Day 5: Hidden Sufferings

The fifth day of the Saint Therese Novena, the midpoint, turns to a dimension of her life that the Catholic faithful sometimes miss in the popular image of the little flower: her hidden sufferings. Therese was not a saint of unrelieved spiritual sweetness. The last eighteen months of her life were marked by a profound trial of faith, by physical agony from advanced tuberculosis, and by interior darkness, and her sanctity is in part the sanctity of her bearing of these without complaint.

Today's invocation

Saint Therese, Little Flower of Jesus... (the full opening prayer)

Today's meditation

In Easter week of 1896, Therese coughed up blood for the first time, the first sign of the tuberculosis that would kill her eighteen months later. The same period inaugurated what she called her trial of faith, an interior darkness in which the Catholic doctrines she had previously held with the natural ease of a child became opaque and distant. She wrote in Story of a Soul of this trial with extraordinary precision: she did not lose the faith, but she lost the consolation of the faith. The truths she had affirmed remained affirmed, but they no longer warmed her interior life. She lived in this trial for the entire eighteen months until her death.

The trial was joined to severe physical suffering. By the summer of 1897, Therese was confined to the infirmary. The tuberculosis had advanced to her lungs and her intestines. The medical care available in the Carmel was minimal; the convent had no morphine, no oxygen, only mustard plasters and home remedies. Therese suffered intensely, often unable to breathe, often unable to eat. She bore this with characteristic patience. Her sisters, recording her last words, are unanimous: she did not complain, she did not despair, she did not stop trusting.

Pope Saint Paul VI, in 1965, took the unusual step of comparing Therese's trial of faith to the dark night of the great Spanish mystics (Saint John of the Cross). The trial is, in this magisterial reading, the same passive purification that the Catholic mystical tradition has long described, applied to a soul of the Little Way and bearing its proper fruit in the deepening of trust through darkness.¹

Today's intention

Today, ask Saint Therese to obtain for you the patience to bear hidden sufferings. Saint Therese, you bore your sufferings without complaint. Help me to bear mine. Whatever the trials I am carrying, let them become, like yours, the means by which the Lord deepens my soul in love.

If you are praying this novena for someone you love who is enduring serious illness, name them now to Saint Therese. Saint Therese, you know the suffering of the long illness. Stand with my brother (sister, friend, parent, child) in his illness, and obtain for him the patience and the trust that you obtained.

Reflection

The Catholic spiritual tradition has long observed that the saints' hidden sufferings are often more spiritually fruitful than their public deeds. Therese's two years of trial of faith and physical agony, lived in obscurity in the Carmel infirmary, have produced more conversions and graces in the Catholic Church than any of her public actions during her brief life. The proper Catholic reading of suffering is in this key: what looks like wasted time (the bedridden patient, the depressed religious, the fading elderly Catholic) may be, in the order of grace, the most valuable time of all.

The Catholic faithful are sometimes tempted to despise their own small sufferings. This is nothing compared to what the saints endured. The Saint Therese devotion is the gentle correction of this. The saint of the Little Way endured small daily sufferings (the difficult sister-in-religion, the cold of the Carmel cell, the dryness in prayer) for years before the great suffering of her last illness; the small sufferings, joined to the love of the Lord, were already the foundation of her holiness. The same is true for us. The small daily sufferings, borne with patience for love of the Lord, are not nothing.

Closing prayers

Conclude with the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be.

Saint Therese, who bore your sufferings in silence, intercede for us in our own.

Footnotes

1. The trial of faith and the final illness are documented extensively in Therese's Story of a Soul (chapter 9 and the autobiographical Manuscript C) and in the Derniers Entretiens recorded by Mother Agnes of Jesus during the last months. Pope Saint Paul VI, address at the Carmel of Lisieux, August 1965. ↩