Another American Adventure: St. Bonaventure University

Sunday, August 8, 2010

St. Bonaventure University - St. Theresa Shrine

Wandering around the St. Bonaventure campus, I happened upon the Shrine to St. Theresa of the Divine Child of Jesus, the Little Flower.

I'm pretty sure this is the shrine before which Thomas Merton was praying when he received the message that he was to join the Trappists.

Merton is popular on this campus ...

1 comment:

AnonymousAugust 8, 2010 at 12:08 PM
It has the simple charm that would have appealed to Merton, even as I'm sure he might have been unable to resist the thought to place it in his "bad statues" category. The Little Flower strikes me as a bugbear for intellectual Catholics like Merton and Day and me, which has an ironic appeal. In her sentimental simplicity she haunts us as a bugaboo or imp.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.