The Little Way
St. Therese of Lisieux
The little way of St. Therese of Lisieux is magnificent in its simplicity, yet it requires great courage and commitment. According to St. John Paul II, it is nothing less than “a path of trust and total abandonment to the Lord’s grace.” Her short life on earth, and the deceptively simple teaching of her little way, continues to bless millions. She reveals a pathway centered on the primacy of grace, the beginning and end of all spiritual life; and a childlike but never unsophisticated or naive approach that is hopeful, trusting, and expectant of God’s grace. She is an exemplar of warrior strength, contained within the ‘smallness’ of a loving and humble heart.
God would
never inspire
me with desires
which cannot be realized;
so in spite of my littleness,
I can hope to be a saint.St. Therese of Lisieux
St. Therese entered the cloistered Order of Carmel in Lisieux, France, at the age of fifteen. Technically too young to do so, her passion and determination won out over the doubts of family and religious elders. On the day she took her vows, she wrote: “I offered myself to Jesus in order to accomplish His will perfectly in me.” Although Therese would never leave the convent again, dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four, she created a whole universe of received grace within the enclosure of cloistered life; a grace that poured through her and into history, in the form of journals, letters, and most notably her biography: The Story of a Soul.
Le Carmel de Lisieux, France. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain; additional artwork and collage by Juliet Pierce Kent.
St. Therese had no formal theological training, yet she became the youngest of only four female doctors of the Catholic Church - a saint who is recognized for their profound contribution to theology. She is in stellar company, with St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Hildegard of Bingen; women who transformed theology, prayer, and history.
It was after her death in late September of 1897 that St. Therese’s spirit, held like a nesting bird in her tiny cell in Carmel de Lisieux, France, seemed to burst forth from its confines to fly across space and time. Known in her lifetime only to her family and convent sisters, her little way soon spread throughout the world, miraculously blooming like a radiant flower in the hearts of countless others. St. John Paul II wrote that everyone can partake of St. Therese’s little way because everyone is called to holiness.
St. Therese of Lisieux; Public Domain; additional artwork and collage by Juliet Pierce Kent.
Holiness does not come from mere productivity or ambition; it is about falling in love with God.
“Let yourselves be charmed by Christ the Infinite, who appeared among you in visible and imitable form … [Let] yourselves be loved by the love of the Holy Spirit who wishes to turn you away from worldly things, to begin in you the life of the new self.”
St. Pope John Paul II, The Pope Speaks (vol. 37, no. 3; May/June 1992)
St. Therese of Lisieux calls to mind a recurrent mystery in creation: grand things contained in small vessels. An acorn becomes a magnificent oak tree. An oak tree looks nothing like the acorn in which it was encased, womb-like. Yet, from a half-inch diameter shell grows a great tree, wondrous with capacity to shelter and provide.
The smallness of her circumstance - St. Therese slept in a tiny cell in a modest convent in a provincial township - and the shortness of her life, miraculously gave rise to the astounding breadth and reach of her legacy. Her little way contains the power to change history: a power that came in the form of the diminutive marks of alphabet letters, strung into words on paper; in journals, letters, and her short biography.
Her message is as simple as it is timeless: the prudence to know, in any given situation, what is the demand of love. Like the strings of words that made up her letters and journals, her little way is made up of thousands upon thousands of moments, when we can choose love first and foremost. The courage and commitment of this way demands a tremendous feat of conscious living: Christ must be set first, before all things, as the center of not only our care and attention but of the universe.
It means to return, again and again, to small things: moments, gestures, helping hands, patience, and kind words; and none of this is half-hearted or hollow when Christ is the source. In the eyes of the world, St. Therese’s pathway to Heaven may seem very little and inconsequential; but from the vantage of Heaven, her way of humble trust means entering into the state of being that Jesus called the Kingdom. (1) Pope Francis tells us that a cloistered life is not a requirement for a life that strives for holiness. Rather, “we are all called to be holy by living our lives with love and by bearing witness [to God’s love] in everything we do, wherever we find ourselves.” (2)
References
(1) Bishop Robert Barron, Catholicism
(2) Pope Francis, Rejoice and Be Glad
“The heart of Christian life is to receive and welcome God’s tenderness and goodness, the revelation of his merciful love, and to let oneself be transformed interiorly by that love.”
Fr. Jacques Philippe
St. Therese of Lisieux left us her heart, the inestimable treasure of her little way, and an eternal invitation to enter into it, step by step, moment by moment.
