St.

Therese and the sword- Meditation

from Archbishop Fulton Sheen
What is the better way than to enjoy a crush course in the Little Way of
our beloved Carmelite Saint, St Therese, the Little Flower, given by her
disciple and third Order Carmelite, Archbishop Fulton Sheen? Let us
see what he has to say....

The new way of St Therese is not to start thinking

about how wicked you are, how sinful, but to begin
looking at our Lord. And from that, you will see
that you are not as good as you ought tobe, but yo
will try to please the one you love. Let me give you
some of her words along these lines. She said:
Jesus! i would so love Him, love Him as he has
never been loved in the history of the world.

And one of the novices - for she was the Mistress

of Novices - came to her one day, and she
said, "Oh, I have so many virtues to aquire."
The Little Flower said, "No, you've got a lot of
things to lose!"
That's the trouble. Our spiritual books tell us how
to acquire humility. I told you about the 12 ways of
St Bernard. Well now, you'll go crazy trying to
develop those 12 ways. One of them is to love to
be stomped on and trampled on. The Little Flower
says, no, start loving the Lord, and then you'll no
longer be proud. You cannot start acquiring, for
example, the virtue of humility or fortitude. You
can never fall in love with abstraction. You can only
love a person. No one in the world ever fell in love
with a theorem of geometry.
This is the trouble with secular humanism and
materialism: There's no person to love. So then the
new way of the Little Flower is....fall in love. Love
the Good Lord, and then you will strive to please
Him. And because you see that there are
imperfections in you, you will love Him more so
that they may washed away. This is not a little way,
it's the new way because we've forgotten it. It's
buried in Scripture. It's buried in Isaiah, buried in
Psalms, buried in Zechariah, and she digs it out for
us.
Now we come to the second point. What effect did
it have on her? Now when we look at the picture of

this frail little French girl, we think of her, yes, as

the little Therese, frail, meek, humble. But does
love make one that way? Real lovers are
courageous.
Do you know what she wanted to be? She wanted
to be a soldier. She used to dream about it. In one
of her dreams, someone was conscripting soldiers
for an army. And she heard a voice saying, "Maybe
we ought to ask for Therese."And she said, "Well,
I'm ready." She said, "I'm sorry it's not a holy war,
but I'm ready to fight anyway."
Now we never think of the Little Flower as having a
saint whom she wanted to be like more than
anyone else, but she did. Do you know who that
was? Joan of Arc. Can you imagine her seated on a
horse clad in armour? And she said:"If I were Joan
of Arc, it would not be voices from heaven. It
would be only the voice of my Beloved."
One of her favourite texts of Scriptures, therefore,
was "I came not to bring peace, but the
sword." (Matt 10:34)...And then St Therese said: "A
sister showed me a photograph representing Joan
of Arc, consoled by an interior voice. The saints
encourage me from above, and they say to me, "So
long as you are in fetters, you cannot fulfill your
mission. But after your death, then will be the time
of your conquest."
In other words, she said, "I'm going to be a warrior
and a soldier after my death, I am in no
battlefields, now except the battle of the spiritual

life."
This figure gives you some idea of, for example,
her powerful intercession. This, too, accounts for
her love of missions. She is the patroness of the
Propagation of the Faith, though she was never in
mission lands. The reason she is the patroness of
the Propagation of the Faith was because she
loved missions, and she corresponded all her life
with two missionary priests and offered up her
sufferings for them.
Yes, that is true, but there is a deeper reason still.
This woman was in love, and she wanted her
Beloved known all over the world. That's why she
loved the missions! As she put it:
"Like the prophets and the doctors, I would
enlighten souls, I would travel the whole world to
preach Your name and set up Your glorious cross in
pagan lands. But one mission could never suffice
for me. Would that I could, at one and the same
time, proclaim the gospel to the world, even to the
remotest of its islands. I would desire to be a
missionary not only for a few years but to have
been one from the creation of the world and to
continue to the end of time."
Love makes one a missionary. When we cease to
love, we cease to be a missionary. Now it is
sometimes asked, for example, why is there a
decline of conversions today? It is due to
ecumenism? No, it's not due to ecumenism. It's due
to the fact that we're not making Christ the center

of our lives. And if we were deeply in love with

Christ instead of with social programs and the like
(all which have their place, but here I am speaking
of primacy), if we gave the primacy to Christ, then
we would be on fire to save souls. After all, the
reason we are tired in body is because we are
already tired in mind. We have no love. The fires
have gone out. We are cinders, burnt out cinders
floating in the immensity of space and time. And
here is a young girl. It is almost as if she is locked
up in a gilded cage, absolutely straining at the
leash in order to become a missionary. Why?
Simply because she loved!
As I told you, love does not mean just simply to
have and to own and to possess. It's not sitting on
the throne waiting for others to serve. It's the
going out, the spending of oneself. Love is not the
circle circumscribed bt self. It's like a cross
outstreched to embrace the whole world.
Love isn't Buddha, fat, sleek, a well-oiled body,
hands folded across the breast intently looking
inward, thinking only of self. It's the picture of thin
saints looking out for the mission to the world, as
Therese looks out in many of her photos. And
therefore, she loved this text, the sword. And she
says many times in her writings that "I am entering
Carmel to bring the sword to the monastery of
Carmel." In other words, it needed a little fire. She
entered it to change it. And her reason for doing so
was right.
We are fond of talking peace today, but all we

mean by peace is lack of disturbance. Our Lord

said, "I came not to bring peace." God HATES
PEACE in those who are destined for war! And we
are destined for war, spiritual war. We've forgotten
that we're in a combat. We are in genuine combat.
When our first parents were driven out of the
garden of Paradise, God stationed an angel with a
flaming sword, a two-edged sword that turned this
way and that. Why? To keep our first parents from
going back to eat of the Tree of Life and thus
immortalize their evil. And the only way we can
ever get back again into paradise is by having that
sword run into us. It's flaming because it's love. It's
two-edged because it cuts, and it penetrates. It's
not the sword that's thrust outward to hack off the
ear of the servant of the high priest as Peter did.
It's the sword that's thrust inward to cut out all of
our seven pallbearers of the soul, the pride and
covetousness, lust, anger, envy, gluttony, and
sloth.
This was the sword she loved. And this sword is
what we've forgotten in our modern world with the
dripping away of discipline, the ascetic principle.
The disciplinary principle of the Christian world
had moved to the totalitarian countries. And
concerning the sword, I quoted the sword in
relationship to the Garden of Eden, but in the
prophecy of Zechariah, we read this:
"This is the very word of the Lord of Hosts: Oh
sword, awake against my shepherd." (Zech 13:7)

Who is the shepherd? Our Lord. So Zechariah is

having the heavenly Father say, "Sword awake!
Awake against My shepherd, against My Son,
against Him who works with Me."So when our
Blessed Lord came to this earth, the sword of
Herod was raised against Him. Did anyone ever
raise a sword against a two-year-old Caesar? Or a
six-month-old Stalin? Why the sword against Him?
because He plays a role in salvation. It belongs to
warriors. And as the heavenly Father ran the sword
into His own Son, the Son ran the into His own
Mother. Simeon said to Mary, "You, too, shall be
pierced to the heart." (Luke 2:35) So the Father ran
a sword into His Son, the Son into His own Mother,
and Our Lord into us.
"I have come not to bring peace, but the
sword." This , then, is the way of the warrior and
the little girl who wanted to be a soldier. And there
was not much difference in her mind between a
soldier and a missionary.