Little Ways, Little Flowers

Today is the feast of St. Theresa of Lisieux (known as the "Little Flower"), one of only three women to be named a doctor of the church, and the only person to be named one who lived in modern times. (The late 1800's was covered in the "contemporary church history" course at my university in Belgium.) I confess, in spite of her popularity (second only to St. Francis of Assisi in all the church popularity polls) she's never been one of my faves. Probably because I grew up seeing her in sappy holy card pictures. When you see an actual photograph, she looks a little more down-to-earth.

Anyway, my mom's mom liked her. A lot. She used to write to her sister, Marie. (Theresa died at 24. Her sister Marie, who was a nun at the same convent, lived to be fairly old.) I remembered mom had one of Marie's letters, and I thought it would make a nice show-and-tell for mass with the primary school kids today. I'll use any trick I can to keep 7-year-olds paying attention.

So we went looking for it yesterday. I could see it in my mind from when I was a kid. It was in very precise handwriting (Marie was a nun after all) in that distinctive European style of handwriting. It was in French, which I couldn't read as a kid, so it was even more mysterious. And mom kept it in a stationery box covered in brown leather with gold embossing on the lid along with some old Christmas cards and other mementos. We didn't find it.

But I found a box of my dad's. I remembered it exactly too, along with the drawer that they both USED to be kept in. Dad's was a tin candy box from the 1940's, when he'd been in the army. I hadn't opened it in years. In it I found two carefully preserved train tickets from Louisville to a port in New Jersey and back, a meal card for the base where he served in Germany along with some photos and two old wrist watches. I thought of the ticket for a flight to Brussels and my Belgian identity card and drivers license in a box at my apartment. And I wished that I could still talk to him about this new way that I'd discovered we were similar.

Theresa's "Little Way" can seem sappy. Especially since she wrote in the late 1800's when the style of religious writing was pretty sappy to start with. But then anybody's little ways of experiencing love or God can seem pretty sappy and trite. From the outside. I'm glad I went looking for that letter. I'm glad mom and I got to spend some time being frustrated. And some time remembering. Glad for the little ways.