Ste. Therese de Lisieux
The Saint Known as The Little Flower
Having visited Lisieux and studied the life of Therese Martin (1873-1897), I was pleased when asked to sculpt a bronze figure of the Carmelite who died at the age of 24. But I resolved not to emulate any of the numerous artistic representations of her seen in prayer cards, souvenir booklets, small plaster figurines and even full-scale sculptures. Nearly all show the young woman, of whom extensive photographs testify to her actual appearance, as a romantically idealized visionary. She is most often portrayed with arms full of flowers, which in color illustrations are prettily tinted, fragile, as the saint herself is perceived to have been.
My study in Lisieux revealed a different Therese, a teenager frail but tenacious, and plagued by a neurotic condition against which she struggled throughout the short span of her lifetime. Obstinate, she overcame objections by Church superiors -- including her bishop -- for one so young to enter the convent, and was admitted to Carmel at the age of fifteen. During nine years in the convent, she never did anything remarkable, preferring to take on menial tasks. Much of her energy went to fighting depression, propensity to tears, and during the last eighteen months of her life to an obsession of religious doubts -- all apparently causeless. Her surrender to what is termed her "Little Way," abandoning struggle against imperfections to acceptance of them, marked her final months before tuberculosis ended her life. She voiced with her last breath the vehement protest that the silence of God had neither touched her faith nor diminished her love for Him.
The stretch of the arm and thrust of the body in my sculpture symbolizes Therese's heroic campaign against elders and superiors to win entrance into the convent at so tender an age -- to reach for religious life, leave behind the secular. Down at her feet, instead of the bountiful bloom with which she's usually shown, is a single small wildflower emerging from a cracked rock. This symbolism is based on one of the many legends to be heard in Lisieux: Seated with her father on a large rock in the garden of the family home, the teenager confided to Louis Martin her frustrations that youth and poor health would forever bar her, despite incessant appeals to religious superiors, from entering the convent. Louis reached down and plucked the wild flower emerging from the rock on which they sat. "If this delicate plant can pierce rock," he told his daughter, "anything is possible."
The bronze face of the sculpture is based on photographs of Therese prior to her entrance to Carmel.
I knew a priest who advocated that Therese should be proclaimed the Patroness of Teenagers. Like myself, he saw her as an exceptionally strong, determined young woman. He shunned the sentimental images of her as forcibly as I did.
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