Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Therese of the Child Jesus. This is the first year as a religious institute that we are celebrating her day as a feast day and not just as a memorial. We are a missionary order. She's the patroness of the missions and so we finally put two and two together and decided to give her the due honor which she deserves as a special patron of ours.
For the homily I'd just like to reflect on something that St. Therese writes in her autobiography at the beginning of her autobiography, The Story of a Soul. Essentially there she's trying to understand predestination and love. First, regarding predestination, in Ephesians 1:5, St. Paul says that God has, quote, "destined or literally predestined us in love to be His sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of His will." The scholastic theologians all teach that from all eternity God has predestined or preordained the number of the elect, bestowing on them the grace needed to obtain eternal life without any respect to merits on their part. So that eternal life is a free gift from God. And on the other hand, too, it's also true that no adult enters heaven unless with his own free will he or she cooperates with the grace of God. So grace is free but it's not a free ride. It's a gift that needs to be put to good use.
And aside from that truth, Blessed John of Scotus teaches that God chose for His heavenly court our Lord, our Lady, all the angels, all the people that He wished to have there with their varying degrees of perfection before He foresaw either the fall or sin or punishment for sinners.   But without going too far into the predestination debates, St. Therese writing in her autobiography says that this question of the differences between souls and their glory and their places in paradise was something that perplexed her. "I wondered for a long time," she writes, "why God has preferences, why all souls don't receive an equal amount of graces. I was surprised when I saw Him shower extraordinary favors on saints who had offended Him, for example, St. Paul, St. Augustine, and whom He forced, so to speak, to accept His graces. When reading the lives of the saints, I was puzzled at seeing how our Lord was pleased to caress certain ones from the cradle to the grave, allowing no obstacle in their way when coming to Him, helping them with such favors that they were unable to soil the immaculate beauty of their baptismal robe. I wondered why poor savages died in great numbers without ever having heard the name of God pronounced."  So what's the reason why God gives great graces to one soul and not so many graces to another? Why is it that to one He bathes them in the fullness of the faith, the fullness of the sacraments, and to another He seemingly only gives the light of natural reason? Why doesn't He treat us all equally? Well, here's the Theresian insight into that. She writes, quote, "Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery. He set before me the book of nature. I understood how all the flowers He created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty and the fields would no longer be decked out with little white wildflowers. And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus' garden," she says. "He willed to create great souls comparable to lilies and roses, but He had created smaller ones, and these must be content to be daisies or violets destined to give joy to God's glances when He looks down at His feet. Perfection consists in doing His will, in being what He wills us to be," she writes.
In short, God loves variety. A garden with various plants and flowers is much more interesting, much more beautiful than one that has only one type of plant or one type of flower. That's how it is in heaven, essentially. Heaven's all the more beautiful because of the variety of the splendor and glory of the various saints and angels.  So when we struggle to understand people and maybe why some people even in the Church, maybe in our religious orders or in our religious associations, if we struggle to understand why some people are less on the ball than others or not as gifted or not as generous or less committed or less zealous or maybe not as faithful, without getting into the reading of the hearts, perhaps we can safely defer back to this picture of Jesus' heavenly garden with the variety of flowers and knowing that not everyone is meant to be a rose or a lily. If we have that perspective, actually, we'll probably be more at peace and inclined to be more merciful towards others, and that's usually a good thing. Peace and mercy are usually a good thing.
Perfection consists in being what God wills us to be, Therese says, so we can sow the seeds of the gospel in the hearts of others and pray for them that they'll cooperate with God's grace and become the person that they're meant to be in His garden, and we can leave the weeding and the pruning and the growth and the results to the Lord, essentially. That's the first note on predestination.
Right after that in her autobiography, Therese continues talking about the nature of love. She writes this, quote, "I understood too that our Lord's love is revealed as perfectly in the most simple soul who resists His grace in nothing as in the most excellent soul. In fact, since the nature of love is to humble oneself, if all souls resemble those of the holy doctors who illuminated the Church with the clarity of their teachings, it seems God would not descend so low when coming into their heart. But He created the child who knows only how to make his feeble cries heard. He has created the poor savage who has nothing but the natural law to guide him. It is to their hearts that God deigns to lower Himself. These are the wild flowers whose simplicity attracts Him. When coming down in this way, God manifests His infinite grandeur. Just as the sun shines simultaneously on the tall cedars and on each little flower as though it were alone on the earth, so our Lord is occupied particularly with each soul as though there were no others like it. And just as in nature all the seasons are arranged in such a way as to make the most humblest daisy bloom on a set day, in the same way everything works out for the good of each soul," writes St. Therese.
It's actually a very beautiful picture of our Lord and of His love and of His goodness that she paints for us there at the beginning of her autobiography. "The nature of love is to humble oneself," she said, and God is the first to do that in His dealings with us. A concrete example of this comes to mind. What did God do after the fall, after Adam and Eve sinned? He actually made clothes for them, of all things, right? Genesis 3:21. It's actually a pretty humble thing to do for a couple that basically just spit in your eye and told you that they wished you were dead. You make clothes for them. God is truly loving. He's amazingly humble at the same time. He has a servant's heart, as Jesus so many times demonstrated to us in His ministry.
The more we humble our minds and our hearts and ourselves and our day-to-day lives, the more God will, in the words of St. Therese, stoop down to reveal Himself to us, and the more His love will shine through us as well. He shined ever so brightly through the little flower that we celebrate today, and He wants to shine ever so brightly in us and through us as well.  So let's ask Our Lady for the grace to become the person that God created us to be and desires us to be in His heavenly garden, as we honor the greatest saint in modern times, as Pope St. Pius X said of St. Therese of Lisieux, even before she was a saint. St. Therese, the youngest doctor of the Church, who knew the heart of our Lord better than almost anyone.  Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.