Description
On the Statue:
Salvaged from a thrift store, St. Therese was horribly air brushed (my favorite kind of finds) four solid colors without any added definition. Extremely well loved, she was chipped and banged up everywhere that stuck out.
Now repaired, all the dents have been filled and recarved with new plaster, filling in her cracked veil and finger, sleeve and nose and everywhere else.
Carefully hand painted, Therese’s habit is now a more faithful Carmelite brown, and her wimple (the white fabric around her face) comes down her forehead in the traditional fashion. Her face now has a small, knowing smile, quirked up in a grin while her eyes are soft and encouraging.
Through multiple layers, the roses spill out of Therese’s hands in a vibrant maroon detailed with tiny green leaves, mirroring the field of tiny pink flowers she is standing on.
Varnished three times with a matte varnish, this statue is easy to clean with soap and water and a soft cloth, without fear of ruining the paint and will withstand general handling and bumps.
This statue is plaster which means if you bump it on a harder surface it will dent or chip, so be careful how you handle it. If you drop it it will break into several large pieces, making it an easier repair than porcelain. Should this happen, gather everything you can and send me an email and I’ll quote you the repair cost or, if it’s a simple break, walk you through an at home repair.
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On the Saint:
The Saint of the Little Way. Born during the time of the heresy of Jansenism, Therese was heavily influenced by its ideology that all souls are trash because of Original Sin and completely unable to obtain any sort of grace or sanctity through the use of free will – that it was though only God’s grace and predestination that you could merit heaven.
It sounds legit, but its a heresy because it denies free will – choosing to lead a life of sanctity or choosing to live a life of depravity didn’t matter because if you were going to be saved God would swoop in and do that or if He didn’t decide you would be saved, there was literally no prayer, no sacrifice, no almsgiving, nothing that you could do to change it.
We have to choose to love God. We will always be unworthy, it IS God’s freely given gifts of grace, but if we aren’t trying we can never obtain sanctity, and if we are trying God will help us.
Which is exactly what Therese found in her Little Way.
She searched through the Gospels for a sign that all was not lost, that despite the fact that she was the weakest of God’s children that she had a chance to be a Saint and fulfill this great desire of her heart.
And she found it: “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Mt. 18:3
Therese chose to remain little, like a child, and perform all her duties with great love, no matter how small. In remaining little, Jesus would stoop to the low places, and seeing her effort, take her up and bring her to the heights. It was her elevator to heaven.
And unlike Jansenism, it rests greatly on our use of free will to perform our duties with great love, our free will to choose to remain little and small, trusting in the goodness of God, the Fatherhood of God, to come and take us to heaven.
Before she died, Therese said that she wanted to spend her heaven helping souls on earth know God. Her unfailing intercession has made her both the patron saint of missionaries (though she remained in a cloistered convent her whole life) and a Doctor of the Church.
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