal:

[I]n her mighty and innocent service of Christ in the cold and obscure convent of Lisieux she was least of all her sisters suffering terrible spiritual and then physical tribulations in obscurity, for the love of God – and without consolations. Not only was she not one whose religion was mawkish, or sentimental, or sloppy, or a luxury of polite sensuous ecstasies, not even consolations at all – only the terrors of the abyss and the Dark Night, and in the midst of this she continuously renounced, over and over, the benefits of her prayers, rejected consolation, offer herself up as a total sacrifice – allowed herself to be totally annihilated for Christ, in favor of simmers – with no reward, no recompense, not even heaven, which she would sacrifice to ‘faire du bien sur la terre’ [to do good on earth] …” ₇

Endnotes

1. At a very tender and critical moment in TM’s The Seven Story Mountain, Thérèse of Lisieux becomes a palpable presence. After his plan to enter the Novitiate of the Franciscans felt apart, and his hopes for entering any cloister and for becoming a priest appeared dashed in an experience of Confession that went horribly wrong, TM made a Holy Week retreat Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky in 1941. He would enter the monastery on December 10^th of that year, and it was in the preceding Fall that Thérèse’s presence was gifted to him: “The big present that was given to me, that October, in the order of grace, was the discovery that the Little Flower really was a saint, and not just a mute pious little doll in the imagination of a lot of sentimental old women. And not only was she a saint, but a great saint, tremendous! I owe her all kinds of apologies and reparation for having ignored her greatness for so long: but to do that would take a whole book, and here I have only a few lines to give away.” (Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1948/1998, pages 386-387). During this whirling period in his life, when little felt solid or stable, Therese’s presence was comforting and grounding as the soon-to-be monk writes in a journal entry of December 2, 1941, when a letter from the draft board appeared to threaten his entering Gethsemani: “If, as soon as a I decide on a vocation, obstacles appear, that has some importance! Today, all day, I am ground between two millstones. I keep praying to Saint Therese of the Child Jesus whom I know to be my friend …” (Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation. Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995, page 465). See also: Fiona Gardner, “’A Tremendous Experience’: The Influence of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux on the Spirituality of Thomas Merton.” The Merton Seasonal, 37, 4, pages 11-18.
2. Story of a Soul. The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated From the Original Manuscripts by John Clarke, O.C.D. Third Edition. Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1996, pages 130 and 131. Online: https://archive.org/details/storyofsoulaut00ther/page/130/mode/2up?view=theater
3. Story of a Soul. The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated From the Original Manuscripts by John Clarke, O.C.D. Third Edition. Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1996, pages 131.
4. Story of a Soul. The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated From the Original Manuscripts by John Clarke, O.C.D. Third Edition. Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1996, page 193. Italics and capitalization that of the edition quoted. On July 14, 1889, in a letter to her sister Celine, Thérèse writes: “Ah! that is indeed a great love, to love Jesus without feeling the sweetness of that love, there you have martyrdom. …All right! Let us die as martyrs! Oh! My Celine … sweet echo of my soul, do you understand? … Martyrdom unrealized by men, known to God alone, undiscoverable by the eye of any creature, martyrdom without honour, without triumph …” (Collected Letters of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Edited by The Abbe Combes. Translated by F. H. Sheed. London: Sheed & Ward, 1949 pages 97-98).
5. In The Seven Story Mountain, TM explains: “I first got interested in Saint Thérèse of Lisieux by reading Gheon’s sensible book about her – a fortunate beginning.” (Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1948/1998, page 388). The book to which TM is referring is Henri Ghéon’s 1934 biographical study, The Secret of the Little Flower. In this work, Mr. Ghéon provides a poignant introduction to one of the “martydoms” which Thérèse underwent, namely, scruples: “Scrupulosity always indicates a desire for perfection, even when it bewilders and leads astray. It is sort of hypersensitiveness of the conscience that ferrets out the by-ways of the soul; it probes into actions and motives, analyzes them, isolates them, lays bare what it finds – and then what it does not. It leads to a chronic shortsightedness which makes everything doubtful and suspicious, so that there is no certainty even of good intention. From being unable to judge, the scrupulous person becomes unable to act, and wears himself out with self-torment and self-reproach. Unless he can get over it – and abandonment of oneself to God will restore sanity – he is done for; despair and suicide lie in wait for him. This form of mental alienation is always a hell for the victim of it in its acute stage …  (Henri Ghéon, The Secret of the Little Flower. Translated by Donald Attwater. New York: Sheed & Ward, page 94). Thérèse herself writes of her experience of this inner torment: “It was during my retreat for second Communion that I was assailed by the terrible sickness of scruples. One would have to pass through this martyrdom to understand it well, and for me to express what I suffered for a year and a half would be impossible. All my most simple thoughts and actions became the cause of trouble to me, and I had relief only when I told them to Marie [Thérèse’s sister]. This cost me dearly, for I believed I was obliged to tell her the most absurd thoughts I had even about her. As soon as I laid down my burden, I experienced peace for an instant, but this peace passed away like a lightning flash, and soon my martyrdom began over again.” (Story of a Soul. The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated From the Original Manuscripts by John Clarke, O.C.D. Third Edition. Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1996, pages 84-85).
6. Contemporary Tibetan Buddhist Nun and Teacher, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, reflects: “St. Teresa was interesting because from the outside she didn’t do anything. She performed no miracles, saw no visions, yet she was extremely devout. However, she must have been special because her Mother Superior made her write her story, which was completely unusual. A photograph taken of her at her death shows how beatific she looked. She had said that she wanted to spend her heaven doing good on earth. That’s the bodhisattva aspiration – you don’t loll around in heaven singing praises, you get on and do something good.” (Vicki MacKenzie, Cave in the Snow: Tenzin Palmo’s Quest for Enlightenment. New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998, pages 122-123).
7. Thomas Merton, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation. Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995, page 433. Many years later, in a journal entry dated February 7, 1959, TM writes: “In the refectory they are reading the new translation of the original life of St. Thérèse. I knew it would be different but I had not realized what fine, power lines and images had been cut out … to make everything conform to the ideas of people without originality and without taste. Flatirons on the feet of the little devils. And she ‘hated’ the size of her mother’s coffin. That she was so content with her own sisters and so completely unaware that she had something in her they were incapable of understanding or appreciating. Or maybe too in a very pure and matter of fact way she was aware of it, and it did not matter to her at all. In any case the thing that overpowers you in everything is the realization of her sanctity. It is always deeply moving – and I am reassured by the fact that I still find it moving.” (Thomas Merton, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk’s Life. Volume Three: 1952-1960. Edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham, New York: HarperCollins, page 256). The image below is a photo of Thérèse retrieved from WikiMedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Therese_Lisieux.JPG The words that follow the image are from Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva. A Translation of the Bodhicharyavatara. Translated from the Tibetan by the Padmakara Translation Group. Boston: Shambhala, 2006, chapter 8, verse 108, page 124.