Les Paumés go to Lisieux

The following is a homily given by Fr. Daniel Chowning for the Feast of St. Thérèse - October 1, 2022.

I have often asked myself what is it about St Thérèse that inspires people? So many people are deeply touched by St. Thérèse and devoted to her. We find statues of St. Thérèse in churches all over the world. St. Pius X, who introduced her cause for canonization in 1914, called her “the greatest saint of modern times.”

I believe that what attracts people to St. Thérèse is that she touches the “child” in all of us. By child, I mean that part of our lives that is fragile, weak, poor, dependent; that part of our lives that longs to love and be loved in all our human fragility. It is the child that Jesus refers to in the Gospel for today: “What you have hidden from the wise you have revealed to infants (children)." “Come to me all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

A few years ago, I was in Lisieux making the pastoral visitation of our Carmelite friars who have a small community there and minister to the many pilgrims who come to pray before St. Thérèse’s relics in the chapel of the Carmel. I had a meeting with the Bishop of the Diocese concerning the specific ministry of our friars. The Bishop had just come from a meeting of the Conference of French Bishops that takes place every year in Lourdes. When I asked the Bishop what he believed is the primary ministry of our friars in Lisieux, he replied: “I just returned from Lourdes. The sick go on pilgrimage to Lourdes: those who suffer with various physical illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, the lame, the blind, the incapacitated. But les paumés go to Lisieux."

Les paumés is a French word that translates into English as: “the losers, misfits, the lost.” In other words, those people who are spiritually and emotionally broken and wounded; those who live on the margin of society, the poor and abandoned; those who feel unloved, those people who struggle with their dysfunctional past history; those who battle with a particular sin or addiction, or who suffer from depression and other psychological disorders. All those who long to know the merciful and compassionate love of God are the ones who flock to Lisieux.

Let me give you an example of one of those paumés to which the Bishop referred. The famous French singer, Edith Piaf, was one of those paumés. Edith Piaf was a national French singer born in 1915. She was very famous between 1935 to 1963. She sang the famous song “La vie en Rose.” (translated as “Life in pink;” – “Seeing life through rose-colored glasses.”). Edith even sang in Carnegie Hall in New York.

She was abandoned by her mother when she was 3 years old. Her father also abandoned her and gave her to his mother who ran a brothel in a small village about 30 kilometers from Lisieux. At the age of six, Edith developed a serious cornea disease and went blind. Her grandmother decided to take her to Lisieux in hopes of obtaining a healing from a Carmelite nun, named Sister Thérèse, whose intercession was powerful. Thérèse was not yet beatified. So, the prostitutes closed the brothel for seven days, dressed in white, and made a pilgrimage to Lisieux. They prayed at Thérèse’s’ grave in the public cemetery where her mortal remains still rested. They gathered some of the dirt from Thérèse’s grave and placed it on little Edith’s eyes. After seven days, she was healed.

Edith Piaf was a poor little girl, abandoned by her father and mother, raised in a brothel, a little girl who just wanted to love and be loved. Through that miracle, she learned that heaven loved her. Someone in heaven loved her. For the rest of her life, Edith always wore a cross around her necked kissed it before she sang, and when she sang, she said, ”I sing for Saint Thérèse.” For the rest of her life, she placed an image of St. Thérèse next to her bed and prayed to Thérèse every day. Every year on September 30, she made a pilgrimage to Lisieux and placed flowers before the relics of St. Thérèse.

Edith is an example of les paumés. Her story touches the essence of the doctrine of St. Thérèse: “To make the merciful love of God known. God is all mercy and love.” Edith was one of the broken ones of this world, a fit receptacle for the merciful love of God: poor, abandoned, a child who hungered to love and be loved.

This is the heart of the Gospel: divine mercy. “Come to me all you who are burdened…” God invites all those who are broken and wounded, who find life burdensome, to come to Him and find rest, love, and peace in him.

God’s love impels him to pardon and heal that which is darkest in human beings, that which is most fragile, broken, rejected, and painful. Through the grace of the Holy Spirit, Thérèse discovered that our God is a God for the little ones of this world: the sinners, the broken, the wounded, victims of abuse, the depressed, the lonely, the forgotten, those who struggle with addictions and sexual disorders, those who have “to sweat it out in life” – all those who experience their utter poverty, sinfulness, and misery – physically, morally, and emotionally. Jesus came for the “little” ones of the world. Jesus said, “I have come not the self-righteous, but for sinners. The healthy do not need a doctor, the sick do.”

Thérèse is one of those souls who believes that God loves us in all our messed up, confused, sinful, and struggling lives. “God so loved this world that he gave his only Son so that all who believe in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (Jn 3: 16) St. Thérèse believed in her in the depths of her being that God loved her as she was, not as she wanted to be. Thérèse asks us these serious questions: “Do you really believe that God loves you in all your brokenness and imperfection?” “Do you believe that God has given you all you can desire in Jesus?” She wrote a beautiful poem entitled: He Who has Jesus has Everything. Do we believe this? In Jesus we have everything because in him we have the compassionate merciful love of God incarnate. Do we want to open our hearts to this Love? Can we bring all that is shameful, dark, imperfect, and weak before him and offer it to him? Our very brokenness is a magnet for his merciful love. By his very nature, God is drawn to what is sinful and broken!

Thérèse’s discovery of God as merciful love didn’t come from a book. It was born from her lived experience as a fragile human being. She had a history of woundedness. As a child, Thérèse suffered from a deep abandonment wound. She lost her four “mothers” in her life. Madame Martin couldn’t nurse Thérèse, so a few days after her birth Thérèse was taken to a wet nurse, Rose Tailleur, who cared for her for two years. Then after a bonding experience with Rose, Thérèse returned to her mother who died when Thérèse was four. Her sister Pauline replaced her mother, and there was a strong bond. Pauline entered the Carmelite monastery and Thérèse lost another mother. Her sister, Marie, replaced Pauline, then Marie entered the Carmelite monastery. Thérèse suffered a lot of grief as a child.

She suffered a kind of nervous breakdown when she was ten years old. The Blessed Virgin smiled at her on May 13, 1883. The simile of the Virgin healed her.

For several years she suffered from hypersensitivity. She was shy, timid, and socially maladjusted outside the family circle. On Christmas night in 1886, the Lord healed her of her hypersensitivity and gave her strength of character.

She suffered a martyrdom of scruples as a young teenager, and even later as a Carmelite nun. Her prayer was as dry as a desert for almost nine years in the monastery. She suffered from “the pinpricks” of living in a cloistered community where you can’t escape from the tensions of interpersonal relationships. She learned from daily experience that without the very love of Jesus flowing through her, she could not love her sisters as Jesus commanded. “Love one another as I love you.”

In the last eighteen months of her life, Thérèse suffered not only from tuberculosis that consumed her body but also from obsessive doubts about the existence of eternal life. She asked herself, "When I die, will God be there for me? Is there eternal life? Does God really love me? Will he be there for me at the hour of death?"

So, my friends, Thérèse was also one of those fragile people, (les paumés). She knew her human poverty. God revealed to her that he loved her as she was, not as she wanted to be. He revealed to her His Merciful Love. Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, she came to the liberating Gospel insight that our God is for the little ones of this world, and if she came to God with all her poverty and misery, and surrendered everything to him, he would pour out his Merciful Love into her nothingness and consume her in the fire of His love. The poorer she was, the richer she would be if she would only come to God in confidence and love and offer everything to him. For Thérèse, there are no obstacles to God’s love.

She wrote a beautiful letter in 1896 to her sister Marie in which that expresses this profound insight: “What pleases Him (God) is that He sees me loving my littleness and poverty, the blind hope that I have in His mercy…that is my only treasure.”

These words are full of deep meaning. God desires that we too come to him as we are with all our poverty; come to Him with empty hands. Salvation is a gift. Holiness is grace. We don’t earn God’s love; we don’t merit holiness. If we are holy; it is God’s holiness flowing through us that transforms us. The challenge is to embrace our poverty and offer it to God. We have to come to God with all our frailty and the messiness of life and give it to Him and He will transform us like fire transforms a log of wood.

Thérèse calls us this morning to believe in God’s merciful love for us. She says to each one of us: “Never fear God. God only knows how to love.” “Even if I had on my conscience all the sins that can be committed, I would go, my heart broken with sorrow and throw myself into Jesus’s arms, for I know how much he loves the prodigal son who returns to him.”Through the intercession of St. Thérèse let us ask God for the grace to believe in his merciful love and to offer all we have to him so that he will transform us into vessels of his love for all people.

After Mass, we will distribute the roses which are associated with St. Thérèse. People often receive a rose as a sign of St Thérèse’s intercession and the grace they received. Even Pope Francis who is deeply devoted to St. Thérèse has received a white rose after praying for her intercession.

We have to be careful not to interpret the roses associated with St. Thérèse sentimentally. The origin of the roses associated with St Thérèse comes from St. Louis of Gonzaga.

In 1897, Thérèse was close to death and was confined to the infirmary. The nuns were reading the life of St. Louis of Gonzaga in their refectory. One day, the nuns heard the story of a German priest who asked St. Louis to save him from a terminal illness. St. Louis appeared to him and showered rose petals over his bed as a sign of the healing he was to receive. When Thérèse heard about this miracle, she said to her sister, Marie of the Sacred Heart: “After my death, I, too, will let a shower of roses fall. People will know better the gentleness of God.”

The roses signify, first of all, the goodness and gentleness of God’s love poured out on those who ask for God’s help through St. Thérèse’s intercession. The rose petals represent Thérèse’s desire to “love Jesus and to make him loved” by helping her brothers and sisters on earth. Thérèse’s rose petals have an apostolic meaning. They are signs of God’s love for his children in need. Thérèse’s great desire is that we come to know and to experience the gentle, merciful love of God and to love God as she loves him. Before she died, she said: “I feel that my mission is about to begin, my mission of making God loved as I love Him, of giving my little way to souls. I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.”

Near the end of her life, she wrote a poem entitled "An Unpettaled Rose." In this poem Thérèse expressed her desire to be like an unpettled rose, that is, a life of outpouring love for God and for others, a life consumed in loving God and others through daily acts of sacrificial love, kindness, compassion, and gentleness.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, the roses you will receive are symbols of God’s tender love for you and his call to make your life one of outpouring love for God and for one another.