Thérèse and her little way

The mystery of radical simplicity, and the strange grace of darkness

I wrote a draft of this while I was studying spiritual theology in seminary. I was not a fan of St. Thérèse when I began, associating her with a style of French piety I found unappealing, even cloying. This is a common mistake, as I learned. The “mystery” of her genius and sanctity is that there is no mystery. The “hidden depths” are there for all to see, as plain and yet as powerful and consequential as The Practice of the Presence of God, but in my imagined sophistication I couldn’t see them. Please note that this is a long post (almost 4,000 words), and email subscribers may not get the entire thing.

Dorothy Day was recuperating from childbirth when she first heard the name of Thérèse of Lisieux. The experience of holding her newborn daughter had changed her. “If I had written the greatest book,” remarked Day, “composed the greatest symphony, pained the most beautiful painting, or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt more the exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”

Although she didn’t realize it at the time, this was beginning of her conversion. She knew of some Catholic saints from reading the psychologist William James on the Varieties of Religious Experience, and was struck by the intellect and humor of St. Teresa of Avila. Despite being unchurched at the time, something deeper was calling to her, and when asked the baby’s name, she said Tamar Teresa. Tamar, she explained, was the name of a friend’s daughter. “And Teresa is after the Little Flower?” the nurse asked.

Day had never heard of the Thérèse of Lisieux, who died the year Day was born, but the nurse pressed a St. Thérèse medal from her purse on the new mother. Day, still a Communist agitator at that point in her life, regarded the medal with disdain, but took it as a kind gesture, and sought to lean more about the Little Flower. As she did, she decided the mighty intellectual of Avila would be her daughter’s namesake, but the young girl from Lisieux would be her “novice mistress, to train her in the spiritual life.” By that point, she had decided to have her daughter baptized Catholic—even though not yet fully one herself—and she wanted both saints looking out for her.

When Story of a Soul was finally given to her and she read it, she found it “colorless, monotonous, too small”^[1] for her notice. A saint who thought being splashed with dirty dishwater and eating the food put in front of her was an example of heroic charity? Day considered herself part of the important work of global Marxist revolution. It was only in time, as she let herself be formed by the Church, that Day would come to see the centrality of Thérèse to modern life, eventually publishing a biography called Thérèse, in which she wrote,

To overcome the sense of futility in Catholics, men, women, and youths, married and single, who feel hopeless and useless, less than the dust, ineffectual, wasted, powerless. On the one hand Thérèse was ‘the little grain of sand’ and on the other ‘her name was written in heaven’; she was beloved by her heavenly Father, she was the bride of Christ, she was little less than the angels. And so are we all.^[2]

Like Dorothy Day, Bishop Robert Barron’s first encounter with St. Thérèse was “off-putting, and my post-Freudian mind was only too eager to see in it ample evidence of neuroses and repressions.”^[3] His reaction was similar to that of her biographer, Ida Görres, who wrote of Story of a Soul:

“How small everything is. How painfully little. It is as though we must stoop to enter into a world where everything is made to a bird-like measure, where everything is sweet, pale and fragile, like the lace in which the saint’s mother dealt. What a shut-in faintly perfumed air seems to rise from it.”^[4]

But like others, Bishop Barron returned to Story of a Soul, drawn back by something beneath the conventional piety and French schoolgirl trappings. If formidable intellects such as Popes Pius X, Pius XI, Pius XII, and John Paul II, Thomas Merton, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dorothy Day, and Edith Stein could find riches within, maybe he was missing something.

Practicing the Presence of God

In The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism, Barron draws on the life and way of Thérèse as an exemplar of the virtue of prudence, while acknowledging that many of her choices would appear “anything but prudent in the accepted sense of the term.”^[5] Her radical Christian love—loving from the heart of the Church, as Christ loves—is expressed in the both the quotidian challenges of life in a convent, and the more radical passion of physical suffering and the darkness of doubt. The way was simple, but it was also difficult. In the words of Day, “She practiced the presence of God and she did all things—all the little things that make up our daily life and contact with others—for His honor and glory.”^[6] This heavenly reordering of earthly challenges is where we see her supernatural prudence the clearest.

Prudence is called the Queen of Virtues because it is the “quality around which the other moral virtues cluster and find their order.”^[7] As one of the four cardinal virtues, prudence is an intellectual virtue that may be exercised and developed by the use of reason, but it may also be infused through sanctifying grace. It is “correct knowledge about things to be done or, more broadly, the knowledge of things that ought to be done and of things that ought to be avoided.” ^[8] Prudence allows us to tell good from evil. It is recta ratio agibilium: correct reason applied to practice.  Strengthened through grace, it becomes a supernatural prudence.

While prudence enables us to read the general contours of the moral life, one of its marks is “its orientation to particulars, to what Aquinas calls singularia, all of the elements, features, and contingencies that constitute a given moral situation.”^[9] Through grace, the natural virtue is infused in the believer and elevated  to “a moral sensibility radically in service of the love of God.”^[10] Natural prudence is reasonable. It can be discerned by faithful or heathen alike. Supernatural prudence is of a different order entirely. As we will see in the example of Thérèse, it may not appear reasonable at all outside of the context of radical Christian love.

This supernatural prudence reshapes us to think as God thinks, love as God loves, and act as God acts. As we know from personal experience, that doesn’t always feel like the “natural” thing to do. The natural thing is to avoid the person who annoys us or correct the one who wrongs us. We know that Christians are commanded to love those who hate us, and that certainly seems like a bold choice as the faithful pray for enemies and suffer persecution even unto death.

But can we read that command backwards into those who wound us in smaller ways? Can we tolerate the annoying and stand silent in the face of calumny? Thérèse could, and her little way shows us not only how but why, and even the fruits of this difficult path.

Finding Thérèse

As is evident from the initial responses of Day and Barron—one a New York Communist activist, the other a theologian in Paris writing a thesis about St. Thomas Aquinas—there is something almost baffling in our first encounters with the Little Flower. When one considers the vast numbers of miracles attributed to her, the fervent devotion she inspires, and her place as not only a Doctor of the Church but arguably the most popular saint since Francis of Assisi, it’s reasonable to expect more from her life. The interesting part is that Day’s assessment of “colorless, monotonous, too small” is both completely correct, and utterly beside the point. It’s only when we turn this jewel to look at it from another angle, in another light, that we see the hidden facets spark to life and understand that, at last, here is an ordinary example—a human-sized example—of a living Gospel.

We know about Thérèse from three manuscripts of varying lengths written by request in 1895 (a memoir of childhood and early vocation), 1896 (a letter to her sister Marie outlining her “little doctrine), and 1897 (two chapters on her religious life written a few months before her death). None of these were written with the intent of publishing, and indeed the first was little more than a family memento containing (according to her sister) “certain childish details from which Thérèse’s pen would have recoiled if she had foreseen that this writing would ever go outside the family circle.” Near the end of her life, however, Thérèse had a premonition that these scattered writings would bring her Little Way to the world and become an enduring legacy. Therefore, she gave her sister Pauline (Mother Agnes) permission to become “mon historian,” and “to add, to delete, to make any changes necessary.”^[11]

Thérèse warned Pauline not to speak of her manuscript to anyone because she had a sense that “the devil will lay more than one trap to hinder God’s work, a very important work!”^[12] From this, we can tell she had been given some sense of the outsized role Story of a Soul would play in 20^th century Catholicism. Pauline’s work involved reorganization and even Bowdlerization, sanding off some of the rough edges of her story and toning down the language of her crisis of faith. An unexpurgated edition was not widely available until 75 years after her death.

In these pages, we meet Thérèse, reluctantly taking up her pen following a request by her sister. The signal passage that inspires her is Mark 3:13: “And going up a mountain, he called to him men of his own choosing, and they came to him.” (Emphasis added by Thérèse.) This passage becomes key as she ponders something that had puzzled her about God’s love: its utter gratuity. “He does not call those who are worthy but those whom He pleases,”^[13] including sinners like Sts Paul and Augustine. Jesus teaches her about this mystery using “the book of nature”:

I understood how all the flowers He has created are beautiful, how the splender of the rose and the whiteness of the Lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy. “I understood that if all the flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked with little wild flowers.

And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus’ garden. He willed to create great souls comparable to Lilies and roses, but He has created smaller ones and these must be content to be daisies or violets destined to give joy to God’s glances when He looks down at his feet. Perfections consists in doing His will, in being what he wills us to be…

Just as the sun shines simultaneously on the tall cedars and on each little flower as though it were alone on the earth, so Our Lord is occupied particularly with each soul as though there were no others like it.”^[14]

Here we have the duality of Thérèse in a single passage: the somewhat cloying, almost childlike, sentimentality masking a deeply profound theological point. Bishop Barron summarizes it well:

Hers will be a story of a divine love, graciously willing the good of the other, that awakens an imitative reaction in the one who is loved. It is not a narrative of economic exchange—rewards for worthiness—but of the loop of grace, unmerited love engendering disinterested love, the divine life propagating itself in what is other.^[15]

A Life in Three Acts

Thérèse divides her life into three stages. There’s a blissful childhood until the age of four, when her mother’s death leaves her shattered and lost; from four until an epiphany at the age of thirteen, and then from thirteen until the present time as a nun with the Carmelites of Lisieux.

Her parents—Sts Louis and Zelie Martin, canonized in 2015—raised their five surviving children (all daughters) in an extremely loving and pious household. All five would become nuns. Thérèse, the youngest, was, by her own admission, spoiled. She was especially close to her father, who was already fifty when his Little Flower was born.

This affection for St. Louis comes through in the Story of a Soul, where her intense love for her earthly father becomes a way for her to understand the love of her heavenly Father. She discerned her vocation at a precocious age and never wavered from her desire to pursue it. Throughout her story, the desire not merely to join the Carmelites, but to do so six years before the acceptable age of entry, is a constant. This fixedness leads her to almost comic moments of steely determination, culminating in her being dragged from the feet of Pope Leo XIII by Vatican guards as she pleads her case for early admission.

Her commitment to God is total, and she refuses to do things by half-measures:

I understood that to become a saint one had to suffer much, seek out always the most perfect thing to do, and forget self. I understood, too, there were many degrees of perfection and each soul was free to respond to the advances of our Lord, to do little or much for Him, in a word, to choose among the sacrifices He was asking…. I cried out ‘My God, “I choose all! I don’t want to be a saint by halves. I’m not afraid to suffer for You, I fear only one thing: to keep my own will; so take it, for I choose all that You will!” ^[16]

Suffering was a persistent theme in her short life. From the shattering death of her mother until her sister Pauline entered the Carmelite monastery, she was an odd and out-of-place girl who didn’t fit in with the other children, the self-absorbed youngest daughter of a doting father and sisters. Her health was always fragile, and she eventually she sank into a prolonged period of madness, complete with fits, catatonia, and hallucinations.

In writing about this period later in life, she calls it a demonic attack, and it certainly has all the classical hallmarks. The long mental illness finally ended with an inbreaking of grace: a vision of a beloved statue of the Blessed Mother, radiant and smiling. This vision banished the darkness, and when she received her first communion the following spring she was blessed with a powerful religious experience that she struggles to convey in words. Receiving the eucharist gives her a profound feeling of the unconditional love of Jesus.

There were no demands made, no struggles, no sacrifices; for a long time now Jesus and poor little Thérèse looked at and understood each other. That day, it was no longer simply a look, it was a fusion; they were no longer two, Thérèse had vanished as a drop of water is lost in the immensity of the ocean. Jesus alone remained.^[17]

She describes it as though heaven itself entered her soul, and found she no longer missed her mother. How could she? Her mother was in heaven and heaven was now part of her. The gift of the eucharist was a healing balm that united her to her lost mother through the loving heart of Jesus. This fusion is a turning point which she interprets through Galatians 2:10: “It is is no longer I that live, it is Jesus that lives in me!”

The corollary to this is a sudden embrace of the cross. She feels a “great desire to suffer.”^[18] This reaction is common in saints who have reached a certain spiritual level, although it seems peculiar to outsiders. In fact, participation in the love and joy of the divine life of Christ also brings with it a desire to participate in His suffering. The cross is the means by which he bridged the gap between heaven and earth and set us free, and is thus an integral part of the entire Christian experience. There is no Christ without a cross, and someone who feels fused with the heart of Jesus is, by necessity, fused with his passion. This desire to suffer is met with an almost immediate “interior assurance that Jesus reserved a great number of crosses for me.”^[19]

When Charity Penetrates the Soul

The final step of Thérèse across the threshold from childhood to maturity comes on Christmas Eve, prompted by overhearing an unusually cross word from her beloved, idealized father. Rather than respond with tears, she acts as though she hadn’t heard and proceeds to delight the old man. Given an opportunity to behave as she normally would, wounded and petulant, she instead feels an infusion of grace that allows her to seek the good of another. It was a pivotal moment for her, so much that she claim it was when charity entered her soul, and she learned to forget herself for the good of others. She adds, “Since then I’ve been happy.”^[20]

For Bishop Barron, this is a small gospel:

I cannot think of a more succinct summary of the Christian way: the divine life, which can come only as a gift, changes us in such a way that we want to live for the other, and this conversion produces joy. Everything else in Christian ethics and dogmatics is commentary.^[21]

At this moment of infused charity, graciously gifted, Thérèse is transfigured into a model of prudence, “adept at discerning the demand of love in the particular situation.”^[22] From this point on, she desires to serve Jesus by helping others to find salvation. She finds herself thirsty for the souls of “great sinners; I burned with the desire to snatch them from the eternal flames.”^[23]

Her means of achieving this is her “Little Way,” outlined in Manuscript B as a letter to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart. This brief document (13 pages in the standard edition) is her cry of love to the world. Failing to recognize herself in any of the great models or charisms of holiness, she realizes that her role is to be love at the heart of the church. Love is the driving force of all vocations, spanning all time and space. Love alone is eternal. Therefore, love itself will be her vocation. She cannot be priest, martyr, prophet, doctor or warrior, but she will be the love that moves them all.

How will she achieve this? Through her littleness. Several scripture passages are key to her understanding:

“Whoever is a little one, let him come to me” (Prov. 9:4)

“For him that is little, mercy will be shown.” (Wis. 6:7)

“God will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and shall take them up in his bosom” (Is. 40:11).

“As one whom a mother caresses, so will I comfort you; you shall be carried at the breasts and upon the knees the will caress you.” (Is. 66:12-13)

God loves those who place their loving trust in Him like little children. This love is repaid not by great deeds, but by love alone.

And so Thérèse will love, in the small ways she knows how from inside the walls of Carmel.

Seeing the World As It Is

With this breakthrough, she achieved a heightened level of infused, supernatural prudence. She was able to see the world ordered rightly, and respond in kind, all for the good of God by wishing the good of others. She likened this love to a handful of little flower petals that Jesus will use to douse the devouring flames of sin. “The smallest act of pure love is of more value to [the Church] than all other works together.”^[24]

What this immense gift gave was the ability to discern “the path of love in whatever situation she found herself—and follow it.”^[25] The moments that illustrates Thérèse’s little way are so small they wouldn’t even be mentioned in the biographies of spiritual titans like Francis or Joan, yet they are the very stuff of that love which moves the sun and other stars.

An irritating fellow nun is always greeted with a prayer, a small service, and a smile. Responsibility for a fussy old nun is taken on as Thérèse’s special project, and she serves the sour woman in patience and love, suppressing her irritation to act for the good of the other. Splashed with dirty dishwater or falsely accused, she neither rebukes the other nor defends herself. She is docile as a lamb, saying of one difficult person, “What attracted me was Jesus hidden in the depths of her soul.”^[26]

All of these little frustrations and indignities, small deeds of patience and kindness done with great love for those loved by Jesus, are as heaven to her, and she “would not have exchanged the ten minutes employed in carrying out my humble office of charity to enjoy a thousand years of worldly feasts.”^[27]

The Grace of Darkness

What she found is “the path of love,”^[28] a gift of infused prudence. It is a path that seeks totally conformity with the love of God, who lets the sun shine on the just and unjust alike.

At the end of her life, deep in the torments of the tuberculosis that will kill her, she entered a period of spiritual aridity and felt the crushing darkness of doubt. She was plagued by the idea that it is all a lie, and there is no heaven. At that moment in the Story of a Soul, anyone who had been unconvinced of her sanctity and unmoved by her childish piety, can’t help but recognize that here indeed is a spiritual daughter of Sts Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

This darkness, she realized, is not the flight of her faith or the fear death, but yet another grace, another marker on the road of her Little Way. She who asked to suffer for Jesus was feeling the despair of Christ crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” She had entered Good Friday in joy, puzzled how any could deny the reality of heaven. In response, God had given her the grace of knowing what it was like to be without faith:

During those very joyful days of the Easter season, Jesus made me feel that there were really souls who have no faith and who, through the abuse of grace, lost this precious treasure, the source of the only real and pure joys. He permitted my soul to be invaded by the thickest darkness.^[29]

This trial was not brief, and indeed had not ended at the time when she wrote Manuscript C, shortly before her death. The grace she felt had been granted so she could “beg pardon for her brothers.” She had long felt that this world was a “sad and dark country,”^[30] and that heaven was her true destination, but now she felt it in a new and sharper way. She felt what it was like to live in that country without the hope of heaven beyond and the God who loves.

She had participated in the suffering of the unbeliever, yet through her ability to supernaturally reorder her inner experience, she fused it with the suffering of Christ and gave it meaning. This, too, is an example of her prudence: her staggering ability to set things in their proper order and understand the meaning within. Even her final suffering and death she saw through the lens of this love.

What Thérèse understood, in the words of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, is

that the Church has a heart, and she grasped that love is this heart. She understood that the apostles can no longer preach and the martyrs no longer shed their blood if this heart is no longer burning. She grasped that love is all, that it reaches beyond times and places. And she understood that she herself, the little nun hidden behind the grille of a Carmel in a provincial town in France, could be present everywhere, because as a loving person she was there with Christ in the heart of the Church.^[31]

The path of the martyr is clear and well marked. We know how the saints stood firm in face of persecution, torture, and death. We like to feel that we would have been the same, and stood boldly before the Roman prefect to announce “I am a Christian.”

Thérèse lived in a time and a place where opportunities for outsized Christian witness were scarce. What is a saint to do when the most challenging part of living a truly Christian life is doggedly volunteering to guide a cranky old lady to the rectory not only with patience, but with genuine love?

She is to love her as Christ loves her. Anyone who has had to care for a cranky old lady understands that this can, indeed, be a heroic example of Christian witness. And at any given moment in history there are more old ladies in need of patience and love than there are pagan emperors. That was the particular simple genius of Thérèse, and it can transform the world.

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^[1] Dorothy Day, Thérèse (Notre Dame, Indiana: Christian Classics, 2016), 2.

^[2] Ibid..

^[3] Robert Barron, The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), 299.

^[4] Ida Friederike Görres, The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003), 15.

^[5] Barron, 299.

^[6] Day, 197.

^[7] Barron, 298.

^[8] Hardon, Modern Catholic Dictionary, http://www.therealpresence.org/cgi-bin/getdefinition.pl.

^[9] Barron, ibid.

^[10] Ibid

^[11] Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated by John Clarke. 3rd edition. (Lisieux: I C S Publications, 1996), xix.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Therese, 13.

^[14] Ibid, 14.

^[15] Barron, 300.

^[16] Thérèse, 27.

^[17] Ibid, 77.

^[18] Ibid, 79.

^[19] Ibid.

^[20] Ibid, 99.

^[21] Barron, 308.

^[22] Ibid.

^[23] Thérèse, 99.

^[24] Ibid, 197.

^[25] Barron, 312

^[26] Thérèse, 223.

^[27] Ibid, 228.

^[28] Barron, 314.

^[29] Thérèse, 211.

^[30] Ibid.

^[31] Joseph Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 121.