Return to Baltimore Carmel's Home Page Return to the Therese index page An e-mail from our sisters in Indianapolis:
Carmel in China
On January 27, 1999, our Sister Helen was informed of the death of Sister Thérèse Elie (Zhou Shu-Ying). She had died in the Labor Correction Camp in which she was sent to be "rehabilitated" after her release from prison where she had spent 30 years of her life.
Our Sister Helen was able to visit Sister Thérèse Elie November 18-20, 1993, while Helen was visiting relatives in China. At that time Sr. Thérèse Elie was 85 years old. Though she had been freed from the Labor Correction Camp in 1987, she chose to continue living at the camp in order to continue serving the local people. For her, the camp had become her Carmel. She called it the Carmel of the Farm.
She was greatly loved by those whom she served.
When Helen met her, she noticed the coarse brown vest she was wearing. Sr. Thérèse Elie had made it from her old habit. It had survived the Cultural Revolution and house raids. Sr. Thérèse Elie had given it to her niece and someone ripped out the seams so it had become unrecognizable. Many years later she found the pieces at the bottom of a trunk....
In 1998, she wrote to our Sister Helen with this instruction: "During this past year, I have felt my energy diminishing daily. But this is normal with old folks so please do not worry. I only pray that our Blessed Mother of Mount Carmel would help me to remain faithful to God's love and to joyfully complete my final journey. I have no other needs, and I only ask that you pray for me, pray for me...[ellipses in original] However, I do want to beg of you that after I die, would you please relate the following to the superiors of our Carmelite Order:
- Zhou Shu-Ying - Born in October 1909, was baptized Teresa
- 9 July 1933 - Entered Carmel of St. Joseph in Tou-se-wi, Ziekawei, Shanghai
- 27 October 1934, Solemnity of St. Joseph - Reception of holy habit, became Sr. Marie de S'Elie
- 18 April 1935, Feast of Christ the King - First Profession
- 25 December 1940, following Midnight Mass - Final Profession, changed name Sr. Thérèse Elie de l'Enfant Jesus
- 19 September 1958, was arrested and sentenced to prison for 10 years
- 7 January 1970, was transferred from prison to "Carmel of the Farm"
What she referred to as her "Carmel of the Farm" was actually the Bai-Mao-Ling Labor Camp in Anhui Province where she and many religious from Shanghai were confined for "thought re-education". It was her choice to remain there after her release in 1987.
She said she had never left Carmel because she always carried Carmel in her heart. She was indeed, like Teresa, a true daughter of the Church.
[signed] Terese
Please hold on to this narrative about Thérèse Elie. I’ll come back to it.
Tonight, my friends, we are gathered by another Thérèse, Thérèse Martin, Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, an extraordinary saint and our friend; for me a woman whose life has come to signify transformation, the call to holiness, and love.
As you may remember Thérèse was born on January 2, 1873 to a loving middle class family in Alençon, France. Her father Louis was a watchmaker and had a jewelry shop; her mother Zélie ran a lace-making business that employed 20 women. [Ahern, p. 19] Mrs. Martin died of breast cancer in 1877 leaving 4 year old Thérèse to the care of her father and 4 older sisters. The loss was enormous for her. She became so hypersensitive that she cried over the smallest things and then she would cry all over again because she cried. She became a day student at the near-by Benedictine abbey school, but did not flourish in that environment; rather she became sick and had to withdraw. She described those years as “the saddest of her life”. It was also during this time that terrible scruples afflicted her and made her even more miserable. Until December of 1886 she was still daddy’s very little girl and then there was a marvelous transformation which Thérèse described as “the grace of leaving her childhood” and “the grace of her complete conversion”. It was after midnight mass when she overheard her beloved father say, “Well, fortunately this will be the last year.” Her father was thinking that surely his 14 year old daughter would give up her little-girl ways about Christmas presents left as a surprise in magic Christmas shoes. Thérèse was mortified, suppressed her tears, and went down to the Christmas celebration changed forever, the first transformation.
Thérèse entered the Carmel of Lisieux on April 9, 1888 and aridity in prayer soon overtook her.[De Meester, p. 81 ff] She often fell asleep in chapel. In 1889 her father became seriously ill and Thérèse described it as the “greatest cross [for herself] that she could have imagined.” [De Meester, p. 87 ff] That same year Thérèse, probably reacting to Jansenistic preaching, struggled again with a tinge of scruples and this evoked a strong response from Fr. Pichon: “I forbid you in the name of God to call into question your being in the state of grace. The devil is laughing heartily at you. I protest against this ugly mistrust. Believe obstinately that Jesus loves you.” Then in 1894 Celine entered the Carmel and brought with her a little notebook of scripture passages. In them Thérèse found the inspiration for her little way, [De Meester, p. 26 ff] which she described in Manuscript A started in January, 1895. In June Thérèse made her Oblation to Merciful Love. She described her little way again in Manuscript B written in September, 1896 and yet again in Manuscript C, June, 1897. The soul who had worried so much about her sinfulness now was able to entrust herself completely to God's tender care. The transformation of confidence.
In her little way Thérèse prescribes only two things: 1) She reminds us that God invites us to the banquet even when we are sinners. She tells us that we must desire to grow in the love of God and then entrust ourselves to God’s merciful care, for God is moved by reliance on the divine compassion.
2) Next, Thérèse gives us a mandate for generosity, for exercising a life of holiness in ordinary things. She writes, “I have no other means of proving my love for [God] other than that of strewing flowers; that is, not allowing one little sacrifice to escape, not one look, one word, profiting by all the smallest things and doing them through love.”On October 21, 1896, Thérèse began corresponding with Maurice Bellière, a seminarian. Listen to the tone of his first letter,
"My good little Sister, The Lord is sending me a hard trial--as He does with those He loves--and I am very weak. Within a few days He will undoubtedly send me to the Seminary of the African Missions. My desire will at last be realized, but I still have to struggle a lot. I have to break myself away from a number of cherished and strong attachments, as well as from some soft and expensive habits of easy living, from a whole pleasant and happy past which still strongly appeals to me....The missionary has to be a saint and a saint I am not." He signs the letter "Devotedly yours in Christ, Maurice Barthelemy Bellière, Aspiring Missionary." [Ahern, p. 57-58]
Thérèse takes him in hand, prays for him, and instructs him in her little way.
Listen to his last letter,
"My dear and more than dear little Sister, Rejoice with me. The one you love so much and for whom you have offered so many prayers has at last had his dearest desires fulfilled, at least almost completely. Little Sister, your brother has been a missionary for a day! Tell me, to whom does he owe it? To Jesus first of all Who chose him, but after Him to my good little sister from the Carmel in Lisieux, to my sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus. You have succeeded completely, for it is you who have done it all. From the way I was acting it looked as though I would derail what you were doing, but your Jesus is so good. He loves you so much that He could not say no to your suffering which was begging mercy for me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, kind little Sister...."He signs this letter simply Brother Louis, and adds a Ps. "Forgive me if in any way I cause you pain--I don't mean to.” [Ahern, pp. 231-233]The third transformation.
Before she died, Thérèse authorized her sisters to edit her manuscripts freely.[De Meester, p. 4] For example, the date of composition for Manuscript A was changed;[De Meester, p.158] text was omitted, [De Meester, p.162] and text was added. Sr. Geneviève tells us that Thérèse didn’t use the term “spiritual childhood”; rather she called it “her little Way.”[De Meester, p. 5] And so even though Therese herself *never* used the term spiritual childhood in *any* of her writing, the phrase "little way of spiritual childhood" was added to the eighth edition of The Story of a Soul in 1907.[De Meester, p.3] This changed the work of the text enormously, a distortion.
When Thérèse wrote Manuscript C, she located the text for us quite clearly. First she wrote about the great saints like Teresa of Avila and then she said "Alas! I have always noticed that when I compared myself to the saints, there is between them and me the same difference that exists between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and the obscure grain of sand trampled underfoot by the passers-by. Instead of becoming discouraged," she wrote ..."I must bear with myself such as I am with all my imperfections. But I want to seek out a means of going to heaven by a little way, a way that is very straight, very short, and totally new....I am too small to climb the rough stairway of perfection.
Thérèse referred directly to Teresa and then used two metaphors [the mountain, and the stairway of perfection] that deftly combined reference to John of the Cross and his Ascent of *Mount* Carmel and Teresa's *Way* of Perfection. The work she was trying to do in this text was to articulate a spirituality as profound as the Carmelite founders, but one that is more easily accessible!
If Thérèse’s contemporaries had difficulty understanding the implications of her work, Thérèse Elie did not. She said she had never left Carmel because she always carried Carmel in her heart. And so by fashioning a brown vest out of her old habit, Zhou Shu-Ying was able to re-weave a symbol of the tradition to make it speak in a powerful, and yet subversive way, to the culture in which she lived. By living her ordinary life at “Carmel on the Farm”, she did what missionaries do everywhere: entrust themselves with total confidence to God’s infinite mercy witnessing to the love of Jesus so that it might be revealed anew to others. The next transformation.
And so, I invite you to befriend this saint who enjoyed playing checkers, who loved her cocker spaniel named Tom and who thought her favorite blue hat made her look ravishing.[Ahern, p. 11] This is the girl who prayed for the conversion of a death row convict and then, because she was forbidden to read the newspaper, had to sneak a glance while her father was napping to see if her prayers “worked.” [They did.]
This is the same girl who successfully evaded the tour guides in Rome so that she could dart down the Coliseum steps to kiss the ground where the martyrs had perished. This is the one who spoke to the Pope even though she was told it wasn’t permitted. And this is the nun who illicitly glanced at a fashion magazine that had weaseled its way into holy cloister. In short, she was one of us and so I invite you, like Maurice, to befriend her and imitate her. Thérèse Elie said that she had never left Carmel because she always carried Carmel in her heart. Take it with you when you leave here tonight, for Carmel *is* within you. Another transformation, ours.