One of the features of the new blog-website is that it will hold hands with my old blog over at Patheos. There is ten years of archived blogging over there and I’ll be picking through it from time to time to share some of the archived posts here.
In 2014 I wrote a piece The Day I Met St Therese. It tells the story of my encounter with Therese while I was an Anglican priest on pilgrimage in France…
I was an Anglican priest the summer I met St Therese of Lisieux. I was living in England and had three months free between jobs, so I decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I was going to hitch hike and stay in monasteries and religious houses on the way.
The first leg of my journey took me across the English channel to Normandy. As divine providence would have it, I missed the ferry to the more Eastern port of St Malo and headed instead for the French port of Le Havre. Once off the boat, I headed for the Benedictine monastery of Bec Hellouin. Bec is over a thousand years old, and is famous for providing the church in England with a couple of archbishops over the years. After staying with the monks at Bec I headed for the town of Lisieux.
As a convert from Evangelical American religion, I didn’t know much about the little saint of Lisieux. I had learned that Catholics call her the ‘little flower’ and that she died young of a terrible disease. What little I did know I didn’t like. Her syrupy sweet spirituality didn’t seem very manly to me. I wasn’t sure what ‘little flowers’ had to do with anything and thought all the little girl talk about ‘Dear papa in heaven’ and ‘being God’s good little girl’ were a bit much.
When I got to Lisieux things didn’t improve much. I made my way up to the imposing basilica dedicated to the saint on the hill outside the town. It looked big and ugly from the outside, and the road leading up to the basilica was crowded with souvenir shops with rosaries hanging from the awnings, postcards and images of the saint (and every other saint imaginable) pictures of Mary and Jesus with wide eyes, and holy water bottles shaped like Mary with crowns that unscrewed. To a tasteful young Anglican priest it was all pretty tacky, and I thought the French ought to know better.
Go here to read the whole article.
Don’t forget to check out the new edition of my book St Benedict and St Therese-The Little Rule and the Little Way.
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