From The Bishop

On October 1, we celebrate the feast of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. We are very fortunate to have a shrine dedicated to St. Thérèse in our diocese. The Carmelites have a long standing presence in the diocese and for this I am most grateful. This is the saint who said that her vocation is to love and then showed us the paths to love. One of those paths can be found in the quote below which is taken from a book about St. Thérèse, “I Believe in Loveâ€�, by Fr. Jean D’Elbee. He writes, “It is true that instinctively we seek to climb the rough stairway of perfection instead of taking the gentle elevator of the arms of Jesus. This is because we have been told so often of our miseries.We have been told, and rightly, that we are miserable; and then, we have been told about Jesus that He is good, yes, but not enough that He is wondrously good, infinitely good, infinite charity. No one has told us at the same time that He is Savior before He is Judge and that, in the Heart of God, ‘justice and peace have embraced’. We have been trained in the habit of looking at our dark side, our ugliness, and not at the purifying Sun, Light of Light, which He is, who changes the dust that we are into pure gold. We think about examining ourselves, yet we do not think, before the examination, during the examination, and after the examination, to plunge ourselves, with all our miseries, into the consuming and transforming furnace of His Heart, which is open to us through a humble act of confidence. I am not telling you, ‘You believe too much in your own wretchedness.’ We are much more wretched than we ever realize. But I am telling you, ‘You do not believe enough in merciful love.’ We must have confidence, not in spite of our miseries, but because of them, since it is misery which attracts mercy. Oh, this word, mercy -- misericordia â€" ‘miseris cor dare’ â€" a Heart which gives itself to the miserable, a Heart which nourishes itself on miseries by consuming them. Mediate on this word.â€� Let us do the same.