On rising, which she must do the moment she awakes, the recluse removes the scapular she has worn during the night, also the veil which has covered her head, replacing them with the tunic and the habit; and, on her head, the toque ordained by Teresa of Avila. Of plain linen, it enwraps the head and throat, while leaving the forehead bare, because its designer with her respect for the things of the intellect did not approve of a bandaged brow. Over the toque goes a veil, and not more than five pins must be used to secure it. On the feet go the alpargates, most Spanish of all these Spanish echoes, for they are the traditional sandal of the Spanish peasant, fastened with a strap of plaited hemp. Thus sixteenth-century Spain, with the rattle of the castanets and the shuffle of the sandal, wakes again in nineteenth-century Lisieux, and the magnificent Castilian Teresa lays as it were a direct touch daily at dawn on the little French Thérèse.
Rules in the convent are strict. Silence must be observed as far as possible, whether at work or at meals. At work you break the silence only when it is not practicable to communicate by signs. At meals, which are preceded by a bell summoning you to an examination of your conscience and by a two-by-two procession into the refectory intoning the De Profundis, you sit under the grim reminder of a skull hanging on the wall, and may speak only in order to make public confession of some fault. If this fault concerns a material object, the evidence must be produced: a broken cup, a chipped plate; or if sloth is the sin, and the offender is guilty of not having leapt straight from bed at the summons, a pillow or a blanket must be exhibited as a symbol.fn6 Unpunctuality for a meal is punished by making the offender go round the refectory with a little bell tied to her neck. The signal to begin eating is given by the Prioress, when in unison, as though at drill, the nuns throw back their long sleeves and unfold their napkins, fixing one corner to the table and the other to their chest, so that no crumb may fall to the ground in transgression against their vow of poverty; any crumb which has fallen on the napkin must be picked up and eaten at the end of the meal, because Christ has said, “Gather up the fragments that remain that nothing be lost.” Abstinence is permanent; meat never appears; all milk, butter, and eggs are likewise banished during Lent and on Fridays throughout the year, as well as of course on the prescribed fast-days; on Good Friday only a little dry bread and water may be swallowed, not sitting at a table, but kneeling on the ground. No wonder that Teresa, who knew something about rough travel, had drawn a practical comparison : “What is our life of renunciation but one night to be spent in a bad hostelry? That is all.”
But simplicity and even severity of life are things to which the most pampered may with good-will grow accustomed, whether they have been voluntarily incurred or no. When they are part of a chosen creed, a symbol of self-denial following an unspeakably greater example, every privation becomes a privilege, every loss a gain. The normal attitude to existence is indeed reversed, in the fundamental difference between the professed religious life and life as most of us lead it: not the avoidance of tribulation, but the welcoming of it as a God-sent increase to the value of the soul; not an occasion for bewailing but for rejoicing; poverty a boast, wealth a disgrace unless it might be devoted to the honouring of God; the greater the trial the greater the benefit. Taken from this point of view, the otherwise outrageous injustices imposed upon the long-suffering Job become intelligible. Teresa in her letters had never tired of telling her afflicted friars and prioresses how lucky they were, and how they ought to thank God for the grace of their sorrows. Thérèse could write of her unfortunate father that the three years he spent in a mad-house, struck with paralysis, as well as insanity, were the most agreeable and fruitful of her life, not to be exchanged for the most sublime ecstasies. And if what we should normally regard as the serious misfortunes are to be considered a cause for rejoicing, how insignificant though still welcome appear the minor hardships.
Furthermore, one should bear in mind the great comfort and support to be found in the life led by every unit in a community entirely dedicated to the same ideal, pursued with the same integrity. There is a certain and perhaps enviable simplicity in the mentality of most nuns which rejoices in the severe direction; the desire of the child for the strong hand and a competence more powerful than his own. The Catholic Church, after all, is the most totalitarian and intransigent of institutions, magnificently inelastic; and, as such, excellently suited to those whose temperament conforms to herd-obedience rather than to the querying recalcitrance of individualism. No room is provided for the refractory, but along the eternal corridor an endless succession of cells nine feet by nine for the docile. Acceptance is the keynote, and how delicious the repose when once acceptance has been accomplished! Only the misfit, the rebel, lonely in a world with different values, perhaps can estimate the consolation of finding himself at last with a company whose aims are entirely similar to his own. No longer a plant blown this way and that by the gale, his precarious roots loosened as he roughly sways, a strong stake now holds him fast, implacable wire engages his tendrils, and above his roots a mulch centuries-old in richness keeps him fed and cool. And as for the cell, it may be true that restricted measurements metaphorically harder than any concrete confine him, but there is no true duress here: the window is open over a landscape of unimaginable beauty, a liberty of spirit unknown even to the lark—nay, the very ceiling is off, open unlimited to a visionary height of his own and personal Heaven.
Thérèse never even mentions the minor hardships, although it was her custom to mention everything that crossed her mind. She who had described herself as so expansive, now submitted to the controlled recreation of a few moments conversation a day, preceded by a prayer that those moments should be well employed, within the scope of the subjects which may be discussed, interrupted three times by the castanets with their reminder of the Holy Presence, interrupted finally by a bell which stops you speaking, even in the middle of a word. The recreation room is completely denuded of furniture, for the rule of Carmel is that you must sit only on your heels, squatting on the floor. Thérèse never mentions this either, and it was only on her death-bed that she revealed verbally what she had suffered from the last and worst austerity : the cold. For Carmel forbids all heating. However bitter the winter, however damp, no concession is made even to a northern climate, with the exception of one single room which in the severest weather may be warmed up to 10° centigrade (50° Fahrenheit). Fingers which have grown so numb that they can no longer ply the needle may be held for relief to the comforting stove. Thérèse, delicate and consumptive, was especially sensitive to cold. Even if she had warmed herself a little before going to bed—and we may be sure that she allowed herself this indulgence only when driven to it—she then had to go out again into the open, through the draughty cloister and down the icy corridors in order to regain her cell. The climate of Normandy runs to no such extremes as the climate of Castile; no knives of wind streak down from frozen sierras; but it can be cold, damp and foggy in that province of northern France which is not unlike the climate of England. Some nights when she could not sleep at all she lay shivering until the castanets made her throw off the poor covering of her blanket, but not until she was dying did they extract from her the pitiful admission. “What I have most suffered from physically in my religious life is the cold; I have suffered from it till I thought I should die.”
If Thérèse could subjugate the flesh, accepting her trials not with any conscious martyrdom but gladly, there is no reason why we should dwell unduly on them. We may surmise that her battle lay rather with the subjugation of her own spirit. She had brought the essential part into the convent with her : the incandescent core which was her desire for the mystic union; she had brought also the message discovered in St. Paul’s Epistle: the message of charity, perhaps better rendered as love. It remained now for her to work out her plan in detail, to find a comprehensive formula for her famous Little Way. Never to fail in the smallest particular; never the slightest relaxation of vigilance; the minutest slip on t
he self-imposed path to be instantly corrected and the balance restored; to act not dutifully but joyfully; to train the character by incessant practice until the eclipsing of self became second nature; it sounds obvious. Let any scoffer try the experiment conscientiously even for a week, even for a day, and find that the Little Way is neither so obvious nor so easy as it sounds.
The aims of Thérèse are far more comprehensible to the average mind than the mystical theology of Teresa. It is true that as a consequence of her intense love for Jesus she desired, and sometimes obtained, the mystic union; but in the other aspect of her faith reigned the ambition which may be put in the simplest and most childish words, “I will be good.” The various States of Prayer of which one could make an almost genealogical table; the progressive Mansions of the Soul; the difference between Bodily Sight and the Vision of the Understanding; between the Understanding, the Will, and the Memory; between Union and Trance; between Trance and Transport; between Raptures and Impetuosities; these things neither interested Thérèse nor played any part in her approach to God. It may seem to some that hers was the less complex and more direct path to a centre which others could reach only through the tortuosities and checks of a maze. Why, we have already asked, enwrap in such intricate technicalities an instinct which, in the last resort, is of the grandest and most resplendent simplicity? The answer can be only, once again, that of all human attributes the soul works in the most uncontrollable of ways and that none can tell from which direction the order will come. Thérèse, for example, gave herself up to Christ from the first without hesitation or deviation, and all the rest naturally followed; Teresa, impelled by very different motives, had to force herself into His service, and, once there, travelled towards Him by very different and far more disturbing means. To so profound a mystery, no inelastic rule can apply, and it pertained to the modest genius of Thérèse to find her fulfilment in the words of the earliest nursery prayer : “May it please God to make me good.”
Pius XI put it neatly when he described her as “an exquisitely delicate miniature of perfect saintliness.”
VIII
ONE MAY, WITHOUT thought of irreverence or flippancy, suggest that as Teresa of Avila stands as the highbrow among saints, so does Thérèse of Lisieux stand as the lowbrow; the Velasquez or the El Greco opposed to the oleograph. Not accidentally have they been accorded the epithets of “the great” and “the little.” The Spaniard enjoyed the double aristocracy of birth and intellect, the French girl belonged by birth to the bourgeoisie and intellectually to the direct and simple. There is a story of Teresa of Avila in conversation with a mother who wished her daughter to be accepted as a candidate for Carmel. “She is very devout,” said the mother. “But has she brains?” asked the saint; “we can teach people here to be devout, but we cannot give them brains.” Thérèse of Lisieux would never have said that. Not the inimitable but the imitable saint, her faculty lay in symbolising and expressing the daily need of ordinary folk; there was no originality in her thought, no ambition in her behaviour beyond that supreme ambition, astounding in its audacity, its simplicity, and its execution, to add herself to the Communion of Saints. The most remarkable thing about the method she adopted (apart from her personal success in carrying it out) was that nobody else had ever thought of formulating it into a creed before. “In my Little Way,” she said, “there is nothing but very ordinary things; little souls must be able to do everything that I do.” She had discovered, indeed, the Columbus’ egg of practical Christianity; “not to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things extraordinarily well.” The Little Way was a lane, by-passing the main road of the heroic. It was a small orbit, but it comprised nothing less than perfection. Unsensational, pierced by no swords, no arrows, broken on no wheel, roasted on no gridiron, she could have pursued her way as effectively “in the world” as amidst the severities of Carmel. A jostling family, the cares of home, the glad unspoken sacrifices of love, the anxieties of poverty, the disappointments of competition, the betrayals of business, the misunderstandings and misinterpretations of motive, the small exacerbations of human contact, all would come within the prescribed quotidian system which was more than a system : it was a routine, observed moment by moment. No need to go to Carmel in search of an unjust Superior, of a sick and querulous old woman, or of a nun who fidgeted with her beads in a manner to drive one mad. The equivalent of these things could be found, and is to be found, elsewhere.
There are many, indeed, amongst those living “in the world,” subjected to its grind, its difficulties, its anxieties, its tangle of ethics, its wearing exaction in the performance of duty, its clamour for the sacrifice of self in the care of others, its demands upon our sympathy and our practical helpfulness at cost to ourselves—many who have no patience with the idea of the contemplative life. It appears to them as a form of escape from reality; almost as a form of self-indulgence, of selfishness, an evasion of responsibility, a withdrawal from the unpleasantness of a world which nevertheless is everyone’s charge to help within their own range to run. About the teaching or the nursing or the missionary Orders they feel differently. That is a thing which can readily be understood and respected, for it approximates more closely and even in a recognisably nobler degree to the calls made upon our own humanity and daily obligations. The applied heroism of a Father Damien or a St. Peter Claver is admirable to all. To the people of that mind—and they are in the large majority—our duty towards our neighbour is more urgent and immediate than our duty towards God; the one duty does not, and should not exclude the other; but God should be served through the medium of devotion to our human brotherhood, not through the quiet of a taper-lit chapel or the isolation of a cell. Estrangement from the burden of life is no part of our common citizenship; the prayers devoted to the evil of the general soul would be better translated into the care of the general body. To such arguments there is no comprehensive reply. There is only the reply that all spirits do not envisage the problem of life alike, and that of another’s need and method of solution we can be no judge. The one place where we can never be is in another’s mind, and the answer to our various enigmas is not single but multiple. If the wooden floor on which we tread with such confidence is not solid at all, but in truer fact a net of holes through which, did we but see it differently, we should fear to fall, how far more tentative should be our estimate of a region which does not even pretend to be visible or tangible! To each must be left the fulfilment of his own destiny; and it may well seem of supreme importance to some, through the graces specially accorded to them, to establish this rare communication between mankind, whose representatives they are, and its Creator. Possibly their nature is so constituted as to preclude any other form of service. Vocation is a word, and a beautiful one; and no word has ever come into existence in human speech save to express a reality which must be named. The reality comes first; the naming follows. Quarrel as we may with the apparent waste of energy, the waste of potential usefulness, the waste, as we see it, of virtue involved in a living burial; indignant though we may grow over the desertion and even the heartbreak of those who see themselves abandoned in a cold world as the door of the cloister shuts finally in their faces; irate though we may be over the loss of competence in a society which so grievously needs it, the loss of talent applied to cogent ends, the denial of usefulness where usefulness should surely be given—none of these arguments and resentments can or should apply if once we accept the to us strange but powerful principle that the mundane and material values can be turned utterly upside down.
The story of a Spanish girl may here not come amiss as an illustration. So far as we know, and it may certainly be accepted as a fact, Thérèse of Lisieux had never known anything, not even in the most virginal sense, of the exquisite though confusing delight of human passion. Her awakening to love had been reserved entirely for the celestial bridegroom. She had never dreamt of a nuptial chamber other than her cell; of a marriage-bed other than a board across two trestles in the lonely
night. Such was not the case with Doña Casilda de Padilla. The only heiress to a rich and noble house, for her brother and elder sister had already renounced the world, she was hastily betrothed to a kinsman whom she loved with an affection beyond her years and with whom she would spend the day when occasion offered, to her great joy because she loved him so much. Yet at the end of every such day she fell into profound sorrow, thinking how the day was ended and how every other day must be ended in the same way. This gave her a sadness so great that she could not conceal it from her bridegroom, nor could she at first account for it though sensing her melancholy he pressed her to tell him the cause. The dress and ornaments of her rank, which after the ceremony of her betrothal they had begun to put upon her, gave her no pleasure such as was natural to a girl of her age, and gradually she began to realise that God meant to have her for Himself and was taking away from her the human love she felt. Her bridegroom was considerably older than she and took the matter seriously; moreover he found himself obliged to undertake a journey leaving his unsettled fiancée to her own devices. She had not the heart to speak to him at all plainly of her irresolution, but she did speak to her sister and mother, saying, if they thought her old enough to be married, how came it that they did not find her old enough to give herself to God? To cut the story short, she thought it wiser not to wait for his return, but under the pretext of going to visit her grandmother she made her way to a monastery, ridding herself of her dueña and attendants (for naturally no Spanish girl of her rank would have been allowed out unless heavily escorted) sending one of them to buy a bundle of faggots and another to fetch her a glass of water, while she evaded the others and broke into the monastery, weeping and imploring the Prioress not to send her away.
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