I think I'm going to leave that gospel alone for a few moments. But I'll come back to it. Over this Jubilee year of 2000, several times, we've looked at different spiritual stars of the last two millenia in the life of our family, the Church, both for inspiration and for lessons of life about them. The next three weekends, beginning today, we're going to look at three more. The first one, this weekend, is the best known and most popular. The one next weekend is the least known and seldom heard of. And on the final week, it will be the most controversial one.

Therese of Lisieux, also known as St. Therese of the Child Jesus, St. Therese of the Little Flower, died just over a hundred years ago, in 1897. Her life was quiet. It was hidden. It was uneventful. It was brief. She didn't go on any great missions. She didn't found a religious order. She didn't perform any great works. In fact, when she died, in her small convent, the Superior in charge of writing the obituary was very troubled because she had nothing to say about her. And they asked one of the nuns there and she said, " Therese was a sweet little sister who never did anything."

And yet, she became easily one of the most popular religious figures of the entire 20th century. Within very few years, twenty-five years, she was named a saint by the Church because of the great devotion and pressure to name her a saint. She had terrific impact on a whole variety of people's lives. Throw out a few examples: James Keller, priest born and raised in Oakland, became the founder and director of the Christopher Movement. He attributes his whole direction and vision to St. Therese. Dorothy Day, one of our other "Spiritual Stars," attributes her conversion to Saint Therese, and wrote a biography of her. Another person who had Saint Therese as a favorite, Jack Keroauc (How many remember Keroauc? If you can remember the 60's you weren't there.) He was the Poet Laureate of the Beat Generation. And, for him, St. Therese was very important.

When I was in Ireland, just ten days ago, still today, many of the homes, the most familiar picture in the house, after the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is a picture of St. Therese the Little Flower. Until recently, most of the Catholic Churches in the United States would have a statue of her. We still do. We have a statue of her. Now look at all those people standing back there (motioning to a back corner area of the church). If you move over, it's the one that isn't moving at all, and the one that is able to stand through the longest sermons without complaining, and the one with the roses in her arms, St. Therese the Little Flower. And then, just three years ago, the Church named her a "Doctor of the Church." Now, in 2000 years, only three women have been named a Doctor of the Church: St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, and now St. Therese the Little Flower. And a "Doctor of the Church" doesn't mean that now you're on our HMO, or that you get an M.D. after your name. It's more like getting the Nobel Prize for Science, where a scientist makes a discovery in his laboratory that benefits all of humanity. These figures, and there's only a handful of them in 2000 years, had such an insight, discovery, understanding of our faith that it benefits the whole Church for all years to come.

So, what is her insight? What's her discovery? What lesson does she have for us? Well, the first of the lessons, I think, comes from the very fact of her age. She was very young. She was only 15 when she entered the Carmelite convent. She only lived nine years. She died at the age of 24. And she taught us that you don't have to be old to be holy. And she taught us that young people are equally called to the greatest of holiness. And she taught us that young people are not the future of our church. They are the present of our Church.

About three years before she died, her superior ordered her to write an autobiography, a spiritual journey of her spiritual life. And her brief life and that small journal, called "A Story of the Soul," really revolutionized modern thinking about holiness. First of all, what she taught us was revolutionary at the time and it anticipated the Second Vatican Council, was that every single Christian is called to holiness. We are all called to holiness, not just people in religious orders, not just missionaries and not just martyrs. We are all called to great holiness. But, secondly, the key for Therese about holiness was the ordinary. She called it the "little way." She wrote, "In my 'little way' are only very ordinary things. And little souls can do everything I do." For her, holiness is attained by doing daily things in a strong spirit of love and a strong spirit of joy. And she was very ordinary about things, for example, when she had difficult periods of prayer and prayer just seemed too dry for her, she wrote, "Jesus sure isn't doing much to keep the conversation going." She complained that she had trouble falling asleep during meditation times. And she complained about the rosary. She didn't call it "boring." But I think that's what she meant. She said, "It's distracting. It's difficult. It's a very hard prayer to pray. I don't like it." And yet what she said was, "Doing one's ordinary work, our ordinary life, is quite enough provided we do it with great love and great joy." And that's exactly what she did. For her, it was washing laundry and sweeping corridors and trying to stay awake at meditation time.

But, beyond that, beyond her small cell, her small Carmelite convent in Normandy, France, she also had a vision that reached out to the whole ministry and mission of the Church. She longed to be a missionary. In fact, she was invited to go to Hanoi, Indochina, as a missionary, but she contracted TB and couldn't go. And she was completely convinced.... This is amazing. We only have three women that the Church designates as Doctors of the Church. (We're to learn from them.) And two of them, Catherine of Siena and this one, Therese the Little Flower, was absolutely convinced that God had given her a vocation to be ordained a priest. In fact, when she was dying at 24, she explained to her sister, "The reason that God is taking me at 24 is because he gave me a vocation to be a priest and He knows that when I reach the age of ordination at 25, the Church won't let me be ordained. And rather than make me suffer that disappointment of seeing my ordination class go ahead without me, He's taking me home." That was another insight from her.

Most of the statues of Therese and paintings and pictures show her with a bouquet of roses or roses at her feet or a rose in her hand. And it's a sign of her caring and loving for her community and people all over the world but especially that she felt that she was going to continue to love and walk with us and reach out to us after her death. She said, "I will send roses from heaven." And she said, "I intend to spend my entire life in heaven continuing to do good work on earth."

Let's look for a moment at an interesting gospel, the one where you tear out your eye, cut off your hand, cut off your foot.... Boy! That's why we need "Doctors of the Church!" My goodness! I think Therese gives us an explanation and interpretation and understanding of that demanding gospel that says we must be totally dedicated in our care for each other, in our committment to holiness, in our committment to following Jesus. We must be totally dedicated and, she was, she had that kind of passion, that kind of dedication, that kind of single-mindedness, that kind of intensity. And we're called to have it, but about the ordinary things in our life, not about things like cutting our hand off. We're to have that passion about trying to be holy and to follow our God.

And so Therese said each one of us is called to be extraordinary and remarkable in holiness, but in an ordinary, unremarkable and daily sort of way. She said that we're called to care for those near us and those beyond us, the mission, beyond us, people different from us, people we can't see or get to. But we're called to do all this not alone. She will send roses. We do this companioned by one another. We do this with companions on the journey, good people, wise people, friends who have gone before us and people like St. Therese. And finally, we do it companioned by our loving God. Let us give thanks to the Lord Who is so good. Amen.