Carmel of Lisieux

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I recently had the good fortune to take a post-Christmas trip to France, a place I’ve long admired for its Catholic culture and intellectual heritage. Although most of my time was spent amidst the museums, gardens and boulevards of Paris, a priority destination for me was the town of Lisieux, where the much-celebrated St. Thérèse had spent most of her childhood, lived as a Carmelite nun before dying in 1897 in her 20s, and is buried today.

I’ve had a devotion to Thérèse for several years and have felt like I have gotten to know her personally through prayerful reading of her spiritual writing and asking for her prayers on my behalf. So understandably, it was a great thrill to be in the physical places where the “Little Flower” had lived her life and put her “Little Way” into practice: Les Buissonnets, her childhood home, the site of so many important events in her young life as depicted in her “Story of a Soul”; the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Lisieux, where Thérèse and her family went to Mass and she made her first confession; and even the enormous and ornate basilica built in her honor on a hill overlooking the city, where a large relic of her is displayed and the remains of her parents (Sts. Louis and Zellie Martin) are entombed.

But at the Carmel of Lisieux, the convent where Thérèse had lived, I was admittedly disappointed. For one, the chapel where Thérèse would’ve participated in the Mass and where most of her remains are entombed today has been significantly modernized, looking nothing like it had during her lifetime. Another disappointment: You can’t even access the cloister where she lived to see those pivotal places from her life as a Carmelite sister, like her cell, the infirmary where she died, or even the laundry room where she charmingly wrote about being splashed in the face with dirty water by another sister and enduring it all with cheer, an instance of her “Little Way” in action.

In some sense, I felt like I was being deprived of access to an important historical and spiritual place. I’d spent hours walking through the Louvre in Paris looking at incredible works of art and artifacts from Persian, Egyptian and Greek empires, so why couldn’t I enter into the places where this saint who’s meant so much to me had lived a life of sanctity?

As it turns out, the Carmel of Lisieux is nothing like the Louvre. It is not a space for the display of inert artifacts, but is a living and active Carmelite community. As the convent says on its website, “The Carmel of Lisieux is not a museum, but the place of life, silence, prayer of a community, which explains why the interior cannot be visited” (although a virtual tour of the important places from Thérèse’s life is available on the Carmel’s website).

The fact that pilgrims cannot enter the place where St. Thérèse lived as a cloistered religious is actually a good thing, an affirmation that the life she lived over 100 years ago is still alive today. After all, only a dead thing can be put on display; a living thing is active, and can’t be confined to a case. Even the fact that the chapel had been modified (although perhaps according to debatable aesthetic and liturgical preferences!) is also a sign that life at the Carmel of Lisieux did not stop with Thérèse’s last breath.

These factors are also an affirmation that ultimately, what was most significant about St. Thérèse of Lisieux was not St. Thérèse of Lisieux, but the Holy Spirit whom she allowed to work so powerfully within her. She allowed the Lord into her life to the utmost degree, and through that act of littleness, Jesus has been able to reach so many. The same Lord is alive and active today, in the Carmel of Lisieux, and throughout his Church.

Of course, there is a particular danger in a place like France, the “eldest daughter” of the Church but also a profoundly secular place today, of the Church becoming something like a museum, a piece of history that is no longer especially relevant aside from giving people a sense of historical identity and rootedness. And for many of the French, this is all the Church is. I think for most Parisians, Sainte Chapelle church effectively plays the same role as the Cluny Museum of medieval history.

In the Twin Cities, Catholicism certainly isn’t as old as it is in France, but I imagine various Catholic churches can seem like little more than relics of the past, in places like northeast Minneapolis or even our beloved Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, to secular passersby.

But strangely enough, I think even as practicing Catholics there’s a danger of having a kind of “museumized” relation to our faith and its physical trappings. Our Church’s Tradition — what has been handed on to us from the Apostles and then protected and nurtured by the Church ever since — is not primarily about “nostalgia,” about doing things the way they were done 60-plus years ago so that we have a “stronger” Catholic identity and a greater sense of historical grounding, adrift as we are in the rootlessness of postmodern American life.

The Tradition, liturgical and otherwise, is primarily about encountering and being animated by the same Spirit who worked in the lives of our Catholic forebears. As Yves Congar, a 20th- century French theologian who wrote the important “Tradition and Traditions” said, “Tradition (is not) merely a transmission followed by a passive mechanical reception; it entails the making present in a human consciousness of a saving truth.” He adds that Tradition is “the continuing presence of the past in the present,” not in the way that the Louvre makes ancient history present to us today, but as “the continuing presence of those events which bring about a man’s religious relation with God.”

In other words, Tradition doesn’t ground us in the past so much as it brings those living events of the past — most especially Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection — to us today.

If a nostalgic-fueled reclamation of elements of the Church’s liturgical and cultural patrimony is not orientated toward this real encounter, it runs the risk of trapping us in the museum. But if our reception of Tradition is grounded primarily in a desire to encounter the living God, then all of the beneficial secondary elements — a strong identity, a sense of historical rootedness — will come with it.

To conclude, I’ll briefly share another highlight of my France trip: my visit to the cathedral of Chartres. The 800-year-old gothic masterpiece houses some of the world’s most awe-inspiring stained-glass windows. Numerous writers and artists have spoken about how their lives were changed upon encountering the beauty of Chartres. It was breathtaking to take it all in alongside other visitors, several of whom I imagine might not even have been religious. But the most important and life-giving part of my visit to Chartres? Discovering that a somewhat disheveled elderly French priest, who wasn’t even wearing clerical garb, was available to hear my confession, and having my sins absolved by Jesus Christ.

Liedl writes from the Twin Cities.