Happy hidden little feast of our brother, Marcel of the Child Jesus!

Once again we are joyful to announce that we have arrived at last at our little brother's feast, the feast of Jesus' first real kiss to him! But before we get caught up in kisses, let's finish our novena! We're saying the prayer that St. Therese asked her missionary spiritual brother Maurice Belliere to say for her every day of her life remaining on earth, and that she also requested him to say for her once she left this earth for eternal life. Since Marcel always wants to be like Therese in everything possible, we've added him to the prayer and voila! Here we go:

Merciful Father, in the name of our gentle Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints, we beg You to enkindle our sister and brother with Your Spirit of Love and to grant them the favor of making You loved very much!

I don't know if you noticed, but by saying this prayer, we've been praying pretty powerfully for all of our intentions. I figure when asking the Holy Spirit of Love to grant Therese and Marcel the favor of making God loved very much, we're asking that they help us to love God very much, and this goes too for all those for whom we are praying! So we here at Miss Marcel's Musings have been asking for healings, and conversions, and reconciliations, and a hundred other kinds of help for so very many dear ones (including you and your dear ones!) - and rest assured that the icing on the cake, as well as the cake itself, is this love of God that provides every good thing, even if sometimes He seems to take His sweet time to grant even the most fervent of our petitions. No worries! He will answer, and His timing is always perfect!

It's like those kisses He was always giving to Marcel, and which, if we are attentive, we will notice Him giving daily to us. They are delightful kisses, but they are missing something, and Jesus explains why in His Conversations with our dear little brother. He says on October 31, 1945 (and thank you, St. Anthony, for letting me find the passage I was looking for so hopelessly!):

"My little child, when I wish to give you a kiss, I must, first of all, contain My love before daring to give it to you. Because, if I give you a kiss putting into it all My love, in the wink of an eye your love for Me would lose itself entirely in the depths of My love so that you would no longer be able to sit here to write the words that I am addressing to souls. When I do give you this kiss it will be the last. And this will happen only on the day when it will please Me to unite your love to Mine forever in a single love. The last kiss will, in truth, be the first kiss given to My spouse when I come to look for her . . . Still a little longer and this kiss will be given to you, my little child." (41)

I have to laugh at Jesus' conclusion: "Still a little longer and this kiss will be given to you, my little child." This reminds me of Our Lady's words to Sister Lucia (of Fatima) - Sister Lucia whose heroic virtues were adorably recently recognized, and I say "adorably" because could we have been in any doubt? And yet these formalities to bring her to the "Venerable" status, formalities which require great rigor and precision and time, are gifts that we appreciate and hope will eventually bring the same to Marcel. Meanwhile, I laugh because Lucia's "little longer" was somewhere near 90 years longer! And laughing is safe now, because the little long wait is finally over for her and her joy is FULL!  Our brother Marcel, on the other hand, had merely 14 years to wait after this conversation with Jesus - although seeing how long a day can be sometimes (why don't we feel more Godlike when a day feels like a thousand years?!), I'm not sneezing at 14 years of his ardent waiting!

I don't talk often - in fact, hardly ever - about that last and first kiss of Jesus to Marcel. There was, I hate to say, suffering that preceded it. But lest we be in any doubt about the glory of the Cross, I found out today that it was on September 14, 1954, the Feast of the Holy Cross, that Marcel took the last plane "to the north" from Da-Lat to Hanoi, that is, from the Redemptorist House where he had made his perpetual vows just two years before (in the relative safety of the south of Vietnam) to the Redemptorist House where he had entered and made his first vows, but which was now in communist territory. Jesus wanted Marcel to love Him amidst the communists . . .

Sure enough, as expected, Marcel was arrested in Hanoi a few months later on a trumped up charge, and another year later tried and sentenced to 15 years in a "re-education camp." There he exercised, by the grace of God and the sweet love of Jesus, his own heroic virtue in generosity to the other prisoners and faithfulness to Our Lord. He wrote some details of his suffering to his sister Anne-Marie Te, a Redemptorist nun in Canada to this day (!), but concluded in words he addresses to us too:

"I will tell you the rest in heaven. Pray a lot for me, so that I may have the courage to fight in earnest right to the end. The enemy is evil, dishonest and very clever. He can destroy my body, but he cannot shake my will. Besides, Jesus tells us not to be afraid. Little sister, I give you a kiss, and I wish you to go ever forward. Your brother, J.M.T. Marcel Van, C.SS.R."

I love that we have been able to fulfill Marcel's request by praying this novena and asking:

Merciful Father, in the name of our gentle Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Saints, we beg You to enkindle our sister and brother with Your Spirit of Love and to grant them the favor of making You loved very much!

Our prayer has been answered and Marcel did have the courage to fight in earnest right to the end, which came with Jesus' first real kiss as noon on June 10, 1959. Thank You, Jesus, for Your faithfulness to Marcel which provided him with faithfulness to You!

And now, he is safe, our little brother. He is eternally happy, and - most delightful for us - he is as concerned over our welfare as his spiritual sister St. Therese was for his (and as she is for ours, so we get double the love!)! I mentioned already that Marcel wants to be like Therese in everything, and that means lots of roses and his coming down to us to deliver them.

One of the things that brought Marcel great joy when he, like us, was receiving very restrained kisses from Jesus, was the poetry St. Therese would recite to him. But his sister was not the only one to give him poems . . . Jesus Himself gave Marcel a song to sing when the novices were asked to perform for St. Stanislaus' feast. And so, in honor of Marcel's own feast, here is the song that Jesus wrote for him. Let it be a word of encouragement sung to us by our dear brother and sister who are showering us with roses like you can see in the picture at the top of this post, the very first roses that started this novena as pre-paid, but definitely not the last!

In the Footsteps of Jesus on the Way to Perfection

The path which leads to perfection,
Is the path of perfect love . . . 
And of confidence in the God of Love.
Dear Jesus!
On the road You formerly trod,
Lead me gently in the scent of Your fragrance.
Draw me to the summit of Love.

With one heart we shall walk side by side,
Ascending towards the God of Love.
May a fervent prayer accompany us,
Which will draw men in our wake.
Without respite we shall advance along the path of love,
While gathering and offering roses;
And later, in heaven, we will see the Beloved.

+  +  +
Happy Feast!

Draw me, we will run!

P.S. One of God's beautiful chronological gifts is that the feast of Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin, St. Therese's parents, follows soon after Marcel's day. Since he is her spiritual brother, they must be his spiritual parents (and the same goes for their relationship to us!), and their feast is in two days, on July 12th. We have time, then, for the littlest of novenas, a three day one if we start now . . . just in case you have an intention or two that haven't yet been perfectly, visibly answered!

Saints Louis and Zélie,
after having had the desire for religious life,
you heard the Lord's call to the vocation of marriage. 
You are the "incomparable parents" 
of whom your daughter St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus speaks...

You love us as your own children, with the heart of a father and the heart of a mother, because you are the friends of God, and the parents of our sister, St. Therese and her and our spiritual brother, Marcel. 
Listen to our prayer and our requests
and intercede for us with God our Heavenly Father,
through Little Jesus,
in the grace of the Holy Spirit who is Love!