St Therese relics at Westminster Cathedral
Took a little break this afternoon to visit the relics of St Therese at Westminster Cathedral. There's been an astonishing amount of news about this casket of touring relics - containing some of the mortal remains (bones) of a late nineteenth century French saint, who died at the age of 24, having been a contemplative - Carmelite - nun for nine years before that. She didn't see visions, she didn't perform great acts of heroic virtue. She wrote fragments of a spiritual autobiography which were circulated amongst other religious communities after her death. She advocated doing little tasks and duties with love, and being kind to everyone, especially those to whom you are disinclined to be kind. She died a difficult death - tuberculosis with little medical intervention or pain relief. She was canonised in 1925. So it's extraordinary, really extraordinary that in these days of reality-show celebrity, etc, that people have flocked to touch their hands, rosaries, holy cards, roses, lips, to the glass surrounding the wooden casket of her bones.
There are some reasons why Therese has captured great public attention beyond the purely miraculous, though. One is a certain amount of family holy business. Therese had four sisters, three of whom were also nuns in the same convent. Therese was the youngest and there was always a certain amount of holy expectation resting on her, particularly when she became so ill so young. The spiritual autobiography was selectively circulated - not to mention carefully edited - and made maximum impact where it mattered. Even so - it was not expected to have such general appeal also. A second reason though is that Therese, for all her enclosed life, was a much photographed saint, one of the first to be so vividly visually captured. The grainy black and white photographs of her, from her teenage years and novice months, to her sickbed, deathbed and afterwards, are very touching because of their immediacy and the obvious vulnerability of their subject. Most of them were taken by Therese’s sister Celine. Some are formally posed, others less so.
These photos certainly struck me when I was younger. I wasn’t brought up in any religion whatsoever – as I’ve probably said before, my father in particular was trenchantly anti-religion, anti-Christianity. So I think I found out about Therese in other ways – was it a Blue Peter special assignment? I think it might have been. Something that allowed her voice to come to life, through televised visits, narrative fragments, photos. As a young girl, twenty four, the age at which Therese died, seemed nevertheless a very grown up age. Now it seems so young. She wanted to be a priest and there’s a certain poignancy in her having died at the age she could have been ordained, had she been born male.
There’s more to St Therese than that, for all her littleness and the proclamation of her accessible-to-all ‘little way’. But suffice it to say I felt I wanted to join in the stream – and it did feel like a stream – of people flowing quietly through the Cathedral. There was a bit of a queue outside (I narrowly avoided being interviewed by BBC Radio) but the time passed peacefully and the sun was shining. At the entrance to the Cathedral people were selling roses – a symbol associated with Therese, who promised she would let fall a shower of roses after her death. So I dutifully bought mine for a pound and touched it to the glass as my turn to pass the casket came. It was all surprisingly moving – large cardboard displays with those black and white photos of a young nun juxtaposed with the beautiful but rather grandiose setting of the Catholic Cathedral. One of the boards had her quotation: ‘At the heart of the church I will be love’. I remember a section of her book which in which she talks about the discovery of this 'vocation' – the active life of priest, martyr, missionary, all denied, Therese retreats to the centre, and finds she is at the heart – the most important place of all. There’s contemplative spirituality for you.
Back home I went, clutching the rose in my hand on the northbound Victoria Line. On the way back to flat and kittens, I stopped at the post office to ensure my godson gets his birthday card in due time tomorrow. There was a queue there too, much more restive than the relics queue. A cheerful guy – one of those crowd pleasing people who oscillate between entertaining and embarrassing – was cracking jokes and buttonholing other people in the queue with his various observations. ‘And who gave you that rose then?’ he said to me. ‘You got a secret admirer then?’ I debated what to say, and thought it best to say nothing – this rose had a different symbolic resonance altogether. ‘Ooh – keeping it quiet!’ he said, to the queue in general. Well sort of. But here it is, a single rose now in a silver flask on the bedside table, and making an unlikely single appearance in some odd poet’s blog.
There are some reasons why Therese has captured great public attention beyond the purely miraculous, though. One is a certain amount of family holy business. Therese had four sisters, three of whom were also nuns in the same convent. Therese was the youngest and there was always a certain amount of holy expectation resting on her, particularly when she became so ill so young. The spiritual autobiography was selectively circulated - not to mention carefully edited - and made maximum impact where it mattered. Even so - it was not expected to have such general appeal also. A second reason though is that Therese, for all her enclosed life, was a much photographed saint, one of the first to be so vividly visually captured. The grainy black and white photographs of her, from her teenage years and novice months, to her sickbed, deathbed and afterwards, are very touching because of their immediacy and the obvious vulnerability of their subject. Most of them were taken by Therese’s sister Celine. Some are formally posed, others less so.
These photos certainly struck me when I was younger. I wasn’t brought up in any religion whatsoever – as I’ve probably said before, my father in particular was trenchantly anti-religion, anti-Christianity. So I think I found out about Therese in other ways – was it a Blue Peter special assignment? I think it might have been. Something that allowed her voice to come to life, through televised visits, narrative fragments, photos. As a young girl, twenty four, the age at which Therese died, seemed nevertheless a very grown up age. Now it seems so young. She wanted to be a priest and there’s a certain poignancy in her having died at the age she could have been ordained, had she been born male.
There’s more to St Therese than that, for all her littleness and the proclamation of her accessible-to-all ‘little way’. But suffice it to say I felt I wanted to join in the stream – and it did feel like a stream – of people flowing quietly through the Cathedral. There was a bit of a queue outside (I narrowly avoided being interviewed by BBC Radio) but the time passed peacefully and the sun was shining. At the entrance to the Cathedral people were selling roses – a symbol associated with Therese, who promised she would let fall a shower of roses after her death. So I dutifully bought mine for a pound and touched it to the glass as my turn to pass the casket came. It was all surprisingly moving – large cardboard displays with those black and white photos of a young nun juxtaposed with the beautiful but rather grandiose setting of the Catholic Cathedral. One of the boards had her quotation: ‘At the heart of the church I will be love’. I remember a section of her book which in which she talks about the discovery of this 'vocation' – the active life of priest, martyr, missionary, all denied, Therese retreats to the centre, and finds she is at the heart – the most important place of all. There’s contemplative spirituality for you.
Back home I went, clutching the rose in my hand on the northbound Victoria Line. On the way back to flat and kittens, I stopped at the post office to ensure my godson gets his birthday card in due time tomorrow. There was a queue there too, much more restive than the relics queue. A cheerful guy – one of those crowd pleasing people who oscillate between entertaining and embarrassing – was cracking jokes and buttonholing other people in the queue with his various observations. ‘And who gave you that rose then?’ he said to me. ‘You got a secret admirer then?’ I debated what to say, and thought it best to say nothing – this rose had a different symbolic resonance altogether. ‘Ooh – keeping it quiet!’ he said, to the queue in general. Well sort of. But here it is, a single rose now in a silver flask on the bedside table, and making an unlikely single appearance in some odd poet’s blog.
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