By Christopher Gaul
When Father Alphonse Rose entered the tiny chapel at The Johns Hopkins Hospital he immediately noticed the elderly woman huddled in a chair crying. It was not an unusual sight for the Hopkins chaplain, who had brought comfort to hundreds of family members and friends of critically ill or injured patients. As was his custom, though, he didn’t intrude on her privacy but took a seat near her.
Claire Suitt saw the priest through her tears, and felt “a strong urge” to talk to him. So she walked over to his chair and sat down next to him.
She told him that her son was to be operated on for a tumor on his skull, the result of renal cell cancer that had already cost him a kidney. She was so upset that she had taken a few moments to be alone, away from the crowded waiting room in the hospital’s Halstead building. What she didn’t tell him was that she had been praying to St. Therese of Lisieux, “the Little Flower,” after a friend had given her a prayer card of the popular Carmelite saint. She had prayed that St. Therese would send her “a rose from the heavenly garden,” as the card encouraged her.
Father Rose listened quietly to the story of her son’s struggle with cancer, offered her words of comfort and then prayed with her for the success of the surgery. Then he got up to leave. But before he did, the woman asked him his name.
“It’s Father Rose,” he replied.
“She almost fell out of her chair when I told her that,” recalled Father Rose, who remembers that day in 1997 very well, and who retired as chaplain the next year.
For Claire L. Suitt, a Methodist and lifelong resident of Annapolis, Father Rose was clearly the “rose” that St. Therese had sent her.
She gasped and asked him to stay with her a little longer. She told him about her prayers to St. Therese. Father Rose remembers responding, “My dear, you have been praying to her to send you a rose, and I am ‘A. Rose.’”
But St. Therese wasn’t through with Mrs. Suitt yet.
While Father Rose and Mrs. Suitt were still talking, a woman entered, sat down near them and began to read a newspaper, The Catholic Review.
After Father Rose left, the woman turned to Mrs. Suitt. Confessing that she couldn’t help but overhear some of their conversation, she asked Mrs. Suitt whether she truly believed in saints and the work they do.
“I have to now, don’t I?” Mrs. Suitt replied.
The woman asked her if she would like to learn more about St. Therese because the Little Flower was her favorite saint, and, she confided, she had been named Therese for her. She was Therese “Nina” Nonan, a parishioner of the Sacred Heart of Mary in Mrayland, and she handed Mrs. Suitt her copy of The Catholic Review, pointing to an article about St. Therese that she had been reading.
Mrs. Suitt’s son, Dennis, came through the high-risk surgery well. Although he died two years later, Mrs. Suitt remains convinced those extra years of life were courtesy of the intercession of St. Therese.
After the Hopkins experience, Mrs. Suitt tried to learn everything she could about St. Therese, the young French nun whose “little way” inspired millions of people around the world. She devoured her biography, The Story of a Soul, and even joined the Chicago-based Society of the Little Flower.
But St. Therese still wasn’t through with her.
Last May the 74-year-old Mrs. Suitt suffered a series of strokes that damaged the right and left sides of the occipital lobe of her brain. After three weeks in the hospital and rehabilitation center, it was determined that her vision was severely impaired to the point where she could not read, drive a car or walk without the assistance of a walker. All this on top of the fact that she was suffering from emphysema and lived her life connected to an oxygen tank.
“So, again,” Mrs. Suitt said, “I went to St. Therese in prayer and this time I asked her to send me a shower of roses and to ask God, if it be his will, to restore my vision.”
Nothing happened for a while, although Mrs. Suitt continued to pray to St. Therese and to pray the chaplet she had received from the Society of the Little Flower.
Then, one day in mid June, she walked slowly out to the back porch of her modest home on the outskirts of Annapolis to fetch something, and in looking up was astonished to discover perched in her neighbor’s Mulberry tree, the branches of which hang over her fence, a cascade of bright pink, fragrant roses.
When she returned, breathless, to sit in her lounge chair to which she is mainly confined, she found that, even though she had no peripheral vision, she could see the roses through the window. They were in her direct line of vision. Were she sitting a few feet to the left or right, she could not have seen them.
Over the next few days, scores of friends, family members and neighbors came to visit. They were amazed, Mrs. Suitt said. After all, she had lived in her house for 27 years and neither she, nor anyone else for that matter, had ever seen anything like it in her or her neighbor’s flowerless yards.
Father John Lavin C.Ss.R., a priest at nearby St. Mary, Annapolis, stopped by with his camera to capture on film the remarkable sight. So did, Rev. Jeff Paulson, the pastor of Mrs. Suitt’s Eastport United Methodist Church. They tried in vain to find the source of the vine from which the roses had sprung.
They both described what they saw as nothing short of miraculous, Mrs. Suitt said.
Some friends, especially her Catholic friends, urged her to pick at least one of the roses as a memento, a relic even. A young grandson offered to climb the tree to bring her one. But Mrs. Suitt refused.
“I didn’t want anyone to touch them because I felt they were holy,” she said.
Two weeks later, the roses were gone. Neighbors and a young man who helps keep her yard tidy could find no trace of them. There were no dried or dead buds, no sign even of the vine that must have supported them. Nothing. Just the branches and leaves of the Mulberry tree as they had always been.
Mrs. Suitt prayed about all of this, a lot. She prayed to God, and she prayed to the Little Flower, and then she felt she ought to write her experiences down. She did, and called her brief but eloquent account, “A Shower of Roses from the Heavenly Garden,” and sent copies to everyone she could think of, some 200 people.
“People needed to know,” she said, “not so much about what actually happened but about St. Therese and how she can draw you closer to God.”
How does Mrs. Suitt interpret what happened.
“I think it is that God has heard my petition and will answer in his own way and time,” she said. “I only pray that St. Therese’s shower of roses from the heavenly garden will bring souls on earth to God.”
Mrs. Suitt has not had an easy life. Her husband left her when her three children were young and she struggled to find work to support them. Her oldest son, Dennis died of the cancer that brought him to Hopkins, and her second oldest son was killed in an automobile accident when he was only 17. But, she said, “I’ve always had faith, I had faith in order to survive. But it’s gotten deeper and deeper. I’ve lost my vision but I can see more clearly now than I ever could, if you know what I mean. I’m so happy, so thrilled, I’m so rich. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing in this world that I need. I have it all, and I am at complete peace with God. I have no fears, I have no anxieties, and I have St. Therese to thank for this.”
(This article courtesy of The Catholic Review.)
