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TERESA HELENA HIGGINSON was born in 1844, and was brought up with her seven
brothers and sisters. in an ideal Catholic home at Gainsborough. A bright,
precocious child, brimming with life and character, she appears to have attained
the use of reason in a remarkable way as a very young age, she was suddenly
overwhelmed by the sense of the majesty of God, she fell prostrate on the ground
and vowed herself to Him forever. At ten years of age she was sent to the
convent at Nottingham, but her school life was much interrupted by ill health,
the result, in part, of the austerities she used even then to practice.
Her father having become bankrupt, she trained as a teacher, thus discovering
her life's vocation - "to teach the poorest of God's children how to love
Him."
She was first appointed to St. Mary's Wigan, and later to St. Alexander's Bootle.
Her days were divided between school duties and visiting the sick, her nights
spent in prayer. To share the Passion of our Lord, and thereby to atone for
sinners, was the chief aim of her life. Her penances were incredible. She hardly
slept, she seldom ate. Her food was the Blessed Sacrament. And our Lord repaid
her love by admitting her to close share in His sufferings, even, it would seem,
granting her the sublime gift of the sacred Stigmata. Blood was often noticed on
her hands and head. Her friends bore witness to her frequent ecstasies, her
miraculous communions, the violent assaults of the devil. Other secrets of her
spiritual life she told to no one but her confessor, to whom she was under vow
to reveal them. Despite her efforts to remain unnoticed, tongues could not be
silenced and rumors spread. Some upheld her as a saint, many more denounced her
as a liar and a hypocrite. Finally, the controversy waxed so fierce that she was
dismissed, sick in body and in heart, from Bootle. These trials were the final
purification for what her director believed to be the Mystical Marriage, the
closest union with God possible to a soul on earth, in which it can say with St.
Paul: "I live now, not I, but Christ liveth in me." The wonders
ceased. Henceforth to human eyes her life became supremely commonplace and
ordinary. She no longer prayed for the suffering: to do God's will most
perfectly in all the tiny things of daily life, such seemed to her the height of
sanctity.
Twelve years she spent in prayer and hidden service in St. Catherine's convent
Edinburgh, and then, her health somewhat restored, she felt called upon to
resume her work of teaching. She accepted a post in the little village of
Chudleigh, where, after a long, lonely year, she had a severe stroke and, on
February 15th, 1905, in her sixtieth year, she died.
From the worldly standpoint how drab and dreary was her life, and yet there is
reason to believe that this humble little teacher in our English elementary
schools, was favored with God's most sublime revelations. Canon Snow, her
director, never wavered in his conviction that she would eventually be raised to
the altars of the Church, and he carefully preserved her writings. Herein we
read how our Lord again and again appeared to her, and impressed on her His
urgent wish that special honor should be paid to His Sacred Head, as the seat of
His divine Wisdom, in order to make atonement for the sins of pride and
intellect, and disbelief, so prevalent in these modern days. In a vision, on the
Epiphany, He once consoled her with these words: "Take courage, my loved
one, for the seat of divine Wisdom will be known, praised, and adored. as I
wish, and I will glorify My Name in thee."
SOURCES OF INFORMATION
The following are Canon Snow's instructions to his executers with regard to
these papers: "To my Executors: The whole contents of this drawer are the
letters and writings of the servant of God, Teresa Higginson, copies of them,
and various writings concerning her and the devotion to the Sacred Head of Our
Lord Jesus Christ. None of these papers must be destroyed but carefully
preserved together, and God in His own time and His own way will bring them to
light and cause them to be used to His own honor and the glory and the good of
souls.
"It is right for me to leave it on record that I was her director from
September 1883, till her death on 15th of February 1905. During that period she
lived in various places, (eleven years at St. Catherine's Convent, Edingborough)
and went to confession to the local priest, but she was in constant
communication with me and always regarded me as her director to whom she was
under her vow of obedience.
Since Benedict X1V in his essay on canonization says that great weight ought to
be given to the opinion of the director of the servant of God, I feel I should
do wrong if I died without leaving behind me a declaration, which I now make,
that it is my strong conviction that Teresa Higginson was from her very early
childhood called to a very high degree of sanctity, that she was led by
extraordinary ways; that she went through, one after the other, the various
degrees of prayer and union up to and including the Mystical Marriage (This last
she beautifully described in a letter to Fr. Powell and in one to me). This
conviction was formed by my intimate knowledge of her, her interior, her way of
life, her heroic virtues, her suffering and trials, her writings, the analogy
between her life and the lives of the saints, all combined with my knowledge of
mystical theology of which I made constant and close study.
"I feel it right to say that I have the first conviction that Teresa was
not only a saint but also one of the greatest saints Almighty God has ever
raised up in His Church."
These striking words, written of Teresa Helena Higginson, express no mere
passing opinion, but are the weighty judgment of the wise old priest, who for
the last 22 years of her life, was the director of her soul.