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St. Therese on Suffering and Hiddenness in her “Canticle to the Holy Face”

In addition to her much-beloved Story of a Soul, St. Therese of Lisieux wrote many poems during her earthly sojourn. She wrote them for herself, to express the longings of her heart, but due to her worldwide fame following her death, we are blessed to have the chance to read these meditations of her soul.

The original French versions, according to The Complete Therese of Lisieux, reveal that “Therese’s poetry demonstrates considerable skill as well as a high level of education. Many of the poems were composed to be sung to hymn tunes that were familiar to late nineteenth-century French worshippers.” Unfortunately, the English translations cannot capture all the power of the French originals, because both rhyme scheme and meter tend to be lost in translation. Still, even with this diminution, the English versions of the poems contain some beautiful lines of poetry, and, above all, a ringing expression of a pure, humble, and completely authentic love for God.

One of Therese’s more successful poems from an artistic standpoint is “Hymn to the Holy Face,” composed in August of 1895. Therese possessed a special devotion to the Holy Face, as evidenced by the fact that she took it as part of her religious name: “Sister Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.” Sister Agnes of Jesus introduced Therese to the devotion, and it became a pillar of her spirituality. Therese recalled:

[My] Sun was His adorable Face veiled with tears. Until my coming to Carmel, I had never fathomed the depths of the treasures hidden in the Holy Face. It was through you [Agnes] dear mother, that I learned to know these treasures. Just as formerly you had preceded us to Carmel so also you were the first to enter deeply into the mysteries of love hidden in the Face of our Spouse. You called me and I understood . . . Ah! I desired that, like the face of Jesus, my face be truly hidden, that no one on earth would know me (Is. 53:3). I thirsted after suffering and I longed to be forgotten.

Therese’s love for her Redeemer’s face found expression in the poem of 1895. It begins:

Jesus, Your ineffable image
Is the star that guides my steps;
You know well that Your sweet Face
For me is heaven on earth!
My love reveals the charms
Of your eyes made beautiful by weeping.

Lines 5 and 6 stand out for the loveliness of the wording as well as the significance of their meaning. First, Therese is asserting that it is her own love that reveals to her the charms or beauties of the Lord’s eyes. Therese realizes that true love can have a clarifying effect on our ability to see. There are some things about the beloved known only to the lover, clarified only through the eyes of love. We might think here of the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “love takes up where knowledge leaves off.” In this case, Therese’s love allows her gaze to penetrate to the beauty of Jesus’s eyes, even though those eyes are veiled in tears.

This brings us to the striking Line 6, which describes Christ’s eyes “made beautiful by weeping.” This description is evocative for multiple reasons. First, it’s literally true that eyes filled with tears possess a glossiness and richness of color that they wouldn’t normally have. Second, on a metaphorical level, Therese expresses in these words the beautifying power of suffering—modelled first by Christ and imitated by all His saints, including the Little Flower herself. As she wrote in The Story of a Soul, “I understood that to become a saint one had to suffer much.” The diamond of perfection in her was formed through the intense pressures of suffering—an idea powerfully expressed through the image of eyes “made beautiful by weeping.”

After that lovely description of Line 6, Therese continues, “I smile through my tears / When I contemplate Your sufferings.” If suffering is needed to make us beautiful, the corollary of that truth is that Jesus will sweeten and temper our sufferings through His own. He has gone before us on the path of thorns, so that it might be easier for us to tread.

The next stanza reiterates the idea of the hiddenness of Christ’s beauty. “Oh! I want to comfort You, / To live unknown and alone; / Your beauty, which You know how to veil, / Reveals to me all its mystery.” Our Lord does not reveal His beauty and the beauty of His ways to those who do not want to see it. Far, far from the world is an understanding of the beauty of suffering. The world flees from suffering. But those who love the Lord and understand Him do not flee it because they understand its beautifying effect.

Jesus and His followers are content, too, to be ignored and even ridiculed by the world, who do not see past appearances: the appearance of a young woman “wasting her life away” behind the walls of the convent, or the appearance of a blood-soaked “criminal,” His face battered and swollen, mounting the steep pathway to a place of crucifixion. As Therese herself put it:

These words of Isaiah, “Who has believed our report? . . . There is no beauty in Him, no comliness . . .” have been the whole foundation of my devotion to the Holy Face, or, to express it better, the foundation of my whole piety. I also have desired to be without beauty, to tread the winepress alone, unknown to every creature.

The beauty of Christ, the beauty of suffering, and the beauty of Therese’s own soul is one that is not always obvious, especially to worldly eyes.

In the following stanza, Therese makes use of a series of metaphors rooted in the natural world. “Your Face is my only Homeland, / It is . . . my smiling prairie, / My gentle sun of each day; / It is the lily of the valleys / Whose mysterious perfume / Comforts my exiled soul.” Like so many of the saints (and poets), Therese sees in the beauty of the natural world a reflection of the Divine. The delight occasioned by sun, prairie, and flower are the best concepts she can get hold of to express the unending vitality and warmth she finds in the Holy Face.

Imagery of the natural world recurs in the final stanza, which turns from praise to supplication, as Therese asks for a “beautiful golden harvest” of souls whose hearts she has brought to Christ. The soul in the thralls of love desires to share that love with others. The soul made beautiful by suffering opens itself to the world in a charity that partakes of the infinite and bottomless. This was the nature of the Little Flower, she who said she would spend her heaven doing good on earth.

The flower that was hidden has been revealed to the world. The face that was veiled has been unveiled. And of course, even from heaven, Therese continues to use her influence to help others see more clearly the beauty of that Divine Face. One way she has done so is through her poetry, simple, heartfelt, yet delicately profound and worthy of our meditation.


St. Therese’s Canticle to the Holy Face

Jesus, Your ineffable image
Is the star that guides my steps;
You know well that Your sweet Face
For me is heaven on earth!
My love reveals the charms
Of Your eyes made beautiful by weeping.
I smile through my tears,
When I contemplate Your sufferings.

Oh! I want to comfort You,
To live unknown and alone;
Your beauty, which You know how to veil,
Reveals to me all its mystery,
And toward You I would like to fly!

Your Face is my only Homeland,
It is my kingdom of love;
It is my smiling prairie,
My gentle sun of each day;
It is the lily of the valleys
Whose mysterious perfume
Comforts my exiled soul–
Makes it taste the peace of heaven.

It is my rest, my sweetness,
And my melodious lyre . . .
Your face, O my sweet Savior,
Is the divine bouquet of myrrh
That I wish to guard and keep on my heart!

Your Face is my only richness;
I ask for nothing more.
In it, unceasingly hiding myself,
I will look like You, Jesus!
Leave within me the divine imprint
Of your features so full of sweetness,
And soon I will become holy;
Toward You I will draw hearts!

So that I may be able to store up
A beautiful golden harvest,
Reach down and set me afire with Your flames!
Soon, with Your adored mouth,
Give me the kiss that endures forever!


Editor’s Note: Follow this author’s Substack, The Hazelnut, here.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

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