“Well, fortunately, this is the last year.”
It was Christmas 1886, and the three members of the Martin family had just returned home from Midnight Mass. Mr. Martin and Celine, tired from the strain of being up at such a late hour, were selflessly preparing the parlor for the gift unwrapping as the youngest daughter, Thérèse, hurried upstairs to put her coat away. Thirteen-year-old Thérèse thought that Christmas was going wonderfully until she heard this remark from her sleepy father. Celine bit her lip, knowing if Thérèse was to hear such a comment, it would set her hypersensitive sister off. Peeking around the corner to whisper up the stairs while their father grabbed the treats, Celine addressed her sister.
“You best calm down before coming back to get your surprise,” Celine suggested, trying to look out for both her sister and her father.
Celine disappeared from the staircase, and Thérèse was left alone to sob her heart out, as she usually did when something of the sort happened. She sunk to the ground, the tears forming in her eyes burning them. How could this be the last year?! she thought grumpily. How could Father do this to me?
By chance, the sensitive teenager looked up, and she met eyes with the figure of Jesus, hanging on the crucifix on the wall just upstairs. Crucifixes were commonplace in her home - it was nothing new to Thérèse. But in that moment, Thérèse felt all of her tears recede, and she found herself simply in awe of the self-sacrificing G’D whom she worshiped.
I can be like that, Thérèse thought. I can be like Jesus.
Standing up slowly, Thérèse ran downstairs, setting her coat on a nearby chair. Her shoes were filled to the brim with candy and little gifts. Celine was sitting on the ground by the hearth, and Mr. Martin was just walking into the room from the kitchen, holding a mug of tea in his hands. Upon seeing the face of her father, Thérèse ran up and threw her arms around him, leading him to a chair so he could watch the girls unwrap their many presents. Celine smiled to herself from the hearth, knowing all was well between them. In her own heart, she could sense the change in her sister, and she noticed it persisted all through their unwrapping session.
Celine would later come to understand, through the memoirs of her little sister, what exactly had transpired on the staircase in the early hours of that particular Christmas morning. And Thérèse, through her diary, would touch the world, teaching them to sacrifice their own needs and wants through her Little Way. What began on that staircase would continue on for the rest of her twenty-four years, and not a day would go by in her life as a Carmelite nun in which Thérèse would not thank G’D passionately for allowing her heart to be opened to Him.
Thérèse’s “Christmas Conversion”, as she termed it in her memoirs, is an excellent example to us, future saints, that something so metamorphic can come out of an ordinary circumstance. If Jesus can touch the heart of an 1800s catastrophizer melting with emotion on the stairs of her home, what can Jesus not do for us - or rather, what would He not do for us?
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