WHEN SAINT THERESE USED HOLLYWOOD TO CONSOLE ME

For over 20 years I have prayed for someone who in my youth did me an exceptionally good turn; and with each passing year I more clearly the benefit of their charity. I can't bring myself to give the details, suffice to say had they not given me certain confidence I could well have gotten swallowed by the whirlpool of vodka that was the natural habitat of so many of my peers in modern Ireland as well as offering myself on a plate to any interested male. 

My intention for her? That she be baptized. She is, however, adamant she has no religion and is anti-Catholic; she holds that the Church is a misogynistic institution that keeps women in slavery. That said, she has a private, and I mean clandestine devotion to St Therese of Lisieux. Devotion is inaccurate, it is more that she oh-so-secretly admires her for being a writer and for being a victim of jealousies and petty vengeances and perhaps for being brainwashed into being a Carmelite nun ("Stockholm syndrome"). 

She has gone to visit the relics of the Little Flower - but as y'know one of the crowd - she can't be seen to practice something so anachronistic as venerate remains of the dead especially when she argues cremation is better. But she knows that had Therese been burnt to dust (sorry - that is a horrid image) then she would never have been able to observe the relics.

She feels a kinship with the Little Flower because she feels "little" and would have liked to have been a big author, but her ideas were so popular that there was no niche for her to fill in the publishing world. It would bother her were someone to compare her to Therese and yet she is more like Therese than anyone I've ever known. With the exception that she is arrogant in thinking the less of Therese as something of a stooge; she'd not be so stupid as to be caught dead in a Carmelite convent. 

So, down through the years I have asked St Therese to intercede. But last night, I was exhausted, and itching to watch the 1946 film noir, The Chase. I knew nothing about it. I am ferreting out flicks like this because I am writing a dystopian novel, well, who isn't these days? I find the stock character of the femme fatale in film noir to be like the femme fatale in Orwell's 1984. Before I left my ten by six study and migrated to my armchair, I felt a pang of hopelessness; I mean will grace ever touch my rescuer's heart? I looked at my picture of St Therese hanging on my clothes line (pictured underneath) and finally gave little flower to Little Flower.

I thought I was done for the day; no more praying or writing. I got engrossed in the plot of The Chase; an innocent man is framed for the murder of the woman he loves and he must run from the cops. He is chased through Havana, and finally evades the detective-in-a-linen suit by hiding in a woman's squalid one-room apartment. She lies to the cops for him, as she washes laundry and weeps. Then the camera swings to the right where an altar is set up; it has a garland of roses and a statue of St Therese. 

I couldn't believe my eyes. Why of all the films that I could have watched, was I led to the one with an altar to the Little Flower? I don't think they are that commonplace in Hollywood movies - are they? I felt the Little flower giving me consolation that the one I've entrusted to her will be in the heavenly gardens; and once there maybe she won't be such a little flower.