This week on October 1st, we will celebrate the feast day of one of the most popular saints in the Catholic Church, St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, or St. Thérèse of Lisieux. St. Thérèse was a Carmelite nun from France who died at the age of 24 years old from tuberculosis. She was asked by her mother superior, Mother Agnes, to write an autobiography which we all know as “Story of a Soul”. In her autobiography, St. Thérèse recounts her upbringing and describes her “little way”, which will be the reason she was declared a Doctor of the Church.
The two virtues St. Thérèse focuses on in her little way are trust or confidence and humility. St. Thérèse always had great desires to be holy. She would look at the lives of the saints and see how great they were and would get discouraged that she would not be able to be as holy as they were. That she could not sacrifice, do penance, or pray like these great saints. However, St. Thérèse realized something. St. Thérèse, meditating on God as a God of infinite mercy and love, would never give his children a desire that they could not achieve, that could not be fulfilled. Because of this, St. Thérèse had total confidence in God that the desire for holiness that she had, would not be something God would give her if she could not achieve it. And in that confidence in God St. Thérèse did not get discouraged but trusted in God’s mercy and love to lead her to the saint He wanted her to be.
That trust and confidence St. Thérèse had in God allowed her to grow in humility. St. Thérèse would write in her autobiography:
“I am too small to climb the rough stairway of perfection, I must find an elevator to carry me up to God. And this what I found: ‘As one whom the mother caresses, so will I comfort you. You shall be carried at the breasts and upon the knees they shall caress you.’ The elevator which must raise me to the heavens is Your arms, O Jesus! For that I do not need to grow; on the contrary, I must necessarily remain small, become smaller.”
St. Thérèse understood that she needed to fail to her own ideals because they were not God’s ideals and, in her poverty, allow Christ to lift her up to Himself. St. Thérèse learned to rejoice in her weakness because it is an opportunity for Christ’s merciful love to grow in us. And in the small, mundane moments of life, we try to practice great love.
Brothers and sisters, how little is our soul? Do we have full and complete confidence in God’s infinite love and mercy? Do we trust that sanctity that He is calling us to is possible for us to achieve? And are we throwing away our own ideals of ourselves and allowing Christ to lift us up to Himself? This is the little way of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. It is a way that is made for everyone because all of us have been children in our life. Let us make that choice like St. Thérèse, to respond to our daily sufferings and failures with trust and confidence in the infinite love and mercy of God. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, pray for us.
In Christ,
Fr. Stefan
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