On Saint Zélie Martin (via Church Life Journal)
An essay I wrote on the great woman and saint, Zélie Martin, was recently published on Church Life Journal around the time of her daughter’s Feast Day. This essay is one work that has come out of my research fellowship with the Sullivan Family Saints Initiative at the McGrath Institute for Church Life. Here’s a preview of the essay (read the rest at the link at the bottom of the text!).
Photo of the Artist: the lace-maker and mother of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, (Saint) Zélie Martin (Source: Les Archives du Carmel de Lisieux)
What gives me some confidence is her spirit of faith and her truly prodigious courage. What a valiant woman! She is not defeated by adversity nor elated by prosperity. She is admirable![1]
—Sister Marie-Dosithée, writing about her sister, Saint Zélie Guérin MartinI want to become a saint, and that won’t be easy. There’s a lot of wood to chop and the wood is as hard as rock. It would have been better if I’d tried earlier, while it was less difficult. Oh well, “better late than never.”[2]
—Saint Zélie Guérin Martin
While the nineteenth-century French saint, Zélie Guérin Martin, had a happy marriage with her husband (Saint Louis Martin), the mystery of her rejection from religious life that she experienced as a young adult remained with her. A year and a half before her death of breast cancer at 45, Zélie relayed her dreams for her one-day retirement, with allusion to the rejection, in a letter to her daughter, Pauline:
So I do nothing but dream of the cloister and solitude. With the ideas I have, I really don’t know how this wasn’t my vocation or how I didn’t remain a spinster, or retreat into a convent. Now I’d like to live to be very old, so I can withdraw in solitude when all my children are grown (CF 150, 211).
While acknowledging these dreams, Zélie was on guard about dwelling inordinately upon them. She added: “But I feel that all these are only empty ideas, so I hardly pay attention to them. It's better to use the present time well than to think so much about the future.”
This frictional dynamic of longing and persistent endurance defined much of Zélie’s life as a to-be saint—even though she herself doubted that she would ever be made one…
