Saint Therese of Lisieux - 1 October

Some Notes on the Life and Spiritual Teaching of St Therese

Suggested readings for her memorial: Isaiah 66.10-14; Psalm 131; Matthew 18.1-4

She was born on 2 January 1873 and entered Carmel on 9 April 1888, at the age of 15. She made her profession on 8 September 1890 but died on 30 September 1897, at the age of 24. The account of her life, Story of a Soul, written at the insistence of her (blood) sisters in Carmel, became known across the world with astonishing speed, and devotion to her grew just as quickly. She was canonized by Pope Pius XI on 17 May 1925 – had she lived she would have been only 52 that year! – and was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II on 19 October 1997.  She had already been recognised as patroness of all the missionary activity of the Church.

She came from an unusual family. Her parents, Louis and Zélie Martin, were canonized together by Pope Francis in 2015. Thérèse was the youngest of their nine children, only five of whom lived to adulthood. But all five surviving daughters became nuns, four of them in the Carmel in Lisieux and one in the congregation of the Visitation. Thérèse’s education was modest, although she was clearly very intelligent.

Her spiritual teaching, though simple, is profound and radical. She lived a life of prayer, solitude, sacrifice and concern for the mission of the Church. Her ‘little way’ requires detachment in order to give oneself to charity in the smallest details of life: the ordinary becomes extraordinary when it is done out of love. She wondered what her role in the Church could be and decided that it was to be the heart of the Church, simply to love. So, her spirituality is centred on friendship with Jesus and faith in him with a humble but unshakeable confidence. It means trusting in God’s providence and in the merciful love of God. Although simple, and sometimes expressed in terms that can seem a bit too sweet to be real, Thérèse’s teaching is based principally on her reading of the New Testament and of John of the Cross. The Paschal Mystery, the passion, death and resurrection of Christ, is central for her and the task is to see this mystery at work in each person’s life. To live the Gospel authentically is to base our lives on this mystery. If we do so we will want to express Christ’s love to others through prayer and acts of charity.

For Thérèse to grow towards perfection in holiness means to have confidence in God and to learn that the Lord uses even our faults and weakness to perfect us in compassion and humility. It means allowing ourselves to be purified in faith, hope and love, giving up the ways in which we want to have Easter without Good Friday. She teaches us also that the spiritual life is not a matter of knowing things but of experiencing things, particularly suffering and temptation through which the necessary purification takes place. Certainly, the Christian life and the charity of Christ are about joy, peace and love, but they include also suffering the Cross and so gaining the hope of eternal life. She does speak on one occasion of an experience of union with God, of being on fire with love, but says it happened only once, that it passed quickly and that afterwards she fell back into her ‘habitual state of dryness’.

She follows John of the Cross in seeing the spiritual life as an exodus-journey out of spiritual bondage to true knowledge of God and ourselves, and so to freedom. Our search for union with God, the ‘better love’, must be firm, unrelenting and enthusiastic, a desire for Christ that is greater than all other desires. It is not known whether she read de Caussade’s Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence but she presents her ‘little way’ in terms that are reminiscent of that work – spiritual childhood, confidence, and complete self-abandonment to God’s care. She knew The Imitation of Christ and seems to have been much influenced as a young girl by a book written by Father Charles Arminjon entitled The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life. 

Through prayerful self-reflection on her spiritual journey, Thérèse came to know the depth of her self-centeredness, the extent of her God-inspired desires, and the role and significance of her thoughts, acts, and feelings in her spiritual life. She had a great confidence in her ability to be honest with herself and an enormous intuitive capacity about the ways of human and divine love. Under the microscope of prayer, in her self-awareness, she came to learn universal truths about love: how love originates, how it is nourished or blocked, and how it grows. Her life thus became a microcosm of love, her teaching a school of love.

Although she belongs to a distinctive social and religious context, it is this ‘breakthrough’ to universal truths about love that explains her immediate and universal appeal. She famously said that she wanted to spend her heaven doing good on earth, and this also encouraged many people to pray to her. Her ‘little way’ is for ‘little ones’, people who believe they have not received any extraordinary graces or spiritual gifts – it is enough, she says, to be faithful to the duties of one’s state in life, to have love alone as one’s motivation, and to cultivate trust in the heavenly Father. Too little to climb any mountain or staircase in order to reach God, she speaks instead of Jesus providing an elevator to bring her up to himself. Among those for whom Thérèse was their favourite saint is Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who valued Thérèse for teaching that what is crucial for our salvation is doing small things with love and faith.

The notion of spiritual childhood was already a theme in the French school of spirituality in the seventeenth century, re-appears from time to time in later French Catholic spirituality, and reaches its supreme expression in the little way of Thérèse. It continued as a theme in French Catholic writing with the poet Charles Péguy (1873-1914) and the novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948). Some might fear that a kind of anti-intellectualism, seen already in how the Curé d’Ars was appreciated, was further strengthened by the promotion of Thérèse’s life with this emphasis on spiritual childhood and the little way. Was the Church itself running the risk of strengthening the idea, coming from the Enlightenment, that faith is somehow irrational, or that it has greater merit the less rational or intellectual support it has? The decision to declare Thérèse of Lisieux a Doctor of the Church was not without controversy. In canonising her, Pope Pius XI had already said that her spirituality was an expression of the fundamental teaching of the gospel and in declaring her a Doctor of the Church Pope John Paul II explained how her ‘little way’ actually encapsulates the central mysteries of the faith:

The core of her message is actually the mystery itself of God-Love, of the Triune God, infinitely perfect in himself. If genuine Christian spiritual experience should conform to the revealed truths in which God communicates himself and the mystery of his will (cf. Dei Verbum, n. 2), it must be said that Thérèse experienced divine revelation, going so far as to contemplate the fundamental truths of our faith united in the mystery of Trinitarian life. At the summit, as the source and goal, is the merciful love of the three Divine Persons, as she expresses it, especially in her Act of Oblation to Merciful Love. At the root, on the subject's part, is the experience of being the Father's adoptive children in Jesus; this is the most authentic meaning of spiritual childhood, that is, the experience of divine filiation, under the movement of the Holy Spirit. At the root again, and standing before us, is our neighbour, others, for whose salvation we must collaborate with and in Jesus, with the same merciful love as his. Through spiritual childhood one experiences that everything comes from God, returns to him and abides in him, for the salvation of all, in a mystery of merciful love. Such is the doctrinal message taught and lived by this Saint (19 Oct 1997).

Her experience of the ‘dark night’ of faith, when the joy of faith was completely absent even as she persevered in that darkness, continued through her last months, and her sisters were keen to censor references to this in the official version of her life. But it is actually something that speaks to contemporary people who wonder where God is to be found or experienced today and for whom faith can often be simply a matter of wanting to believe and continuing to love. This is what Thérèse encourages – go on believing, or at least go on wanting to believe, but always carry out the works of faith and, above all and always, the works of love, no matter how simple or ordinary they are.