Today is the feast day of Thérèse! I often remark that her face – or, more exactly, alternately one half of her face and alternately the other half (try to cover each half and look) – has been transfigured: It has been taken, shaped, transformed physically by divine love. Perhaps I hint at this observation too often. So I’m not going to go any farther with it today.

Instead, I want to talk about Thérèse’s discovery that she wanted to spend her time in heaven doing good on the earth, until the earth and its history should finish:

I can no longer spend time thinking much about the happiness that awaits me in heaven. One thing only do I wait for in my heart: the love that I will receive and that I will be able to give… I think of all the good I can do after my death: to make little children to be baptized, help priests, missionaries, the whole Church. (12 July 1897)

And:

I feel that my mission will begin… Yes, I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth. It is not impossible, since, even within the Beatific Vision, the angels watch over us. (17 July 1897)

And then the next day:

The good God wouldn’t give me this desire to do good on the earth after my death, if he did not want to realize it… What do you think, my little Mother?

She is right, of course. Her desire came from God. Where else could it come from – so good, so pure, so conscious of the link between heaven and earth?

And, having come from God, others testify that this desire of Thérèse’s was fulfilled; for example, Marcel Văn has her say,

You will cry a lot, but don’t forget, little brother, that I shall be there with you, doing everything in your place.

Thérèse’s confidence in the Church of Heaven is, by nature, contagious.

Having a contemplative vocation means becoming “at home” with the invisible world, as Thérèse was. The consciousness that the angels watch over us, that they are present; that the saints, too, are present – saints canonized, saints who will be canonized, saints who will never be canonized: all of this is a taste for what we could be doing in the future, too.

The more we feel at home with the invisible world, the easier it is to desire to be part of it, to do God’s will in that way, to keep going. But how does one enter more and more into the daily realities of the invisible world? By contemplation – by being transformed into love through the love that Jesus gives us – by loving, contemplative wisdom. Everyone in heaven is united by love and by the Blessed Vision of God. The only way to be at home with a heavenly community linked in such a way is to live, however faintly and inchoately, the same link on the earth here-below: love of God, love of neighbour.

If we continue on this road, maybe, perchance, by God’s freely given graces, we might begin to develop the same desire as the Little Flower:

I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.

And if we are anxious for this grace, it doesn’t hurt to ask God to give it to us.