St. Teresa was born in 1873 at Alencon in Southern Normandy, one of several children of Louis Martin and his wife. Her mother's death in 1877 caused the family to move to Lisieux, where their aunt was living. The Martin sisters were all to enter the Carmelite convent at Lisieux. Teresa did nothing spectacular in the convent; indeed the possibility of moving with others to the foundation of the Carmel at Hanoi in Vietnam was prevented by the onset of the tuberculosis which was to kill her. On the contrary, she is known for her 'Little Way' - the faithful following of the Carmelite rule in the spirit of a continuous search for the gift of charity. She died in 1897 aged only 24, and would probably have remained unknown were it not for her writing, "The Story of a Soul", edited by one of her sisters. The phenomenal success of this work established it as a kind of 'Fifth Gospel', and indeed that is what her life can be seen to be: a living Gospel, applying in a spirit of obedient hope - and in no way trying to whitewash the difficulties of community living - the principles of Jesus Christ. She was canonised in 1925...

"My mission - to make God loved - will begin after my death," she said. "I will spend my heaven doing good on earth. I will let fall a shower of roses." Countless lives have been touched by her intercession, and thousands have imitated her "little way." She has been acclaimed the "greatest saint of modern times." Everywhere in the world the roses continue to fall.

One stop is worth making on the way to Lisieux from Alençon: the great medieval cathedral at Sées. Both Martin parents walked here on foot at various times, to beg Our Lady's intercession for their daughters, particularly Léonie, whose poor health in childhood dogged her for the rest of her life (she is the only one of the Martin sisters not to enter Carmel, but became a Visitandine instead). The cathedral with its cool interior, soaring stonework and stained glass makes a good rest-stop on the way to Lisieux. The lovely Madonna in the right transept, holding out her smiling Child to us, is in itself a reminder of the deeply Marian dimension of the Thérèsian spirituality.

In the garden at Les Buissonnets, a statue commemorates the famous moment when Thérèse asked her father for permission to enter Carmel. Louis Martin walked over to the wall of the garden and plucked from it a small white flower, roots and all: he knew well who his youngest daughter was, whatever the anguish involved in being parted from his "little queen." Perhaps Les Buissonnets epitomises best of all that atmosphere so well evoked in Story of a Soul, in which the gravity of the mission - the Pranzini crucifix, the painting of the Blessed Virgin consoling the Magdalene in Louis Martin's room - mix so easily with the small symbols of childhood: the toys and the miniature statues and candles with which the young saint made shrines in the garden (a game she preferred to dressing dolls indoors), the garden table on which she would do her homework , also by preference, out of doors.

The adventure of this young girl, who never literally sailed on those stormy seas and is yet invoked as the patroness of the missions along with St. Francis Xavier, is one of the great love stories. It is the tale of the passionate, uncompromising love for God by one of His creatures, a love which flows out towards her fellow creatures in an act of cooperation that was so radical as to overturn the laws of space and time. Thérèse's chalice, as she said to Mother Marie de Gonzague as she lay dying, was full to the brim, full of a love tested so ardently in the limited time she gave herself over to the secret designs of God's merciful heart, that He has held her up as a living proof of His response to this kind of love.

Nine years later, as she entered her last agonising months in the Carmel before her death (in which the spiritual darkness was far worse than the physical pain), Thérèse had deepened her capacity for generosity to such an extent that, unbeknown to her Carmelite sisters, she was making a kind of extraordinary pact with her Beloved. The girl who as a child had watched the sun setting over the sea at Trouville, so close to the shrine of Notre Dame de Grâce, and envisaged her march towards heaven in terms of this golden path of light across the water, was now forging the same path on behalf of millions of other souls whom she was determined must be enabled to reach the same horizon.

The ouragan de gloire (literally, "hurricane of glory") that has followed in her wake in the last hundred years, is a supreme sign of hope for our age. As St. Thérèse lies in her glass coffin in the chapel of the Lisieux Carmel, her effigy looking for all the world like a latter-day sleeping beauty, surrounded by the flowers brought to her in her turn by grateful recipients of her heavenly roses, it is easy to imagine the joy of awakening in eternity, out of the "shadows and imaginings" (J.H. Newman) of this world. For it is the simple and uncompromising science of love which she practised, the transforming exchange she effected between her heart and the Heart of her Saviour, which resulted in her being declared, like her more obviously active forebear, St. Teresa of Avila, a Doctor of the Church. For hers is the medicine, and the teaching, for our complicated times.