October 1, 2021 - Memory of Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus, virgin, doctor of the Church, patroness of the Missions
Friday, 26th Week in Ordinary Time
Bar 1:15-22
Ps 79
Lk 10:13-16
On this first day of the missionary Month, the Eucharistic celebration in the Liturgy of the Word proposes very severe texts, which describe ancient realities, yet of disconcerting relevance. Jesus, who has just chosen seventy-two other disciples and sent them on a mission, already foresees the indifference or even refusal of many in the wake of preaching of the Kingdom of God:
Jesus said to them: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you. And as for you, Capernaum, ‘Will you be exalted to heaven? You will go down to the netherworld.’ Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”
In the first reading we meditate on the words that are attributed to the prophet Baruch, a disciple of Jeremiah, who lived at the time of the Babylonian captivity, six centuries before Christ. He too had noted with pain the consequences of sin throughout the kingdom of Judah:
Justice is with the Lord, our God; and we today are flushed with shame, we me of Judah and citizens of Jerusalem, that we, with our kings and rulers and priests and prophets, and with our ancestors, have sinned in the Lord’s sight and disobeyed him. We have neither heeded the voice of the Lord, our God, nor followed the precepts which the Lord set before us. From the time the Lord led our ancestors out of the land of Egypt until the present day, we have been disobedient to the Lord, our God, and only too ready to disregard his voice. And the evils and the curse that the Lord enjoined upon Moses, his servant, at the time he led our ancestors forth from the land of Egypt to give us the land flowing with milk and honey, cling to us even today. For we did not heed the voice of the Lord, our God, in all the words of the prophets whom he sent us, but each one of us went off after the devices of his own wicked heart, served other gods, and did evil in the sight of the Lord, our God.
The reality of sin, disobedience, and indifference is a constant in the history of mankind, and in our own personal history. These biblical texts, which remind us of it, help to place believers in the right position before God and neighbor: we are all sinners, we all continually need redemption and salvation.
The responsorial psalm, 79, is a cry that invokes this salvation: the holy city has been destroyed, the temple desecrated. To whom can we turn, whom should we call upon? The psalmist knows well that only God can save his people and therefore starts to argue with him, to make him change his disposition so as obtain mercy:
O God, the nations have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple; they have laid Jerusalem in ruins. They have given the corpses of your servants as food for the birds of heaven, the flesh of your faithful ones to the beasts of the earth.
They have poured out their blood like water round about Jerusalem, and there is no one to bury them. We have become the reproach of our neighbors, the scorn and derision of those around us. O Lord, how long? Will you be angry forever? Will your jealousy burn like fire? Remember not against us the iniquities of the past; may your compassion quickly come to us, for we are brought very low.
Help us, O God our savior, because of the glory of your name; deliver us and pardon our sins for your name’s sake.
Believers know well that without God's help we are all poor, alone, lost, helpless, unhappy. Every man seeks happiness and awaits salvation, but our strength alone is insufficient to obtain it. The humble awareness of this impotence and this need opens us up to welcoming it and enjoying it. We are sinners, it is true, but forgiven sinners. Christ has redeemed us. God wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. (1 Tm 2:4).
The gratitude and joy of freely having received and continuing to receive salvation transform the heart and life of every baptized person, making him eager to transmit the gift that he has received to others. In turn, they too can recognize themselves as children of God, destined for eternal life, and thus become missionaries, heralds of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The commitment to proclaim Christ, Redeemer and Savior, is therefore a service rendered not only to the Christian community, but also to all mankind, which can freely, if it wishes, welcome the good news, the Gospel of Christ the Lord, who became man for us and for our salvation. No believer can escape the duty to announce the salvation wrought by Christ, each one in the form and extent of his particular vocation and condition in the world. When we do not feel this desire in us, we should question the authenticity and stability of our own life of faith.
Love pushes us to communicate the beauty and truth of salvation in a thousand different ways, through life’s witness, through words, through silence, through gestures, through prayer, in daily relationships, in the simplicity of love and friendship. If love is true, it is recognized by the fruit it bears.
Today we celebrate the liturgical memory of Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus, who is the patroness of the missions alongside the great apostle Saint Francis Xavier.
Teresa, a young Carmelite nun, had never left the narrow space of her Carmel of Lisieux, but she knew well that her hidden life was for the sake of the Kingdom, for the sake of the coming of the Kingdom, of its growth and expansion. She knew that the first land in need of conversion was her heart and that the life she had embraced, with its demands of faith, prayer, and oftentimes challenging fraternal communion, had a mysterious apostolic fruitfulness. She aspired to possess all the charisms that St. Paul describes in the first letter to the Corinthians, but alas finding the more perfect way - that of charity:
Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts. But I shall show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. (1 Cor 12:31-13:3).
The young nun surveyed the various functions existing in the Church, yet did not identify herself with any of them:
When I had looked upon the mystical body of the Church, I recognized myself in none of the members which St. Paul described, and what is more, I desired to distinguish myself more favorably within the whole body. Love appeared to me to be the hinge for my vocation. Indeed I knew that the Church had a body composed of various members, but in this body the necessary and more noble member was not lacking; I knew that the Church had a heart and that such a heart appeared to be aflame with love. I knew that one love drove the members of the Church to action, that if this love were extinguished, the apostles would have proclaimed the Gospel no longer, the martyrs would have shed their blood no more. I saw and realized that love sets off the bounds of all vocations, that love is everything, that this same love embraces every time and every place. In one word, that love is everlasting.
Then, nearly ecstatic with the supreme joy in my soul, I proclaimed: O Jesus, my love, at last I have found my calling: my call is love. Certainly I have found my place in the Church, and you gave me that very place, my God. In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things, as my desire finds its direction (Manuscrits autobiographiques, Lisieux 1957, pp.227-229, from The Liturgy of the Hours © 1973, 1974, 1975, ICEL).
But life on earth was not enough for the Carmelite saint to love Jesus and make him loved, and thus she wrote in her last letter to Father Adolphe Roulland of the Foreign Missions of Paris (MEP), a missionary in China:
I really count on not remaining inactive in heaven. My desire is to work still for the Church and for souls (Letter 254, July 14, 1897, from the Archives du Carmel de Lisieux).
During her last illness she often returned to express her conviction that the authenticity of our love for God manifests itself in the quality of our love for others, and she continued to prepare herself for this universal mission, without time or boundary:
God would not have given me the desire of doing good on earth after my death, if He didn't will to realize it; He would rather have given me the desire to rest in Him (Last Conversations, The “Yellow Notebook” of Mother Agnes, July 18, 1897).
A few weeks later she expressed herself as follows:
As long as you are in irons, you cannot carry out your mission; but later on, after your death, this will be the time for your works and your conquests (Last Conversations, The “Yellow Notebook” of Mother Agnes, August 10, 1897).
On December 14, 1927, Pius XI declared St. Therese of the Child Jesus the universal patron of the missions, giving her the same title as St. Francis Xavier. Consequently, she was given a place in the liturgy, and although it aroused much surprise, a more appropriate choice than this has never been made.