Happy Feast Day!
St. Therese is my (accidental) patron saint, and the older I get, the happier I am that I picked her—or she picked me, either way. :)
The St. Therese reliquary at the local retreat house.
A French girl who died at the age of twenty-four from TB, what can she possibly teach us? SO MUCH. So much that St. John Paul II made her a doctor of the church. That’s right. She’s one of four women to have that title.
Don’t be deceived by her sometimes flowery (period appropriate) prose, or the saccharine images. St. Therese is a wonderful friend to have.
If you’re new to her, let me recommend a few things:
1) Her autobiography, The Story of a Soul *. (My friend Elizabeth wrote the introduction to this edition!)
2) I Believe In Love, *which is one of my all-time favorite, desert island books.
3) The Film Therese. *
4) If you want to go a bit deeper, then 33 Days to Merciful Love is what you want. This is a daily meditation book, leading up to the Consecration to Merciful Love (which I made on New Year’s Day this year). It’s powerful!
There have been so many books written about her that it would take a long time to read them all (believe me, I’ve tried!) but these four resources are excellent starting points.
So, let’s get on the Little Way….
*=Amazon affiliate links