Thérèse's things
Andrew Hamilton reads the relics.
In January, relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux are touring Australia. When in Ireland, they attracted millions of people and left commentators perplexed. Some recognised in the event the vacuum left by the demise of popular devotions, while others saw the triumph of sentiment over substance.
Devotion
to St Thérèse has always attracted followers and critics.
Her older sisters in Carmel, who even during her lifetime regarded her
as a saint, encouraged devotion to her. They edited her writings and touched
up her image to fit the ripely emotional world of 19th-century piety.
That Thérèse herself belonged to that world is evident in
her painting of the dream of the Infant Jesus. She painted it at the age
of 20, four years before her death. She copied a commonplace work, adding
touches of her own. Her sister later amended it to make it even sweeter.
Photographs of Thérèse Martin, however, show a strong and composed young woman, and the unedited version of her writings and conversations are laconic and astringent. She died agonisingly of tuberculosis. During her illness she thought occasionally of suicide, and in her inner experience entered fully the world of unbelief. Her faith remained simple, but was without reassurance. It finds expression in spare words in counterpoint to the devotional rhetoric of her sisters. When, for example, her sister remarks how lovingly Thérèse is looking towards Heaven, she answers, 'Do you think I am thinking about the real Heaven? I am simply admiring the sky. The other is more and more closed to me.'
The tension between faith and the absence of God are caught in another poignant image: 'I am like a small child at the railway station, waiting for its parents to place it on the train. But they do not come, and the train is leaving. Still there are other trains; I shall not miss them all.'
The difference between Thérèse's effusive painting and her spare words may provide the right lens for fixing the popular response to the visit of her relics. The distinction is one classically made between devotions and devotion.
The painting belongs to the world of devotions. Its interest lies in the contrast between the ecstatic expression of the child and the subject of his dreaming - the insignia of pain and death. The image brings together Christian faith and the hard things that most challenge it. But it does so tentatively and sentimentally, in a dream where suffering is not real. The painting explores whether such a dream, such a dreamer, is possible. Devotions allow people to test imaginatively hard realities against faith. Like soapies, they help us explore from a safe place the reality of crisis and our response to it. Because they explore sentimentally, the art and rhetoric that they produce are often tacky.
The test of any faith, however, comes at midday when we face the full heat of pain and loneliness, without reassurance. Only devotion suffices, the unsentimental and stripped down love shown in Thérèse. Dream is replaced by reality.
The popular response to Thérèse's relics suggests the importance of the imagination within faith. A theology that speaks well about death and suffering does not substitute for an imaginative pondering of these things. But while images and devotions rehearse reality, devotion engages it.
Andrew Hamilton SJ is Eureka Street's publisher.
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