Old Stuff

Discovering Thérèse

I've avoided reading Carmelite literature for years, thinking it just wasn't for me - it seemed distant, vague, contemplative. Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa of Avila were impenetrable. Last month my parish's book club read Guy Gaucher's biography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Life, and through this book Thérèse has begun to change my life.

Being an only child growing up with my divorced mother, my childhood was a pretty quiet, orderly affair. I had never so much as touched a diaper until I changed our first child through the porthole of his incubator. With number 5 on the way now, I'm often overwhelmed with it all.

Somehow in my 36 years I picked up the Puritanical child-hating notion that children shouldn't be "spoiled." (The term ¨spoiled" betrays the stench of the Enemy.) Nota bene: even vague notions imbibed unconsciously can have grave effects. Under stress, I have a well-developed habit to crack down on the kids' innocent activities, to be a super-strict daddy handing out punishment in the blink of an eye, to get them quiet. Saint Thérèse has already begun changing me: I'm starting to spoil the kids! So far it's mostly a change in my attitude toward their stress-inducing activities, but deeper, it's a renewed and enlivened awareness of the Love to Whom Thérèse was espoused.

Bishop Gaucher's picture of her childhood and her own way of spiritual childhood have renewed my vocation to fatherhood, and my vocation to sonship. Merci, Thérèse!