![]() ![]() Thérèse’s writings, letters and poems are saturated by a sense of divine mercy, by the “living flame of love” so characteristic of the Carmelite charism-especially as found in the writings of her special patrons, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Ávila. It rejected the place of free will in the economy of salvation and emphasized divine justice over and against divine mercy. She held that God’s mercy and justice are inextricable from each other, and, in so doing, supplied a counter to the Jansenist heresy still lingering in regions of France throughout the nineteenth century. As I will discuss at more length, later on, Thérèse, like St Francis, believed death was a friend, a sister even. Zèlie also records, with comic flourish, how her little girl “want to kill her father too, when she gets really affectionate.” Thérèse’s parental intimacy naturally transposed into a longing for heaven and an unshakeable (although sorely tested) confidence in God. You told me yourself one can’t go to heaven without dying.” I do wish you’d die.” Receiving a “scolding”, she would go to great pains to explain herself: “Oh, but it’s only because I want you to go to heaven. Thérèse’s mother, Saint Zèlie Martin, recounts in one of her letters that her little girl, aged two and a half, loved to run to her mother, embrace her, and say: “Oh, poor little Mother. One of the earliest signs of Thérèse’s sanctity can be found in her childhood wish that her parents would die. ![]()
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