← All Things Catholic with Dr. Edward Sri
All Things Catholic with Dr. Edward Sri
St.Thérèse & Trauma: The Real Story of Her Soul (Part 2)
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Many of our ongoing struggles trace back to deeper wounds—and this was certainly true for St. Thérèse. In part two of this series, Dr. Sri continues to explore the childhood traumas that affected St.Thérèse and more importantly, how God gave her the grace to do His will in the midst of them.
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Hi, I'm Edward Sri, and welcome to All Things Catholic, where real faith meets real life. I can be very strategic when I'm making my way through an airport to get through as quickly and efficiently as possible. And one day I was running late to catch a flight, and so I got online to figure out which TSA line was gonna be the shortest. I went to that line, went through security, put my bag on the conveyor belt. It goes into the screener, and I'm waiting, waiting on the other side to grab my bag and head off to my gate. But something happened. The bag didn't come out. The bag was stuck in the screener. And I see the TSA agent looking and talking to someone else and pointing at the screen, and I thought, oh, no, they're going to take my bag. And sure enough, my bag did not come down the conveyor belt toward me. They took it out, and the TSA agent brought it to another table for additional screening. And then they finally came out to me and said, hey, is this your bag? And I said, yes. And they said, well, look what we found inside. And. And it was a water bottle, a full water bottle. I forgot that I had my water bottle in there in my rush. And there was something inside my bag that I didn't realize was there, and it kept me from going through. I share that story because I think in life, there's. Sometimes we want to go certain places with our lives, but we find ourselves stuck, unable to advance, unable to break free. What do I mean? Let me give some examples here. Maybe anger, for example, I hear from so many great Catholic parents that love Jesus and their kids, and they find that they get angry at their kids and they get yelled at their kids, or they get lose their temper with their kids and they feel so badly about there. Have you ever been there, done that? I have. And no matter how hard they try, I'm not going to be angry anymore. And no matter how hard they pray, Jesus, don't let me be angry at the kids, they find their temper just gets the best of them. Maybe it's something else. Maybe for you. You struggle with strong reactions, expressing frustration and criticism to say your spouse, and you just snap and it just comes harsher than you wanted to, and you wonder, why do I keep doing that? Or maybe you find yourself just being very defensive and always complaining. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you pray, you find yourself still struggling with this. Or maybe you struggle with anxiety, where you're always worried something bad is going to happen. You're always looking around, oh, what's the worst thing that could go wrong here? And there's some impending doom around the corner. And every little problem, you catastrophize and make it like the worst case disaster that could possibly happen. And no matter how hard you try and you do the novena with trust and asking Jesus to help you, you still struggle with being anxious. Or maybe you put a lot of pressure on yourself to be perfect. You got to get everything right. And you fear failure. You really dread making a mistake, letting other people down, you dread being wrong. And no matter how hard you try to get better, whatever, we all have our struggle, right? We all have a struggle when it's one of these or something else. But no matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we work, no matter how hard we pray, we pray more rosaries, we pray more novenas, we still struggle. And that leaves us even feeling worse about ourselves. What's going on here? Well, I would suggest to you that maybe the reason we're still struggling is not because we're not trying hard enough or not because we're not praying hard enough, but maybe it's because there's something in our suitcase. There's something we need to unpack in our souls, something we need to unpack in our story, our life story from our past that's holding us back. You see, the way the Christian life works is when we first get on fire with our faith, we have this conversion, we start following Jesus as a disciple. It's common to notice some levels of progress. We start praying more, we start thinking about the Christian life more, we start thinking about the virtues more and wanting to live a better life life and break free from the sins that had chained us down for so many years. And we can see a certain level of progress, which is because of our intentionality. We're putting in more effort and we're trying harder and we're praying more. And all of that goes and we see improvement. But our sins, our weaknesses, our wounds are really deep. They go so deep into our soul, the deep roots of our sin. You don't get pulled just by a little bit of effort and a little bit of prayer. God has to come in and do a deeper work that only he can accomplish in our souls. So I invite us to consider what's in your suitcase. What is it that God may be inviting you to unpack from your story? Is there something from your childhood that happened? Something in a previous relationship, some very painful, traumatic event in your life? These things really affect Us, our upbringing. What we got from our upbringing deeply affects us. What we didn't get from our upbringing really affects us. Sometimes what we didn't get affects us more than what we did receive. It shapes us. It forms certain patterns of behavior, patterns of relating patterns for how we view the world. That certainly was the case with the saint we celebrate this week, the great Saint, Therese of Lisieux. We've been looking at in this podcast the story of her soul, the real story. Do you know the great heartache and pain and suffering she endured in her childhood, in her upbringing? Do you know the trauma that Therese went through and how it impacted her? And yet Therese, while she was quite aware of how deeply wounded she was and how weak she was, she found great freedom and healing in Jesus. How did she do that? It wasn't just by trying harder or praying harder. In fact, she writes about how she tried for 10 years to break free of this certain wound, this certain weakness in her soul that kept her down. She tried so hard for 10 years and nothing worked until one day Jesus came in and accomplished what she could not do on her own. How did she experience that healing power and freedom that comes from Jesus Christ? And how can we experience it, too? That's what we're going to take a look at in this week's podcast. So welcome to All Things Catholic. I'm your host, Edward Sri. And really fun to go through this life of Therese. I had so much fun just really reflecting on Therese's life. I taught Therese for so many years, going way back to the very beginning of my life as a professor professor and the beginning of my marriage. I remember just reading through everything that Therese wrote, all of her letters, her poems, her correspondence, and, of course, Story of a Soul, then reading the background, all the testimonies from her canonization, testimonies from her family. So there's so much of Therese's life that I've been so blessed to get to know. And it's really inspired me and encouraged me in my own walk with the Lord. But it was just in the last year, I came across this book I mentioned last week by Father Mark Foley. He's a Carmelite, and he wrote a book called the Context of Holiness. And what he did was he put together all these stories that I heard about, but he put it together through the lens of the impact these events in Therese's childhood and upbringing would have had on her soul. And he offers it as a lens to help us appreciate, understand better her spirituality and the little way that she's offering us and it just has opened up a whole new level for getting and so I'm excited to share some more of that with you. But first I just want to give a shout out to the many married couples in Northern Colorado for the Archdiocese of Denver. Beth and I were blessed to be with them at the marriage retreat that we did in Loveland, Colorado a couple weeks ago. So I just want to give a shout out to them and thank them for a wonderful day that we were able to spend together talking about the messiness of real married life. And my wife and I, we're going to get to actually go together on a trip to to present in Southern California if you are in the LA area. Saturday, October 11 the LA Love and Responsibility Conference is taking place and Beth and I are gonna be presenting all day long there at St. Kilian Catholic Church in Mission Viejo, California. We'd love to get to meet you there. October 4th I'll be in Round Rock, Texas for the Fullness of Truth conference October 15th and 16th. I'll be in the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin for the Bishop's lecture series on the evening of the 15th, and then a diocesan workshop for parish leaders on the 16th, and then finally October 17th, 18th. Real excited to be going back to Southern California for the Orange County Eucharistic Congress. So if you happen to be at any of these events or in that area, I'd love to come see you. Please come up and introduce yourselves. I always love to get to meet the listeners of the show. Now let's turn our attention back to the story of Tereza's soul. We remember from last week. I mentioned to you the great trauma of Teresa's upbringing and how there's a big turning point when her mother dies. She's only four and a half years and lost her mother. Therese herself describes that as a significant shift turning point in her life. Everything changed, she said. Before her mother's death, she was cheerful, confident and outgoing as a little girl. But then after her mother died, she became very timid, very shy, not liking being around with other people and hypersensitive that she could not control her emotions. She'd have these big feelings and she'd just start crying and then she'd be upset with herself and then she'd start crying for having cried and she just could not control her emotions. She was hypersensitive. She described that her sisters described that about her. Now we looked at last week how when after her mother died, the family moved to Lisieux and that was healing For Therese to have that time with just her family. But there were two difficult events that unfolded in her childhood. Two very difficult experiences that turned everything upside down for her again. So just as things started looking like okay, or she's getting some balance, she's getting some foundations, and things are going to be looking good, two significant events happened. First, her family sent her to a Benedictine boarding school as a day boarder. And while she excelled in her classes, she was first in her class. The separation from her family during the day was really, really hard. Having gone through so much separation with her mother and the wet nurse and then her mother again after her mother died and then having to move, there was so much in her life, a lot of instability. Being away from her family now was really hard for Therese. She writes about how she didn't know how to play with the other kids. She didn't fit in. The other children didn't include her. They made fun of her. And she described this as the saddest days of her life. That's what she writes about, how sad this time was. But I think what's really, really important to look at is that she also didn't tell anyone about the struggle she was having at school. She kept it all inside. She buried it inside. She didn't tell anybody about it. So picture this young 8 year old girl struggling in school. I mean, on the outside it looks like everything's going great because she's getting good grades, but she's struggling socially, feeling so lonely, feeling so out of place, missing the connection with her family and keeping that all inside. That's the first event. Second event, even more traumatic, something happened in her relationship with her older sister, Pauline. Let me tell you about this here. So after Zelie died, Therese and Pauline became very close. They were the two younger sisters in the family, Celine and Therese. They were close friends. And after the mother died, Celine turned to one of the older sisters, Marie, and said, you will be my mother now. And Therese, the youngest, you know, imitated Celine and went to Pauline and said, hey, Pauline, you will be my mother now. And from then on, Pauline and Therese developed this very close bond. And Pauline's closeness with Therese had a profound impact on Therese. Pauline was like a mom to her. She did the daily motherly tasks for Therese. She would wake Therese up in the morning, dress her, do her hair, get her ready for breakfast, get her ready for the day, help her say her morning prayer prayers, put her down at night. Pauline really formed a maternal bond with Therese. Therese was attached to Pauline as a motherly figure. In fact, Pauline was the central authority figure in her life. I think there's some evidence to say that maybe even more of an authority than Louis Martin, the father. There's a story about how Louis Martin was going to go for a walk, but Therese was like, no, I got to check with Pauline. And only if Pauline approves. And you get the sense that Pauline really was like this maternal figure. And they were very close. They had a really beautiful, close relationship. Intimate conversations, sharing heart to heart with each other. And Therese called Pauline my second mother. That's how important Pauline was to Therese, a second mother. Now, something very, very difficult happened in their relationship. You see, there was a time when Therese wanted to share something with Pauline about a great dream. She had a great desire. Therese said, I want to be a Herm someday. I want to give everything to Jesus. I want to be a hermit. And Pauline responded saying, oh, I desire the same thing. I want that as well. And I'll wait for you, Therese. I'm waiting for you to be old enough to leave. Now, who knows exactly the nature of that conversation? But we do know that Therese, little Therese, took that as a promise from Pauline, her second mother. And she was just so overjoyed that, oh, Pauline wants the same thing I want. And Pauline's waiting for me to grow up so that we could leave together. And we'll always be together. We'll be hermits together. It'll be beautiful. And so Therese thought this was like a promise that Pauline had made to her. You can imagine how devastating it was when Therese happened to overhear a conversation. It was Pauline sharing with her sister Marie, the older sisters, about how Pauline would be entering the convent soon. That completely wiped out Therese overhearing that conversation. This is her close friend, this is her second mother, who promised that she would wait till Therese was older and then they could run off together and be hermits. And now all of a sudden, Pauline's leaving now without her. Again, this sounds like just a simple little story in family life, But I want you to know that we all have our simple little stories in family life. Simple little stories that. Oh, yeah, that was really hard. Oh, that was really sad. But they deeply affect us. That's what we're going to see here with the story of Therese. I think we could say a few things. First, this is another abandonment that Therese is experiencing. An abandonment by a mother figure. Remember when Therese. This is what we looked at last week. When she was three months old, her mother couldn't nurse her anymore, so she was separated from her mother. And Therese was raised by a wet nurse named Rose out in the country. And so just separated for 12 months. Only seeing each other for short visits once a week. That would have been really hard for a little infant. And then she attaches to Rose, really connects with Rose and country life all of a sudden. Now Rose's job is done being the wet nurse. And at the 15 month mark, she brings little Therese back. And so now Therese is separated from Rose and now she's trying to attach to her mom. And we saw that there were challenges there. But then her mom dies at the age of four and a half. I mean, that was. That's just a lot to deal with for any child. Now she attaches to Pauline as her second mom. And there's just such closeness, such friendship. And now Pauline, the second mother, is leaving. Another separation, another feeling of abandonment. That would have been so hard. And this leaves a tremendous mark on Therese's soul. She writes about how much suffering this caused her. And we're going to take a look at this isn't just like, oh, hey, little girl, come on, get over this. She's pursuing God's will and a religious vocation. I'm not saying what Pauline, you know, Pauline going off to the convent was necessarily wrong, but I just want looking at this from the perspective of Therese and the impact it had on her. And it wasn't just the feeling of abandonment. I think there's a second thing we could see. There was a feeling of betrayal because Therese felt like this was a broken promise. She thought, well, Pauline, I thought it was supposed to wait for me. And what happened here, she doesn't want to wait for me. I'm not important what happened. These are her words. Listen what Therese says. She says, Pauline was going to leave me to enter a convent. I understood that she would not wait for me. And I was about to lose my second mother. So there's a sense of betrayal here, a broken promise that was really hard for Therese. And then thirdly, consider how Therese found out. It wasn't like Pauline came and said, hey, Therese, I remember we've talked about how we want to go together and all this, but I sense that God's asking me to go now and I'm hoping you'll come soon and we'll still see each other on weekly visits. You're so important to me. That's not what happened. What happened was Therese just happened to overhear Pauline talking about it to someone else. That Pauline shared with another sibling before she shared with Therese. That was really heartbreaking for Therese. It was like a breach of friendship, a breach of their close intimate friend relationship. And then finally, the last thing I'll highlight here is what happened. Historically we know that she was, Therese was able to go visit Pauline in the convent. They would make a weekly visit, I think it was on Thursdays. It would be a short visit. But these visits were re. Traumatizing for Therese because she wasn't able to go one on one and just have a one on one time with Pauline. The whole family went, even the aunt and even the cousins. So there's a large group there. And Therese writes about this, about how Pauline spoke with the whole family and gave very little in conversation to just Therese. I want you just again to think about that. They used to talk every day, one on one, daily intimate conversation, sharing heart to heart. And now there's little one on one time. In fact, there was one time she goes there and Pauline doesn't even really even acknowledge her because there was, the aunt was there and there's older people there. So like Pauline was trying to honor the aunt and others and didn't even acknowledge Therese being there that day. And that was so painful. And Therese at the end of the visit is just in utter tears. And she writes about this in Story of a Soul, saying, it was at that moment I realized Pauline was lost to me. So again, this isn't, you know, just a modern psychologist fully here. This, this, this Carmelite looking back and trying to conjure up all these like, oh, look at, look at the impact on Therese. This is Therese's own words. She's describing how much this was a suffering for her. It felt like a death to her. Pauline is lost to me now. Therese, she understood that these events impacted her. And I want to highlight this because this is something we can take away from there. I think what we could do sometimes in life is say, oh yeah, what happened in my past, that's not a big deal. Oh, I'm over it. I've worked through that. Other people suffer more than I do. And we end up just burying those hurts, those pains from our past. We don't talk about it, we don't like to talk about it. We don't like to go unpack the suitcase of our life and look inside and see what's there. We don't want to share it with others. We don't want to seek help. But we don't realize how much it really does affect us. These things from our lives really do affect us. They affect our soul, our relationship with God, our ability to trust him. It affects our marriages, our dating relationships, if we're parents. It affects our relationship with our kids. It affects our ability to handle conflict, to handle stress. These things really affect us. But the challenge is that many times, because we don't want to go back and look at those things, we just bury them. We just keep them all underneath. I don't want to look at this. In fact, that's actually what Therese did in her childhood. I mean, she realizes the impact when she's older and she writes Story of a Soul. But in her childhood, as this was unfolding, when she's around 8 years old, her mom dies at 4 and a half. She goes off to the boarding school. Pauline enters the convent. She loses her second mother. And she just buried it. She just stuffed it all down. She did not share with anybody how it was affecting her. She did not open up and say, I'm really lost at the school. I'm not fitting in. I don't know how to connect. I don't know how to relate. I'm really lonely. I'm stressed out. This is wiping me out. She did not raise her hand and say, please help me. And then when Pauline leaves and she's in utter devastation, another abandonment, losing her second mother, feeling betrayed, feeling there was a broken promise. When all that's going on, she doesn't raise her hand and say, this is really hard for me. I need help. She stuffs it all down. She just tries to bury it. And you know what happened as a result? Therese writes in Story of a Soul, it wasn't long before I became sick. I love that line. It was not long before I became sick. In other words, when we stuff these things down, they're gonna come out. They're gonna come out in other painful, dysfunctional ways. Therese suddenly has a complete meltdown. It starts with violent headaches. She's constantly having headaches. She starts getting rashes, fevers, uncontrollable shaking. Eventually, she's just brought home and she just gets worse. And her sickness doesn't get better. But it's more than just a physical sickness. She has terrifying dreams, attacks of terror, horrifying visions. And this is not often talked about. When you see the little plastic statue of Therese, they don't often present to you, hey, here's all that Therese went. This poor young little girl. Think about what she was enduring. She describes how she had the urge to throw herself headfirst off the bed. That's not normal. That's not what happens. Just because you have A cold or just because you have a long fever. Violently. Something is happening inside of her. She has a dream, a vision where she sees the nails in the wall that become really big and thick like charred fingers. And she screams out, I'm so afraid. In the midst of all of her hysteria, her father comes to sit next to her to try to comfort her. And he sits next to her and he has a black hat in his hand. And Therese sees the black hat and she shouts out, oh, a great black beast. She thinks there's like some monster ready there to attack her. She would bang her head on the wooden bed stand. That doesn't happen when you have an ear infection, you know, or when you got strep throat. No, no, there was something serious going on. The doctor said science is powerless before these phenomena. There's nothing to be done. You can understand why the family thought there was something supernatural happening here. Her sister Marie said the devil tried to kill our little sister. Therese herself said that. Yeah, this sickness was not just on the natural level. It came from a demon. She said the devil had external power over me, to incite great fears in me. So yes, there's a physical ailment and then the devil's exploiting it. And so there is something supernatural happening. Therese is very clear on that. And at the same time, it makes a lot of sense on a natural level. Right. And that's what Therese says. Therese says, I believe I'd become ill on purpose. I became ill on purpose. I made myself sick. I mean, think about it. That makes sense. Think of what all that Therese was going through. The trauma of her infancy, separations, her mother dying, separation by going to school, and then her second mother leaving. This was all just bottled up inside. And her illness, I think we could say, was her body's way of crying out for help. And you know, you look at the theme from what we looked at last week to this week. She's searching for her mom. She's searching for her mom. We live in a day and age where a lot of people talk about father wounds. Fathers who were just absent, not involved in their kids lives, didn't know their kids emotionally, fathers who left, abandoned the family, fathers who were just too busy with their careers, fathers who were shaming their kids, beating their kids, abusing their kids. You hear all about father wounds, wounds. In our world today, we don't hear as much about mother wounds, though. And yet that's clearly what Therese is struggling with. A certain mother wound. She's searching for her mom. And there's Many souls today that didn't have a great relationship with their mom. Maybe their mom wasn't around at all. Maybe their mom left the family. Maybe their mom died. Or maybe their mom just wasn't emotionally available. Or maybe their mom was critical. Maybe their mom was controlling. Maybe their mom was just always anxious and worried and manipulating and putting pressure. We could have mother wounds as well, just like we can have father wounds. I think Therese's story of her soul is the story of a great mother wound. And I think we could see this clearly at the moment of her miraculous healing, see what was happening. So she's in complete hysteria. She's just having these horrible visions. She's sick, she has this fever. Nothing is working on the natural level to help her. And one day, as she's still grieving the loss of her mother, her mother Zelie, she calls out in a low voice, mama, Mama. She's crying out for her mom. She's searching for the face of her mother. And she was saying things like this a lot. And one of the sisters hears it and go, there she goes, crying for Mama again, but doesn't do anything. But she starts crying a little louder. Mama. Mama. And then another sister, Marie, comes in. And Marie tries to comfort her, tries to give her a drink. And then when Therese sees the drinks, she says, oh, they're trying to poison me. So again, she's in again, hysteria. And Marie is just so desperate, just so sad for what's happening to her little sister Therese. She falls on her knees and just prays to this Mary statue, begging the Blessed Virgin Mary to heal her little sister Therese. In Story of a Soul, Therese writes about how at this moment, as Marie's on her knees praying, and Therese also is laying in bed and sees this statue there in the room of the Blessed Virgin Mary and turns to Mary and all of a sudden notices a miracle with this statue. That the statue smiles Mary, smiling at Therese, and appears so beautiful, more beautiful than anything she had ever seen before. And Therese is so moved by the beauty of Mary's face in this statue, the spiritual mother, the face filled with such benevolence and tenderness. She says, Therese writes, what penetrated the depths of my soul the most was the ravishing smile of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And in an instant, she was cured. How beautiful that it was the smile of a mother, an attentive mother, a loving face of a mother, the spiritual Mother Mary. That was what brought about the great healing, the miraculous healing of Therese interiorly and physically, and that great sickness that she was enduring. But I want to take a look in closing at the deep emotional healing that took place in Therese's life. And this comes a little bit later, in her early teen years. It's called the famous Christmas miracle. Therese really points this to this as another big turning point in her life where everything changed for her for the good, that she finally experiences this amazing freedom and healing in her life that she's been longing for. You may know the story. It's Christmas Eve, and they go to the midnight Mass, and the Father comes home. He's a little grumpy. You know, I can understand that. You know what? Father might not be grumpy after midnight mass. You're just tired. You're exhausted. And I could get that. And he sees the shoes sitting by the fireplace. Now, they had the tradition in France of the kids leaving the shoes out, and the Father would put little presents in the shoe. But Therese is, like, 14 years old and a little old for this, and. And the father's a little exhausted and grumpy, and he's complaining. He says, oh, I got to do the shoe thing again. Well, at least this will be the last year. Now, Therese happened to be coming down the stairs at this moment and overhears her father's complaining words. And this is the kind of thing that would normally set her off. Her emotions would just get the best of her. And she was hypersensitive. She would just break down in tears and just be really upset and frustrated. And Celine was on the stairs as well. And Celine sees Therese and sees the tears welling up in Therese's eyes and basically says, don't go downstairs. Don't go down there. You're going to be really sad. Don't ruin Christmas Eve. Don't go downstairs, Therese. But Therese finds an inner strength in that instant that she had never experienced before. And she'd been trying for 10 years to have strength, to be able to attend to her emotions well, instead of letting them control everything. And she says, the work I've been unable to do in 10 years, Christ did in that instant. And she said, it wasn't me. It wasn't me just trying harder or praying harder. It was Jesus that changed my heart. Now, what I want to highlight here, this is what we're going to close with, is that I want you to note that God did not heal Therese of her big emotions. I don't want to give the impression that all of a sudden, Therese didn't have big emotions anymore. God did not free Therese from her hypersensitivity. That's not what happened. God gave her a strength, a newfound strength to work with them. In other words, the feelings inside didn't change. They're still there. She feels the pain, she feels the sorrow over what her dad says, and tears are already glistening in her eyes, she writes. But she was comforted and strengthened. Yeah, she was able to comfort and strengthen those emotions within her, to redirect them. She noticed what she was feeling, acknowledged it, and found a strength of soul to hold back the tears and go downstairs and delight in the gifts that were there in her shoe and delight in her father. And the rest of the evening went great. So I want to be clear that she wasn't delivered from struggles with her emotions. She was just given a special grace, a strength to attend to those emotions. Well, and this is the point that Foley makes, and I'll put this quote in the in the show notes, there's a couple quotes I'm going to give you here. He says Therese was not healed of her hypersensitivity. Rather, she was given the strength to deal with it. Her father's remark deeply hurt Therese, but she received the strength not to give in to her tears. Her feelings were not changed. Rather, she was given the strength to control them. Forcing back my tears and controlling the poundings of my heart, she writes. And then Foley goes on to explain, God did not remove Therese from the battle of her emotions, but gave her the fortitude to remain in the battle. And I think that's just helpful for us to remember. So many times they just like we say, I don't want to have to battle with my temper. I don't have to battle with my discouragement. I don't have to battle with my fears. I don't ever want to battle with my anxiety. Well, most of us are going to have that battle to the day we die. The question is, how do we respond to that? Will we have the inner resources to be able to help us with that? It, Foley goes on to say, once we can accept, the answer is that I'll never be able to be freed completely from these deep wounds, these deep fears, this shame, this temptation to anger, this temptation to lust is always. There's always going to be the temptations. But can we find the strength in Jesus to allow him to help me attend to those emotions and those fears and those desires? Foley says this Trez did not make it a goal to get beyond the effects of her childhood, but to do the will of God in the midst of them. Therese understood that the emotional wounds of her childhood were not obstacles to spiritual growth, but the context of growing in holiness. And that's my hope, encouragement for all of you is that whatever you may struggle with, we all have our struggles, whatever those are. To think of them as not just something, oh, I just got to get rid of it. I got to overcome it by trying harder and praying harder. But to see them not as obstacles in our path to holiness, but to see them as the context for our growth in holiness. They're the places God wants to meet us. And like Therese and like Marie, on that day, we can fall on our knees and beg God for the grace to help us to do what we can't do on our own. And I also want to encourage us to be willing to look inside the story of our soul, to open up the suitcase, open up the bag, and is there something in there that's actually keeping me, like my water bottle as I was going through tsa? Something that's keeping me from moving forward in my walk with the Lord and living in community, well, with others and just being a fully integrated human being. Is there something from my past that's behind that strong reaction I tend to have? Or that great fear and terror that binds me? Or that desire to please all the time? Or that fear of failure? Or that anger that just comes out and I just can't control it? Whatever it is, whatever we struggle with, can we be curious and ask, what's the story of my soul? What were the things from my past, from my upbringing, events of my life that might be at the roots of why I tend to respond this way? Because if we want to grow in virtue, in holiness, and receive the love of God more, these are the things God wants to heal. These are the blockages, the things that keep us from receiving his love, living in his love, and sharing his love more. Thanks so much for listening, my friends. We'll see you next week. God bless. Sa.