This is merely to paraphrase the testimony of Mother Agnes (Pauline Martin) for the process of beatification:

Devotion to the Holy Face was the special attraction of the Servant of God. However tender was her devotion to the Infant Jesus, it could not be compared to the devotion she had for the Holy Face. It was in the Carmel, at the hour of our great ordeal regarding the mental illness of our father, that she attached herself further to the mystery of the Passion, and it was then that she obtained permission to add “of the Holy Face” to her name. She herself speaks of where she derived the idea of this devotion. She writes, “These words of Isaiah: He was without splendor, without beauty, his face was hidden, as it were, and his person was not acknowledged (cf. Is 53, 2-3); one finds in them the whole foundation of my devotion to the Holy Face, or to say it better, the foundation of all my piety. I also desire myself to be without splendor, without beauty, to tread alone the wine in the press, unknown by every creature.”⁴

In the rest of this essay, I hope to show the way in which Therese’s devotion to the Holy Face was indeed the foundation of all her piety, first by showing the place of the Holy Face in Therese’s life and writings, and second by showing how the Little Way cannot be understood apart from Therese’s devotion to the Holy Face.

Modern devotion to the Holy Face can be said to have begun with the apparitions of Jesus to Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre (1816-1848), a nun at the Carmel of Tours.⁵ In a series of apparitions, beginning April 1843, Our Lord requested Sr. Marie to begin an association devoted to His Holy Face, in reparation for blasphemy and the profanation of Sunday. This work was furthered by M. Leon Dupont, the “Holy Man of Tours” (1797-1876), and led to the erection of the Confraternity of the Holy Face in 1848. On April 26, 1885, M. Martin and his five daughters all were en rolled in this Confraternity, most likely at the suggestion of Sr. Agnes of Jesus (Pauline).⁶

Thus it was from Pauline, Therese’s “second mother,” that she learned to appreciate the Holy Face. Writing about her postulancy in the Carmel (1888), she says to Mother Agnes:

Until my coming to Carmel, I had never fathomed the depths of the treasures hidden in the Holy Face. It was through you, dear Mother, that I learned to know these treasures. Just as formerly you had preceded us into Carmel, so also you were first to enter deeply into the mysteries of love hidden in the Face of our Spouse. You called me and I understood. I understood what real glory was. He whose Kingdom is not of this world showed me that true wisdom consists in “desiring to be unknown and counted as nothing,” in “placing one’s joy in the contempt of self.” Ah! I desired that, like the Face of Jesus, “my face be truly hidden, that no one on earth would know me” (cf. Is 53: 3). I thirsted after suffering and longed to be forgotten (SS A 71r; ET 152).

We see already in these early attitudes (perhaps colored by hindsight; Therese is writing sometime during 1895) the main outlines of Therese’s devotion to the Holy Face. First, we should note that Therese frames her devotion not so much in terms of reparation as imitation: Jesus suffered, so Therese suffered; Jesus’ Face was hidden, so Therese wants to become hidden from all creatures. We also note that this early that Therese frames her devotion in scriptural terms, looking to the hymn of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53.

Her devotion soon became connected with suffering in a very concrete way. On January 10, 1889 Therese received the Carmelite habit;⁷ shortly afterwards, her father began showing signs of mental illness, beginning a period of great suffering for the Martin family, within and outside the Carmel. In reflecting on the condition of her father, Therese realized that this was the fulfillment of a vision she had had in the summer of 1879: While alone in the garden one afternoon, she had seen a man similar to her father (who was away on business at the time) walk past her with an apron covering his head. The vision frightened her to such an extent that even “after fifteen years, it is as present to me as though I were still seeing the vision before my eyes” (SS A 20r; ET 46). The vision had remained a mystery until M. Martin’s illness; it was only then that Therese was able to understand — God was transforming her father after His own image. Thus, she directly related her father’s sufferings to those of the Suffering Servant: “Just as the adorable Face of Jesus was veiled during His Passion, so the face of His faithful servant had to be veiled in the days of his sufferings in order that it might shine in the heavenly Fatherland near its Lord, the Eternal Word!” (SS A 20v; ET 47).

Here we have another key to Therese’s devotion to the Holy Face, what might be called a “Theresian paradox”: in this life it is necessary to undergo suffering, to view Our Lord’s Face through a veil in order to be prepared to see Him face to face in heaven. We must become like Christ in order to see Him as He is.⁸ With such ideas in mind, Therese writes to comfort Celine (still “in the world” taking care of their father) and first uses an image she returns to often — heaven as an eternal “face to face” encounter with God (LT 96, 15.10.1889).

During her time of caring for her father, Celine conceived the desire of also becoming a Carmelite. Therese wrote to her often during their father’s illness, not only to encourage her in the midst of the family crisis, but also to fan this desire for religious life. In at least one letter, Therese’s wishes for Celine are ex pressed explicitly in terms of devotion to the Holy Face. Therese wants her sister to be another Veronica, who wipes away the blood and tears of Jesus, her only Beloved; may she win souls for Him, and especially the souls whom she loves; may she be tireless in braving the soldiers, that is, the world, in order to reach Him. … Ah, how happy she’ll be when one day she will be able to contemplate in glory the mysterious drink with which she had quenched her heavenly Fiancé’s thirst, and when she sees His lips, once desiccated, open to speak that unique and eternal word of love! … The Merci which will have no end. … (LT 98, 22.10.1889; ET 1, 591).⁹

Here we see that Therese’s devotion to the Holy Face also has an apostolic aspect: Celine is to comfort Our Lord in His agony, but especially by assuaging His thirst for souls.¹⁰ Celine was eventually to join her three sisters already in the Lisieux Carmel, and took the name “Sister Genevieve of the Holy Face.”

Therese made her Profession as a Carmelite on September 8, 1890, understanding this event according to traditional monastic theology: as an espousal of her soul to Christ.¹¹ Shortly before the profession, Therese explained the state of her soul to Sr. Agnes as a fiancée being asked where she wants to travel on her honeymoon. Therese answered that “she had but one desire, that of being taken to the summit of the mountain of Love.” But when asked by Jesus to choose a route, she finds herself unable; she has made this choice only for Him, and so wants Him to choose whatever path seems best. “Then Jesus took me by the hand, and He made me enter a subterranean passage where it is neither cold nor hot, where the sun does not shine, and in which the rain or the wind does not visit, a subterranean passage where I see nothing but a half-veiled light, the light which was diffused by the lowered eyes of my Fiancé’s Face!…” (LT 110, 30-31.8.1890; ET 1, 651-2).

This image of a subterranean journey is to mark the rest of Therese’s life, especially her night of faith and her eighteen month struggle with tuberculosis. Our Lord’s Face is veiled from Therese, not only because His sufferings hide His glory from her, but her own sufferings also contributed to the darkness. But Therese believed that her sufferings were a gift from her Divine Spouse, the gift of being conformed to His likeness. Thus, the journey was endurable, even joyful, because it was the will of God: “I don’t see that we are advancing towards the summit of the mountain since our journey is being made underground, but it seems to me that we are approaching it without knowing how. The route on which I am has no consolation for me, and nevertheless it brings me all consolations since Jesus is the one who chose it, and I want to console Him alone, alone!…” (LT 110; ET 1, 652).

Therese also expressed her devotion to the Holy Face in the prayers and poems she wrote for various occasions.¹² Her shortest prayer, for example, was just the simple words, “Make me resemble you, Jesus!” (Pr 11). These words were written on a small card to which Therese had also affixed a stamp of the Holy Face, and she always wore the prayer in a little container she had pinned over her heart. She also mentions the Holy Face in her famous “Act of Oblation to Merciful Love” (Pr 6) made to the Most Holy Trinity on the Feast of the Trinity, June 9, 1895: “Since You loved me so much as to give me your only Son as my Savior and my Spouse, the infinite treasures of his merits are mine. I offer them to you with gladness, begging you to look on me only through the Face of Jesus and in his Heart burning with Love” (ET 53).¹³

On the feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 1896 — the date the Feast of the Holy Face was celebrated in the Lisieux Carmel — Therese and two of her novices (she was acting novice-mistress at this time) made a “Consecration to the Holy Face” (Pr 12). In the introductory aspirations, the three ask Our Lord to be hid “in the secret of your Face,” which seems to mean that they wish to be caught up in imitation of the hidden and suffering love of Christ, with the result that “our souls be exercised so much in Love so that being consumed quickly we do not linger long here on earth but soon attain to the vision of Jesus, Face to Face” (ET 91). In the consecration proper, they express their desire to be Veronicas, comforting Jesus in His passion and offering Him souls as comfort (motifs we have noticed earlier). The prayer concludes: “O beloved Face of Jesus! As we await the everlasting day when we will contemplate your infinite Glory, our one desire is to charm your Divine Eyes by hiding our faces too so that here on earth no one can recognize us… O Jesus! Your Veiled Gaze is our Heaven!…” (ET 92). Jesus’ love, expressed in suffering and gentle glances from half-closed eyes, can only be answered by the three loving Him in kind.

Therese expresses similar sentiments in Pr 16, also written during the summer of 1896:

O Adorable Face of Jesus, the only Beauty that captivates my heart, deign to imprint in me your Divine Likeness so that you may not behold the soul of your little bride without seeing Yourself in her.

O my Beloved, for love of you, I accept not seeing here below the gentleness of your Look nor feeling the ineffable kiss of your Mouth, but I beg you to inflame me with your love so that it may consume me rapidly and soon bring me into your presence: Therese of the Holy Face.” (ET 104)

Again, we have seen these ideas before. Therese wants Our Lord to re-make her after the likeness of His sufferings, as expressed by the Holy Face. And as with the image of the subterranean journey, she accepts not being able to see Our Lord’s Face directly, so long as she will see it soon in heaven.

Therese’s poems that mention the Holy Face do so in ways similar to the motifs we have already noticed, so we shall perhaps look at only a few lines that give us new things to contemplate. First we might notice the striking phrase in stanza 8 of PN 12, dated 18 December 1894 and addressed to Mary, written for Marie of the Trinity’s reception of the habit:¹⁴ “Tender Mother, may He deign / To hide your humble lamb in his Face. / That is where she craves a place, / Not wanting any other cradle” (ET 75). In these lines, amidst an odd confusion of imagery, we see a connection being made between Therese’s devotion to the Holy Face and her understanding of spiritual childhood. It is the child-like soul, the lamb, that is to be hid under the shadow of Our Lord’s suffering.

Therese’s poem “Living on Love” (PN 17, dated 26 February 1895) expresses the now familiar wish to be another Veronica (stanza 11). But in stanza 12 she goes even further, asking to be another Mary Magdalene: ““Living on Love is imitating Mary, / Bathing your divine feet that she kisses, transported. / with tears, with precious perfume, / She dries them with her long hair… / Then standing up, she shatters the vase, / And in turn she anoints your Sweet Face. / As for me, the perfume with which I anoint your Face / Is my Love!…” (ET 92). The Holy Face is also the Sun which gives strength to the Little Flower (cf PN 16, stanza 3), and It is the “divine brilliance” of heaven (PN 33, stanza 3). She brings all her sentiments of love for the Holy Face together in PN 20, “My Heaven on Earth!…” (also known as her “Canticle to the Holy Face,” dated August 12, 1895):

Jesus, your ineffable image
Is the star that guides my steps.
Ah! you know, your sweet Face
Is for me Heaven on earth.
My love discovers the charms
Of your Face adorned with tears.
I smile through my own tears
When I contemplate your sorrows. …

Oh! To console you I want
To live unknown on earth!
Your beauty, which you know how to veil,
Discloses for me all its mystery.
I would like to fly away to you!

Your Face is my only Homeland.
It’s my Kingdom of love.
It’s my cheerful Meadow.
Each day, my sweet Sun.
It’s the Lily of the Valley
Whose mysterious perfume
Consoles my exiled soul,
Making it taste the peace of Heaven.

It’s my Rest, my Sweetness
And my melodious Lyre
Your Face, O my sweet Savior,
Is the Divine bouquet of Myrrh
I want to keep on my heart!

Your Face is my only wealth.
I ask for nothing more.
Hiding myself in it unceasingly,
I will resemble you, Jesus
Leave in me the Divine impress
Of your Features filled with sweetness,
And soon I’ll become holy.
I shall draw hearts to you.

So that I may gather
A beautiful golden harvest,
Deign to set me aflame with your fire.
With your adorned Mouth,
Give me soon the eternal Kiss!” (ET 109-110)

The Holy Face was present up to the very end of Therese’s life. It helped her to solve a problem which she had been working on for some time: how she could reconcile the traditional understanding of heaven as a place of rest with her desire to help those still on earth. In LT 254 (14.6.1897, her last letter to P. Roulland, one of her priest-brothers) Therese writes: “I really count on not remaining inactive in heaven. My desire is to work still for the Church and for souls. I am asking God for this and I am certain He will answer me. Are not the angels continually occupied with us without their ever ceasing to see the divine Face and to lose themselves in the Ocean of Love without shores? Why would Jesus not allow me to imitate them?” (ET 2, 1142) Just as the angels contemplate the Face of God yet are active on earth, so it must be for Therese, who so loved the Holy Face on earth and understands heaven as an eternal Face to face with God.

Finally for our survey, we note that on the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration, 1897 the picture of the Holy Face from the nuns’ choir was brought into the infirmary. It was while contemplating this picture that Therese summarized her whole devotion to the Holy Face. First she notes, “How well Our Lord did to lower His eyes when He gave us His portrait! Since the eyes are the mirror of the soul, if we had seen His soul, we would have died from joy” (CJ 5.8.7). And a little later she spoke the words that Mother Agnes mentioned to the Process: “These words of Isaias: ‘Who has believed our report? … There is no beauty in him, no comeliness, etc.’ (Is 53: 1-2), have made the whole foundation of my devotion to the Holy Face, or, to express it better, the foundation of all my piety. I, too, have desired to be without beauty, alone in treading the winepress, unknown to everyone” (CJ 5.8.9; ET 135). Thus for Therese, it was good that Christ came to us under the veil of suffering, else we would have been overwhelmed by his glory. And this invitation to love which His veiled Face presents to us can only be answered by a desire on our part to be hidden as well.

It remains to suggest briefly how one can understand Therese’s devotion to the Holy Face in light of her understanding of spiritual childhood. Does the Holy Face play any role in the Little Way? It does when we remember this fact: the Theresian paradox consists in the fact that the Child in the crib is the Man on the Cross and the Man on the Cross is the Child in the crib. This, of course, is one of the central paradoxes of the Gospel as well. Even on the Cross, Jesus is eternally in the bosom (eis ton kolpon, in sinum, in the womb!) of God the Father (Jn 1: 18).¹⁵ He is the Little Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (cf. Rev 13: 8).

The classic definition of the Little Way is the statement Therese made to Mother Agnes: her way of spiritual childhood is “the way of confidence and total abandon” (cf. LC ET 257). The Little Way is an echo of the Fiat of Our Lady that took her from the little sufferings of scrubbing the floors in Nazereth, to the sword that pierced her heart as she shared in her Son’s sacrifice on Calvary. It is the love of every child-martyr, the attitude of the Holy Innocents. In the end, it is an imitation of Christ’s own self-emptying love: “Many people think that her ‘little way’ means her ‘easy way,’ and so miss the whole point of her message. She did not teach the way of spiritual childishness, but of spiritual childhood. She did not simply become a child, but a Christ-child, the child of God, whose suffering is the suffering of the Cross, whose love is the love of the Cross.”¹⁶

Just as every act of Our Lord’s life was redemptive, so Therese means to teach us that every act, even the slightest, can “make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (cf. Col 1, 24). Therese, when we understand her whole name, is the answer to Ivan Karamazov, phrased not in terms of logic but in the answer of Love: The salvation of the world does depend on the sufferings of a child, of the Child Jesus. We are all called to enter these sufferings by walking the “Little Way.” This is how Therese understands spiritual childhood — abandonment, trust, love. The sort of love that dares to say, Even though He slays me, I will trust in Him (cf. Job 13, 15). The sort of love that says, Take this cup from Me, but Thy will be done (cf. Lk 22, 42). Therese was sent to remind us that we are all called to imitate — in the little things as much as the big — the Crucified Child.

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt is a convert to the Catholic faith and a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame.

1. Throughout this essay, I will be using the following system of abbreviations — SS: Story of a Soul (citing manuscript A, B, or C and the page number, recto or verso); LT: Therese’s letters (giving the letter number and the date in European format); LC: Last Conversations; CJ: the Yellow Notebook of Mother Agnes; PN: Therese’s poems; Pr: her prayers; RP: the Pious Recreations (these last four according to the numbering in the French critical editions). ET stands for the page number of the respective English translations of Therese’s works published by the Institute for Carmelite Studies.
2. Or to be most precise, “Therese of the Child Jesus of the Holy Face,” as she often signed her letters. Thus the two attributes are not even two “poles” of her spirituality, but are intimately interconnected: one cannot understand the Child Jesus (and thus “spiritual childhood”) without Him being the Child Jesus of the Holy Face.
3. The Passion of Thérèse of Lisieux (New York: Cross road, 1989) 226.
4. Procès de Béatification et Canoninsation de Sainte Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus et de la Sainte-Face. II: Procès Apostolique. (Rome: Teresianum, 1976) 152. Cf. LC 5.8.9.
5. The most readily available source in English is The Golden Arrow: The Autobiography and Revelations of Sr. Mary of St. Peter (1816-1848) On Devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus (reprinted: Rockford, IL: TAN, 1990).
6. She seems to have learned of the devotion from Mother Genevieve de S. Therese (one of the founders of the Lisieux Carmel), and of course from the writings of Sr. Marie de Saint-Pierre. See Guy Gaucher, The Story of a Life: St. Thérèse of Lisieux. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1987) 99; The Prayers of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (Washington, DC: ICS Publications) 93; and Stéphane-Joseph Piat, The Story of a Family: The Home of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Eng. trans. (New York: P J Kenedy & Sons, 1948; repr. Rockford, IL: TAN, 1994) 403-4.
7. The very same day is the first time she signs her one of her letters “Sister Therese of the Child Jesus of the Holy Face” (LT 80). Cf. Gaucher Story 99.
8. One thinks perhaps of St. Paul’s statement in Phil 3: 10-11: “That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”
9. This desire to be a second Veronica is in fact Therese’s own desire, expressed in a letter to Sr. Agnes of Jesus (LT 95), unfortunately too long to quote in this short essay.
10. This is a very common Theresian image, her understanding of the cry from the Cross as expressing Our Lord’s thirst for souls. See for example SS A 45v.
11. Inspired by the wedding invitation of a cousin who had recently been married, Therese even wrote her own “invitation” for her Profession and taking of the Veil (see SS A 77v). In this invitation she describes herself as “little Thérèse Martin, now Princess and Lady of His Kingdoms of the Holy Childhood and the Passion, assigned to her in dowry by her Divine Spouse, from which Kingdoms she holds her titles of nobility — of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face” (ET 168).
12. And also in the “pious recreations” (plays) she wrote which were performed by the nuns — unfortunately not in English yet. Special mention should be made though of RP 2, “The Angels at the Manger.” This is a nativity play, expressing the sentiments of various angels while they adore the Christ-Child in the manger. One of the angels bears the unusual name “the Angel of the Holy Face.” The editor of the French edition remarks, “it is not ordinary to cite Isaiah 53 in a composition for Christmas” Théâtre au Carmel, Récréations pieuses (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1985) 87.
13. At he end of her Oblation she again speaks of heaven as an “Eternal Face to Face” (ET 55).
14. Marie was probably Therese’s favorite novice. See Pierre Descouvemont’s book Thérèse of Lisieux and Marie of the Trinity, Alexandra Plettenberg-Serban, trans. (New York: Alba House, 1997).
15. Compare Therese’s desire to be love in the bosom of the Church her Mother, expressed in Ms B.
16. Caryll Houslander, The Passion of the Infant Christ (Sheed & Ward, 1949); reprinted as Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1995), 113.

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