Taking the Dirty Water

I sometimes give myself a challenge in Assembly at the Infants School, and as yesterday was the Feast of St Thérèse of Lisieux I thought a good challenge would be to say something about her that a mixed group of 5 to 7 year-olds could grasp. I'm not sure whether I succeeded, but it made me read a bit about her. I've had a copy of L'Histoire d'une Ame for years, but never read it. 

What a brilliantly straightforward, honest young woman Thérèse was. She wrote that she found writings about the spiritual life quite hard to take on board, whereas, when she turned to the Scriptures, everything became pellucidly clear and seemed easy to manage. I find the opposite; the parables and sayings of Jesus are multifaceted and ambiguous, pointing us beyond what we are and where we are towards a heavenly way of living but - absolutely necessarily - not describing in any detail what that might mean. The lives of the saints, however, show ordinary men and women striving to work out what the Gospel meant for them, and sometimes give me something I can aspire to.

Thérèse's 'Little Way' is like that: concentrating on the small and apparently insignificant things you are called to do as a means of self-forgetting. I liked one story I stumbled on in her book. One particular sister Thérèse shared duty with in the convent laundry had a habit of flicking handkerchiefs to lay them out for drying in such a way that Thérèse was usually splashed with mucky water. This was probably not deliberate (although it might have been as most of the sisters were considerably older than Thérèse and she found them tough to get on with). Thérèse admitted that her first instinct was to take an obvious step back when this happened and thus passively-aggressively to impress on Sister X her displeasure without actually saying anything, although presumably explosions of temper were not entirely unknown among the Carmelites of Lisieux, either. Then she reflected that it was not her business to correct her fellow nun, and that getting used to this little discomfort was a suitable occasion for the exercise of virtue. 'Another sort of asperges', she jokes in L'Histoire, turning this disagreeable sprinkling into a reminder of baptism like the scattering of water during Mass. And so the transgression of Sister X lost all its power to make her angry and became a source of amusement instead.

You might think this all a bit weird. But living in community is full of instances which raise the same questions. Had Thérèse confronted Sister X, the other nun would either have been horrified and penitent, or defiant and stiff-necked. What would have been the point of either? Negligently splashing dirty water did Thérèse no harm, and if it was deliberate, taking Sister X to task would only have increased the bitterness of the situation. They all had to live with one another, after all: there was no escape. Instead Thérèse's little act of sacrifice absorbed all the potential hurt and converted it into something else. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in a group of people apparently devoted to a common purpose but in fact gathering all the time a history of petty rivalries and resentments will recognise how more apparently common-sense approaches to them seldom do much good. As in the Carmel of Lisieux, so in much of life - including a parish church.