The Mother of the Little Flower: The Witness of St. Zélie Guérin Martin

What gives me some confidence is her spirit of faith and her truly prodigious courage. What a valiant woman! She is not defeated by adversity nor elated by prosperity. She is admirable![1]
—Sister Marie-Dosithée, writing about her sister, Saint Zélie Guérin Martin

I want to become a saint, and that won’t be easy. There’s a lot of wood to chop and the wood is as hard as rock. It would have been better if I’d tried earlier, while it was less difficult. Oh well, “better late than never.”[2]
—Saint Zélie Guérin Martin

While the nineteenth-century French saint, Zélie Guérin Martin, had a happy marriage with her husband (Saint Louis Martin), the mystery of her rejection from religious life that she experienced as a young adult remained with her. A year and a half before her death of breast cancer at 45, Zélie relayed her dreams for her one-day retirement, with allusion to the rejection, in a letter to her daughter, Pauline:

So I do nothing but dream of the cloister and solitude. With the ideas I have, I really don’t know how this wasn’t my vocation or how I didn’t remain a spinster, or retreat into a convent. Now I’d like to live to be very old, so I can withdraw in solitude when all my children are grown (CF 150, 211).

While acknowledging these dreams, Zélie was on guard about dwelling inordinately upon them. She added: “But I feel that all these are only empty ideas, so I hardly pay attention to them. It’s better to use the present time well than to think so much about the future.”

This frictional dynamic of longing and persistent endurance defined much of Zélie’s life as a to-be saint—even though she herself doubted that she would ever be made one. She frequently thought her impatience, stubbornness, and irritability, as well as her inability to pray regularly in solitude, would prevent her from sanctification. Yet, Zélie and Louis would be canonized in October of 2015, and their youngest daughter, Thérèse of Lisieux, was canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church. Her other daughter, Servant of God Léonie Martin (with whom Zélie had great difficulty) also has a cause open for her beatification.

It was in and through the often precarious conditions of Zélie’s life—riddled as it was with uncertainty, tragedy and an array of unfulfilled longings, but nevertheless defined by the warmth of family life—that she became a witness to a faith which endures, even through the most severe of circumstances.

After Zélie was prevented from entering religious life, and seeing marriage as her only viable alternative path, she resigned herself to the fact that she would become a wife and mother. She prayed to consecrate her future children to God, and begged Mary to show her the kind of work God wanted her to take up to support them. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, in prayer to Mary, she received an answer, hearing an inner voice say: “Undertake the making of Point d’Alençon lace” (The Mother of the Little Flower, 2). Zélie immediately began to attend a professional school to learn the craft of lace-making and, at the age of 22, she founded her own business.[3] Celine Martin (also known as Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face, Zélie’s daughter and biographer) offers a dignified portrait of her mother, who remained soberly grounded amidst her early successes:

Mother was as shrewd in business as she was quick and intelligent. Her energy was extraordinary, and she rapidly became successful in her undertakings.

An influential lady of the world, who admired the beauty and talents of mother, wanted to take her to Paris, perhaps with the intention of having her married advantageously; she categorically refused the proposal. She used to tell of the incident smilingly; the world had absolutely no attraction for her (The Mother of the Little Flower, 2-3).

Eventually, Zélie met Louis (who had also been prevented from entering religious life) and, at the age of 27, she married him. Nineteen years later, in a letter to her daughter Pauline, Zélie described the emotionally turbulent day before her own wedding, when she visited her sister (who had entered religious life) at the monastery:

I can say that on that day I cried all my tears, more than I’d ever cried in my life. . . . In short, for a very long time, my mind and my heart were only at the Visitation Monastery . . . I would have liked to hide my life with hers. You who love your father so much, my Pauline, are you going to think that I was hurting him and that I’d ruined our wedding day for him? No, he understood me and consoled me as best he could because his inclinations were similar to mine. I even think our mutual affection grew from it. Our feelings were always in accord, and he was always a comfort and a support to me (A Call to a Deeper Love, xxiii-xxiv).

In marrying each other, Louis and Zélie endured the loss of their respective dreams. Yet, their sharing of this loss helped form a foundation from which their love and family life could grow. The few letters of theirs that we have today reveal their mutual affection—in Louis addressing Zélie as “my dear friend” and in his signature, “Your husband and true friend, who loves you for life” (CF 2-a, 4), in Zélie’s proclamation, “it would be impossible for me to live apart from you” (CF 108, 135), in their confessions of longing for one another while away from home, in their promised prayers and kisses for each other. To help alleviate the stress and overwhelm Zélie faced with her lace-making work, Louis sold his beloved artisanal business and became a businessman representing Zélie’s. He wrote to her, “Once again, don’t worry so much. We’ll manage, with God’s help, to build a good little company” (CF 2-a, 4).

For Zélie, running the lace-making business came with a number of responsibilities, on top of those she had as a wife and mother. She frequently worked late into the night to fulfill orders and often while tending to children.[4] Sometimes, she bemoaned the work (“I have a lot of trouble with this wretched Alençon lace which gives me the hardest time” [CF 20, 25]), and other times, she adored it (“To tell you the truth, I only enjoy myself when I am seated at my window assembling my Alençon lace” [CF 82,102]). The business was, in the end, a means of providing for Zélie’s children and workers:

It’s not the desire to amass a great fortune that drives me because I have more than I ever wanted. But I think it would be foolish of me to leave this business having five children to provide for. I must go all the way for them, and I see myself in a dilemma. I have workers, and I have no work to give them while other companies are doing very well. That’s what distresses me the most! (CF 152, 214).

By certain (spiritually anemic) metrics, Zélie had more than enough excuses to overlook the needs of those outside of their family and business. Yet, she and Louis made the time—there is a story of Zélie and little Thérèse bringing a homeless elder home for dinner and arranging for him to be in hospice, according to his wishes (CF 159, 228-229), another of them feeding a struggling family while Louis arranged work for the father (CF 84, 103-104, n203), an account from Zélie of her accompanying an overwhelmed mother of young children on a cross-country train ride (CF 141, 191-192), and many others of the like. Pope Francis called them “an evangelistic couple who throughout their whole life gave witness to the beauty of faith in Jesus, both inside and outside of their home.”[5]

Their spiritual detachment helped make such a life of charity possible. In a letter to her younger brother, who owned a struggling business, Zélie shared with him her wisdom (which echoes that of her husband) as a seasoned business-owner:

You must take heart and not worry. I was like you when I began my Alençon lace business, and I made myself sick over it. Now, I’m much more reasonable. I worry much less and resign myself to all the unfortunate events that happen to me, and may happen to me. I tell myself that God allows it, and then I don’t think about it anymore (CF 26, 30-31).

In an earlier correspondence about a different matter, Zélie even went so far as to say to him that “it’s a bad sign when all goes well,” for “in His wisdom, God wanted it this way to make us remember that the world is not our true home” (CF 7, 8).

This was not an abstract reality for Zélie. She and Louis endured the horrific losses of four of their nine children, which I will only touch briefly on here. Shortly after losing her father and two babies to illnesses, Zélie recounted a time she was unable to pray on a trip to the cemetery where they were buried. She qualified the story with an admission of her own hypocrisy: “I preach to others, and I’m hardly reasonable myself,” and continued: “To see me [there], one would have said, ‘Here is the most indifferent person in the world.’ I was kneeling at the foot of his grave, and I couldn’t pray. A few steps away I knelt by that of my two little angels, the same apparent indifference . . .” (CF 39, 43). The deaths of her children would make her wish for her own (see CF 60, 71).

Yet, Zélie would persist in her attempts at prayer. Through the extraordinary pain and sorrow that accompanied each of their deaths, her trust in God and desire for heaven deepened. In a letter to her sister-in-law, who had just lost a baby herself, Zélie offered the consoling, hope-filled insight:

Several people have said to me, “It would be much better never to have had [your late children].” I can’t bear that kind of talk. I don’t think the sorrows and problems could be weighed against the eternal happiness of my children. So they weren’t lost forever. Life is short and full of mystery. We’ll see them again in Heaven (CF 72, 90-91).

Affirming the goodness of her late children’s short lives, she never regretted the cross she carried for them.

Zélie’s life was marked with an array of uncertainties: that of having chosen the wrong vocation, that of the well-being of her children, that of her sanctity and her own death. Shortly before she died from breast cancer, she sought a miracle on pilgrimage to Lourdes. In a letter sent before the trip, Zélie wrote:

If God wants to cure me, I’ll be very happy because, deep down, I want to live. It’s hard for me to leave my husband and children, but, on the other hand, I say to myself, “If I’m not cured, perhaps it’s because it will be more helpful for them if I go away” (CF 189, 284).

Even as she faced the bleak probability that she soon would be absent from her husband and her young daughters’ lives, she trusted that God would use her absence for their good.

Sometimes, we take material prosperity and material peace to be sure signs of divine favor, and assurances that we are on the right path. Saint Zélie Martin renders the absolutizing of these impulses dubious. Her witness reminds us that sainthood simply requires the entrustment of our lives to God, and that this entrustment is not to be conflated with an empirical certitude about the divine plan.

Much of our lives—and the loose threads of unfulfilled longing, confusion, and heartache that run through them—will remain a mystery to us; the purpose of our pain in God’s great plan obscured from our sight, as was often the case in Zélie’s life. Yet, as Zélie was keen to remind those around her: It is not in prosperity or success that the meaning of life is found, but in the inseparable, interlinked tasks of how we love God and others.

Reflecting on her own inadequacies in the Christian life, Zélie declared: “I often say during the day, ‘My God, how I would like to be a saint!’ Then, I don’t do the work! Though it’s high time I started” (CF 154, 216). This remark holds a splendid note of dramatic irony for each of us who have come to appreciate this great woman today because of her canonization. This woman, who never assumed, and often doubted, she had chosen the right path, that she was en route to sainthood, was, in fact, being made a saint. Though she did not know it with certainty then, her hope to be with God and her family in Heaven would one day be realized.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Support for this essay was provided by the Sullivan Family Saints Initiative and the Global Catholic Research Initiative, both at the University of Notre Dame.

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