Online novena

The physical ordeal of illness which Thérèse experienced violently from Lent 1896 onwards, during which she went to the very limits of the asceticism of which she was capable, was heightened, from Holy Week of the same year onwards, by her entry into the night of faith. Unable to feel God’s presence, unable even to believe in him through her human intelligence, unable to hope for heaven, whose existence she doubted terribly, Thérèse was subjected to the fire of love by experiencing God’s absence. But here again, her spiritual genius and inexhaustible love manage to transcend pain and anguish. For in this dark night, she is at last a sister to all, including the atheists whose words she had never understood: “At this time I was enjoying such a living faith, such a clear faith, that the thought of heaven made up all my happiness, and I was unable to believe there were really impious people who had no faith. I believed they were actually speaking against their own inner convictions when they denied the existence of heaven.” Thérèse is now one of them, a universal sister in the night of this world. She heroically passed the test of this dark fire by verifying God’s existence with a solid, visible, indisputable reality: her own actions. “While I do not have the joy of faith,” she wrote in the early summer of 1897, “I am trying to carry out its works at least. I believe I have made more acts of faith in this past year than all through my whole life.” Since her childhood and adolescence had revealed to her that she was not capable of loving by her own strength, and that only divine grace could make her a saint (Christmas 1886), it was by continuing to make the gestures and say the words of love around her, by redoubling her attention and patience towards exasperating or unpleasant sisters, by multiplying invisible sacrifices for the happiness of others, that she would continue to see that God exists. And hope.