The Shower of Heavenly Roses

HAPPY FEAST OF OUR LITTLE SISTER ST. THERESE!!!!!

If you're just joining us - or if you feel like you've been here forever - whether you're the worker who woke at dawn or the one who slept in til noon, welcome and happy feast!

We hold Jesus to His promises here, and today we're planning on a feast day celebration (an octave, or a triduum at least)  to reward us above anything we can ask . . .  but first we need to ask, according to the wishes of our dear brother, best friend, and the Spouse of our souls. I don't mean we have to ask what He wants us to ask, but simply that He wants us to ask, and the bigger the requests the better so our True Love can show off His love for us. Let's get to it, then, and finish our novena to St. Therese. We've been remembering all your intentions - even the ones you've forgotten! - so no worries, let's just pray. 

O Little Therese of the Child Jesus
Please pick for me a rose from the heavenly garden
and send it to me as a message of love.

O Little Flower of Jesus,
please ask God to grant the favors
I now place with confidence in your hands:
for Marcel to obtain a miracle for Suzie,
for us all to become great saints,
and for the countless other miracles we need
for ourselves, for those we love, and for the whole wide world.

St. Therese, help us to always believe as you did,
in God’s great love for us,
so that we may imitate your “Little Way” each day.
Amen.

And now for a word from our sponsor:

I feel my mission is about to begin; my mission of making others love God as I love Him: of giving them my Little Way. I shall send down a shower of roses. I want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth.  - St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, big sister of little Marcel Van

We have a lot of feasting to do, so I'm going to get down to business and offer a few roses from our sister Therese on this opening day of her festivities, and then send you on your little way. Tomorrow, October 2nd, is the feast of the guardian angels (thank you, dear friends!), and then the next day is Therese's feast again. My impression is that Holy Mother Church gave us two liturgical calendars (the old and new) so we could feast to our hearts' content. Cupcakes, anyone? Roses? Miracles?

On the miracle front:

This year has been a year of miracles for sure. I wish I could have a cup of tea with each of you and just listen to the litany of miracles you could recite for me, and if you weren't seeing them, I would love to laughingly point them out.

I can't wait till Heaven!

But then again, the point of the miracle we've been asking for lately is precisely to keep me from Heaven, or rather, in the words of St. Catherine of Siena which a dear friend now has as her motto under her signature (and so happily I get to read it frequently), since "All the way to Heaven is Heaven," we've been asking that I stay on this little way of Heaven with y'all, and that's precisely what's been happening.

I went to City of Hope! And guess what? It was really and truly, if not a city (since I went to the satellite office in South Pasadena), at least a medical building FILLED WITH HOPE!

I met the wonderful Dr. Paz (Dr. Peace, which makes me feel like I'm in a Trollope novel), and wow did he do his job well. He began with a friendly, "What can I do for you?" and before he ended with a kind and sincere, "Did I answer all your questions?" he ordered more tests and told me the words every blonde (and even those of us with recent highlights) wants to here: "There's a good chance you won't have to do chemo."

Hooray for Marcel and all the little miracles he and Therese procure to keep us from losing our minds and sometimes even from losing our hair!

I have been keeping up with a few of you in terms of the miracles we're asking on your behalf, and let me tell you, Heaven seems stingy (that's stinge-ee) lately, but I think we must be looking at it all wrong. I can't remember if I told the joke here recently, but I heard it in the Reagan movie and it sums up this life on earth. Our Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus of Avila said it this way after falling off the back of a cart (how they rode in the old days) and into the mud: "No wonder You have so few friends, if this is how you treat them!"

Reagan's words, the punchline of a joke, were from the mouth of a little boy whose father found him digging in a pile of manure on Christmas morning. When asked what he was doing, the boy replied, "I know there's a pony in here somewhere!" 

Sheesh, it's so true! When Mary and Joseph were the perfect parents of Jesus, what did the little imp do but make them search 3 days to find them in His Father's house?! And now when we're trying so hard to be what He wants us to be, or at least doing what He told us to and ASKING so we can RECEIVE, what does He do but hide, and sometimes it seems like He's hiding in a pile of manure, or at least dumping us in a mud puddle before He offers us a hand to lift us out.

Sorry for the vivid images that are so unfeastlike, but one of Therese's mysterious (to me) sayings, taken from her counsels to and reminiscences of her novices, goes like this:

"Do you know my Sundays and feastdays? They are the days when the good God tries me the most."

I don't know if she means that when God tries her the most, that's a feast day for her - and if that's what she meant I find it singularly unhelpful. Just for the record, I like a feast to be a feast and, I've said it before, I definitely like a kiss to be a kiss. Mother Teresa (and if you're young, that's St. Teresa of Calcutta to you, but some of us have photos with her, and we like to call her Mother, hahahaha).

As I was saying, Mother Teresa spread this terrible rumor that suffering is a kiss of Jesus. Can we just reframe that? I don't like to overquote Myth Busters, but let me just reject her reality here and substitute my own. A kiss is something delightful. A kiss is the symbol and reality used by God in Scripture (His love letters to us) and in life to express affection, sweetness, joy, and love. Let's not ruin that with this whole suffering business!

I do understand that suffering is inevitable. I've been in 12 step groups where some have said, "Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional." I disagree. It seems to me that pain and suffering both happen, just as it seems to me that God has made us for everlasting joy with Him in Heaven, and He's also intended for that Heaven to begin on earth. "All the way to Heaven is Heaven" comes from another Doctor of the Church, and since we can have Jesus with us - we do have Jesus with us - on earth, on the way to Heaven, so we have Him who is Heaven with us now, and so we have Heaven now.

And suffering? Well, darn if God didn't give us free will, and that does tend to get us into trouble. We - I use the royal we of the children of God - made a pretty silly decision in The Garden, and we're still paying for it. But the glorious Truth is that the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate, He took on flesh, so that He could pay for us, and ever since then things have been much better. I like to look at it according to the sage advice God gave us through His consoling prophet, Isaiah:

Behold, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?—Isaiah 43:19
To get back to St. Therese, wonderfully enough Pope Pius XI who beatified and canonized her and called her the star of his pontificate (not just the rock star, but the guiding star) had a cute nickname for her. He called her "Omen Novum" and it's on a book she's holding in the huge statue of her that you pass as you walk (or drive) to the her Basilica in Lisieux. Shall we go see it together someday? My future daughter in law (talk about miracles of grace!) will be working at a wonderful Catholic pilgrimage company, and I bet we can set something up. Ah, Lisieux! Ah, Therese! Why are you an "Omen Novum"? What in the world did Pius mean?

It was in a speech the day after her canonization in the spring of 1925 that he coined the phrase, and he was saying she was a New Omen, a new sign of God's love for us, and a portent of His future gifts and graces. Having seen how many roses she had already sent - miracles, favors, and actual roses, thousands of which festooned St. Peter's for the canonization, and some of which had fallen at his feet after the homily - it wasn't a big prophecy for him to predict she'd keep sending them! But more than her miracles of healing, reconciliation, conversion, and so on, there is The Miracle of her Little Way. 

I never tire of repeating the story about her sister Celine who was chastised in the process of the Process. The Church officials interviewing and taking depositions from those who knew Therese were asking Celine why she thought Therese should be declared a saint. When Celine said it was so her Little Way of Spiritual Childhood could be shared with the whole world, they got exceedingly snippy and told her to STOP, cease, and desist such talk of a "new way" because that was exactly the kind of thing that sunk a cause. Celine, that "salad with vinegar" as Therese called her, snapped back, "Well then don't canonize her! If I can't talk about her Little Way, there's no point in talking about her at all!" My translation here is loose, but that was the gist of it.

Celine later said that the happiest day of her life - more so than Therese's beatification day or canonization day - was when Pope Benedict XV proclaimed Therese's heroic virtues and in his allocutio he offered her Little Way to the whole world!

I think she must have loved this "Omen Novum" bit too, then, because by this nickname Pope Pius XI again proposed her Little Way. In his speech he called her, "A new omen, a Word of God in our time." As our Heavenly Father reveals to us, "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" (Isaiah 43: 18-19) He even continues, "I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself, that they might declare my praise."

Sometimes I object to calling this life a valley of tears because when I was young I misunderstood and thought that meant I ought to resign myself to unhappiness.

Not so! Might I say that the cross is inevitable (by God's mysterious design), but unhappiness is optional? Yes, it is so often a wilderness or a desert where we find ourselves. Even a dark alley! But the good news is that God is there - He is here, with us - and He knows the way out of that dark alley, He knows where the path out of the wilderness is, He knows how to keep us on a straight track leading out of the desert instead of in circles . . . but even while we are in the desert, the wilderness, dark valley, He makes it a place of springs and delicious fruits. 

So, where was I?
Yep, dilly dallying and shilly shallying so as to avoid tallying up our miracles.
Miracle of complete healing from cancer for me?
Well, no, not yet, but I'm having so much fun that I feel a little guilty asking you to pray for me!
Or maybe I should put it this way:
Your prayers are so incredibly powerful that I can only see this as a time of blessings beyond imagining. Truly. 

As for the complete healings and miraculous restorations I've been praying for right back atcha, well, those are equally elusive and equally ongoing . . . Without going into details, I'll just say at last count I am praying for - hahaha, I don't have all day, and neither do you! I was going to count up how many miracles I'm praying for, and then I started and realized we'd never end!

Here it is, my miracle story for today. Well, let's make that two miracle stories:

1. We prayed for my dear and so dear father in law Paul for 0ver 60 years, that he would return to the sacraments and the Church. Let me clarify that the photo at the top is of me and taken in the last year, so I am (hopefully clearly) not over 60 quite yet (but golly, I'm getting close). But my mother in law prayed for Paul from the time she met him, I'm guessing, because they fell in love pretty instantly and she was a devout Catholic and he was fallen away. When their kids came along, they started praying because they knew and loved their parents first, and God a close second, and they wanted for their daddy what they had by the grace of God and the love of their mom. Then when friends, spouses, grandkids, etc., came along, we all prayed too. Who didn't love this man, and who didn't, by definition, want everything good for him - the chief of which was the grace of God and the beautiful sacramental life of the Church? And then (let's make it sound sudden, and it kind of was) on April 24, 2021, the Vigil of Good Shepherd Sunday, Paul Harold Andres said yes to Fr. Tom who had brought the sacraments to his sickbed. He received anointing and absolution, in the middle of which his beloved and so faithful, loving wife said aloud in her awe and joy, "WOW!" and at the end of which, as the priest was leaving, Paul said with his engaging smile and typical charm, "God bless you, Father!"

2. After seeing a good doctor and a bad doctor (God bless them both), I have found not only A FABULOUS DOCTOR but also a whole CITY of them. This is truly a miracle because if the bad doctor, we'll call him Dr. B, had exhibited just the tiniest bit more bedside manner and not sent me on my way with instructions to self-insert a port (okay, that's an exaggeration, but not by much!), we would now be in an infusion room for chemo I may not even need! Is this an indictment of the medical profession! NO WAY JOSE! (I'm not good at inserting accent marks in blog posts, so please read that as no way hoe-zay!)

As I've said before, I love doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc.
God just needed to remind me that, as Therese herself liked to say, "Everything is a grace."
This means that when she loved God her whole life without committing a mortal sin, that made her no better than Magdalene but simply covered with preventative grace, like the child whose father doesn't let go of her hand, and thus she is kept from running out into the street and getting hurt by oncoming traffic. 

So in my case, I have been showered with wonderful doctors in my life, starting with my dad and Uncle Mike, moving on to cousins, a brother, nephews, and that's not to mention all their friends and colleagues. And most of all, the great doctors who have not been relatives and only became friends after they treated me and those I love with the utmost kindness and compassion and professional expertise. And don't get me started on the nurses! What a profession and procession of angels!

It was good, then, for me to be reminded that no field is exempt from The Fall, and poor Dr. B gains my prayers but not my confidence.

Which brings us back to Therese!
"It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love!"
Let that be our byword, our watchword, our mantra!

Why is it nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love?
Because God is Love, and He loves us.
When an animal has been hurt, it hides away and licks its wounds. (Okay, this is good. Sometimes I bet there are animals that have been hurt and so they lash out and try to hurt back! Let's stay away from those ones, poor things!)
We have been hurt - sometimes we hurt ourselves - and our tendency is to hide away. You can see it in the beginning of the book of Genesis. It's a very old story, a very old history.

And yet what is God's attitude?
He is Love, and He loves us.
He comes looking for us, and like the Good Samaritan, He binds up our wounds.
Here we are, crouching in a corner or hiding under the covers, hoping to be left alone to cry or moan.

Therese is a new word of God for us, and that word is CONFIDENCE, that word is LOVE. 

Little Therese, we are so bad at confidence. Please give us yours. You don't need it anymore - you see Face to face what you believed on earth, what you taught and lived with so much hope. Give us your hope, give us your trust, give us your confidence in the good and merciful God who loves us without limit, who loves us exactly as we are right now. Wake up Marcel and little Jesus. They are asleep on Mary's lap, but they need to wake up and come quickly to our aid. You were a bossy little girl Therese, and when asked what you would choose, you chose all! Choose all for us and bring that basket of miracles near so we can feel them pouring over our heads and into our hearts and the hearts of all those we love, all who have asked for our prayers, all we have promised to pray for, and all who need our prayers. Thanks, sis!

Draw me, we will RUN!!!

BONUS ROSE FOR THE FEAST:

Last week I had the joy of speaking with Dr. Marcus Peters on the Catholic radio show "Ave Maria in the Afternoon." We talked about the similarities between Padre Pio and St. Therese and now there is a link to our 10 minute convo:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3mgvylWUJkk6GeypmEvz9O?si=vZuCpDLxQk-J7JZnrXN-PA

The highlights for me were the amazing pronunciation by the host of the name "Padre Pio" the first time he introduces the topic . . . and his first question to me: about whether my son Joseph was at Ave Maria . . . it turns out they were classmates in Theology Grad School!

It was fun to be on the radio, and fun that somehow my future daughter-in-law was the only one who could figure out how to hear it live as my husband drove me to a follow up appointment and I chatted away! May St. Therese, Padre Pio, and our guardian angels help us always to use this amazing modern technology to glorify God, Who is so very, very good to us!

Also I love that I couldn't hear the closing music warning me to wrap it up, and as a consequence I talked to the very last possible moment, which allowed me to end on Therese's invitation that we, too, ask Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament to remain in us as in a tabernacle.

If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend Something New with St. Therese: Her Eucharistic Miracle. Our friends at amazon will get it to you instantly on a kindle or computer or phone (and I think you must have one if you're reading this now!) if you click HERE, and they'll get it to you almost instantly in 3-D, that is, as a paperback book, if you click HERE. Thanks again to Mimi, our production designer and so much more, for creating the gorgeous cover, which boasts Therese as sacristan from a photo by Celine, but in this version in charcoal by Celine. This charcoal rendition was their oldest sister Marie of the Sacred Heart's favorite image of Therese, and she kept it in her cell until her own entry to Heaven decades after Therese had flown the coop. Enjoy!