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Dear St. Therese, how beautiful and true is the view you took of God when He sent you suffering! What tenderness of feeling in your love for Him! How blind I have been in the past! How often I have complained and murmured against God just when He was bestowing His choicest favors—crosses and trials—upon me! I have looked upon Him as "a hard and austere man" or as a father without feeling and sympathy, who regarded not the pains and tears of his child, and all the while in His love He was cutting most gently and tenderly, and that but to heal, "turning away His face meanwhile, lest He should be overcome by grief at my pain," as the most loving of mothers, though her tears flow fast and her heart is rent with grief, is yet driven by her very love to cause pain to her child, that its life may be saved. O St. Therese, help me to view suffering as you did, to realize that God never loves me so much as when He gives me the Cross as my portion, and obtain for me a delicate and refined love like yours. Pray for me, that God may give me the light to see the immense value of suffering for His own glory, for my eternal reward, and for the salvation of souls. May I, too, be wholly consumed by an insatiable thirst for suffering. I also recommend to you my special intentions in this Novena…. God will refuse you nothing.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory be.

Other Novena Prayers on page 46.

 

(1) —St. Therese knew full well that trifles are but trifles, yet that trifles go to make up sanctity, and sanctity is not a trifle. "Everything," she wrote, "has such value in the religious life…. Pick up a pin from a motive of love, and you may save a soul." Little crosses are always within easy reach, and she was eager to make good use of them. "It is such a jov," she cried out, "to think that for each little pain borne with joy we shall love God more through eternity" "If we only realized what we gain through self-denial in all things!" She did, and for that reason  9