Vigils Reading – St Therese of the Child Jesus

A letter from the “Illustrimissimi” of

POPE JOHN PAUL THE FIRST

◊◊◊

I was seventeen years old when I read your autobiography.

For me it was like a bolt from the blue. “Story of a little flower” you had

called it. To me it seemed the story of a “steel bar” because of the willpower, the

courage, and the decision that shone from it. Once you had chosen the path of

complete devotion to God, nothing then could stand in your way: no illness, no

external contradictions, no inner shadows or uncertainty.

Rereading you, I am impressed now by the way in which you loved God

and your neighbor. Saint Augustine had written: “We go to God, not with

walking but with loving.” You also call your path the “way of love.” Christ had

said: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”

Perfectly in line with these words, you felt yourself like “a little bird without

strength and without wings“; in God, on the contrary, you saw the eagle, who

came down to carry you to the heights on His won wings. You called divine

grace the “elevator,” which raised you to God quickly and without toil, since you

were “too small to climb the harsh stairway of perfection.“

I wrote above “without toil.” Let there be no misunderstanding: that is

true in one aspect, but in another…Let me remember your last months; your

soul advances in a kind of dark tunnel, it sees nothing of what it formerly saw

clearly. “Faith,” you write, “is no longer a veil, but a wall.” The physical

sufferings are so great that they make you say: “If I had not had faith, I would

have given myself death.“

Nevertheless, you continue saying, with the will of the Lord whom you

love: “I sing the happiness of Paradise, but without feeling joy; I sing simply

that I want to believe.” Your last words were: “My God, I love you!“

To God’s compassionate love you had offered yourself as victim. All this

did not prevent you from enjoying beautiful and good things: before your final

illness, you painted joyously, wrote poems and little sacred plays, interpreting

roles in some of them with the taste of a sensitive actress.

In your last illness, during a moment of remission, you asked for some

chocolate pastries. You were not afraid of your own imperfections, nor even of

having sometimes dozed off in weariness during meditation. (“Mothers love

their children also when they are asleep!“)

Loving your neighbor, you drove yourself to render little services, useful

but unobserved, and to prefer, when possible, the people who irked you and had

least in common with you. Behind their not very likable faces, you sought the

lovable face of Christ. And this effort, this seeking, was not noticed. “Mystical

as she is in chapel and at work,” the mother superior wrote of you, “she is

equally comical and full of fun during recreation, when she makes us split our

sides laughing.“

These few lines I have written are very far from containing your complete

message to Christians. They suffice, all the same, to indicate some lines for us to

follow.

 

5 Illustrissimi, Letters from Pope John Paul I. Albino Luciani/ Little, Brown and Co.1978. p.147-8.10