Foreword

Carmel Religion's holy mount, has its angels. Fleeting visions from high heaven, they come as the dawn, light up Carmel's glorious peak with the radiance of their splendor, and vanish into boundless space, letting linger behind them the last ineffably sweet notes of that new canticle" which can be sung only by those "who were purchased from the earth ... those who are virgins" (Apoc. xiv., i, 4)

Saint Theresa Margaret of the Heart of Jesus was one of these angels of Carmel; she offered herself to our eyes' eager gaze for a brief moment of time, then vanished into the thin ether of eternity. Her short life was a hymn of love whose cadences increased in beauty of rhythm and sweetness of expression up to that last high hour of transition into the infinite harmonies of Divine Love.

God, Himself, showed that He had chosen her for Himself in her earliest years by showering her with the rarest of graces. As she grew older He made her burn with that love that, one day, would enable her to exclaim with her Seraphic Father Saint John of the Cross, "Now no longer have I any task but this one ... to love". From the days of her childhood her heart yearned to be engulfed in the Heart of Jesus, there to remain forever. Like a homing dove she flew to mystic Carmel's be-flowered mountain in search of Him Who had wounded her heart. There she found Him. At His feet she learned the science of the saints. With the years her love increased apace, grew purer, became more heavenly. God's divine gift, the virtue of love, took firm root in her soul. The splendid glory of her inner life burst through the shell of her spirit and lighted up Carmel and the world. This young nun's mission, the mission of Divine Love, is now finished, and, as if by enchantment, she has disappeared, vision-like, from this world, leaving behind her in redolent Carmel the sweet perfume of her virtues.

Contents  Next