HEROIC souls who offer themselves as victims to divine justice presuppose their own separation from the sinners who offend that justice; but Thérèse totally identifies herself with ‘my brothers, the sinners’.⁷¹ When she describes her own inner darkness, she says that it mocks her ‘with the voice of sinners: “You dream of light .. - you believe you will one day emerge from the fog which surrounds you. Proceed, then, proceed! Enjoy death - which will not give you what you are hoping for, but only an even deeper night, the`night of nothingness (la nuit du néant).` At that point Thérèse breaks off, for fear of `blaspheming’.⁷⁴ The temptation to unbelief is entirely authentic, evidently. There is nothing condescending about her self-identification with unbelievers; she knows exactly what their position is, because she is in it herself. She can make her acts of faith on their behalf because she is precisely where they are.

Her spiritual journey seems to be almost exactly the opposite of what we should have expected. Her way is almost a ‘descent from Mount Carmel’. The intimacy of her love for God, which characterised her childhood, made way for aridity when she became a nun, and then finally she fell into this total darkness. Yet it was precisely in this way that she came to know the reality of love, and to enter into her apostolate of love. All that is left, finally, after the consolations have gone, is the desolate cry, `I thirst (j’ai soif)!’

In the course of her account of the ‘grace’ of Easter 1896 she breaks into a direct address to Jesus, as she so often does in her autobiography; but this time she draws attention to it: ‘My little story, which was like a fairy tale, has suddenly turned into prayer.’⁷³ The interruption in her narrative seems to be particularly significant here, and surely this is because it reflects the `interruption’ in her life, which cut off the fairy tale which she had been living before and turns it too into prayer. As a Carmelite she had certainly known all along that prayer was a central part of her vocation, but it seems that suddenly, in 1896, prayer takes on a new urgency. We have some evidence that she was not very good at her formal times of prayer (for which she uses the word oraison); as we have seen, she used to go to sleep quite often, and she was easily distracted. It was not during her times of prayer but during her everyday work that she usually received any ‘lights’ she needed.⁷⁴ It appears that her best use of the time of oraison was when she was able to get interested in some passage of scripture.⁷⁵

The rosary was a torment to her.⁷⁶ But in 1896 the fairy tale turns into prayer - and she uses prière, not oraison. This suggests that she has to some extent, no doubt unwittingly, rediscovered the original, primary sense of ‘prayer’ as petition, as the cry for help which the creature addresses to the creator precisely because the creature is helpless. The proprieties of oraison had largely obscured the true nature of prayer, simply by making it an exercise in which the practitioner could hope to become reasonably competent, whereas prayer arises, if at ail, from incompetence, otherwise there is no need for it. It is not at the top of Mount Carmel that prayer is learned, but at the bottom. It is the little ones who cannot master oraison who can engage in prière.⁷⁷ It is seated at the sinners’ table of sorrow that Thérèse learns the full intensity of prayer, because there is nothing left to her except prayer.

When Pius XI canonised Thérèse he stressed that she was specially significant for our own time because she fulfilled her vocation ‘without leaving the common order of things’.⁷⁸ This must not be taken to mean that in her a harmlessly devout triviality was being canonised. She is the saint of the ‘common order of things’ precisely because she represented a total love of God and a total belief in God in the very predicament where most people find themselves, namely sin and unbelief. `I have my faults, but I also have courage.’⁷⁹ She dares to express the love which sinners do not dare to and are not able to express. She makes herself sing the praises of God even though ‘blasphemy resounds even into my heart’.⁸⁰ And so she expresses the worship which blasphemers are unable to express. Unlike so many exponents of the ways of piety, she neither bullies us nor teases us from any position of elevation; she simply gets on with loving God as one of us. And in so doing she shows us that precisely as sinners, as doubters, we are welcome to run to God’s love. Her acceptance of darkness identifies our darkness as a thirst for God, and at the same time assures us that even in this very darkness Christ is there thirsting for our love.

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