This “anthropology of love,” as we might call it, is shown to us in the mystifying words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In the middle of the night a couple months before she died, Thérèse sat up in bed, coughed up blood, and declared:
I feel that I’m about to enter into my rest. But I feel especially that my mission is about to begin, my mission of making God loved as I love Him, of giving my little way to souls. If God answers my desires, my heaven will be spent on earth until the end of the world. Yes, I want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth. This isn’t impossible, since from the bosom of the beatific vision, the angels watch over us. I can’t make heaven a feast of rejoicing; I can’t rest as long as there are souls to be saved. But when the angel will have said: “Time is no more!” then I will take my rest; I’ll be able to rejoice, because the number of the elect will be complete and because all will have entered into joy and repose. My heart beats with joy at this thought.
Thérèse cannot imagine a heaven where she would have to sever herself from those whom Christ called her to love. So long as Christ hastens to poor sinners in mercy, Thérèse desires to hasten toward them in his mercy. In her imagination, this means that until the end of time, Thérèse’s heaven will be spent as a servant of Christ’s mercy directed toward those still struggling on earth. She desires their well-being, and desiring their well-being is, for now, her joy. Salvation for Thérèse is not at all private, but it is absolutely personal.
Likewise, Teresa of Calcutta, who took Thérèse’s name as her own religious name, would never dream of cutting herself off in death from the poorest of the poor whom she hastened to love throughout her life in obedience to Christ’s call. She did not consider her life as a test to “get into heaven” but rather as a practice for heaven. Loving the least among us was, to Teresa, the way to learn what heaven is: the communion of all in Christ.
With a profound understanding of what it means to be genuinely human and thus of what true love is, Teresa penned words that confounded many upon their publication: “If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light to those in darkness on earth.” Again, how could a mother enjoy a holiday while even one of her children was suffering? For years and years, day after day, Teresa took “the unwanted, unloved, unclaimed” as her own children. She loved them with a mother’s fierce affection. They were a part of her: the whole Teresa includes those whom she loves. If they live in darkness, then she would choose to keep them company in the darkness rather than enjoying light all by herself (so long as Christ permitted it). Teresa chose the poor in obedience to Christ, who chooses the poor as his own beloved. Her enigmatic words and unfathomable desire give witness to Ratzinger’s description of the anthropology of love: “Love cannot close itself against others or be without them as long as time, and with it suffering, is real.”
Saints desire in death to continue loving those whom they leave behind. The seriousness of this truth in the witness of saints like Thérèse and Teresa shocks us, forcing us to think more seriously about and imagine more boldly the love of our beloved dead for us who remain. Their longing for us may in fact exceed our longing for them. The saints stretch across the interruption of death toward communion with us in Christ. The desire of the saints comes as a calling to the living, to respond to this desire for communion that makes a claim on us. Openness to continuing relationship—albeit on different terms—with those who have died is necessary for those of us who are “living” to be fully and wholly ourselves, as we are created and called to be. The problem, of course, is that in modern times we deny death, avoid the process of dying, and have developed the social habit of looking away from the dead as if they were not still a part of us now and we were not meant to be one with them in the fullness of time.
This excerpt from Our Faithful Departed: Where They Are and Why It Matters is reprinted with permission of Ave Maria Press.
Leonard J. DeLorenzo has worked at the McGrath Institute for Church Life since 2003 and teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is an award-winning author who has written or edited eleven books, including Witness, What Matters Most, and Our Faithful Departed.
