May 17 this 2025 will mark the first centenary of the canonisation of St Thérèse of Lisieux, known to the world as the Little Flower. Considering she only died 28 years before that, that was remarkably soon for a canonisation, by the standards of the time. But there had been a whirlwind of devotion to her within a few years of her death, after the publication of Story of a Soul. ‘A storm of glory’ was how those investigating her life described the upsurge of devotion to her. And Pope St Pius X had already described her in 1916 as ‘the greatest saint of modern times’. It was Pope Pius XI who canonised her and he referred to Thérèse as ‘the star of our pontificate’.
So, what was it about Thérèse that so gripped the world, and why is she still the most popular saint in the Church’s calendar? She said herself that early in life she set out to ‘love Jesus, love Him with a passion … love Him like He had never been loved before’. It would appear she succeeded and in return God cannot refuse her anything, for countless people can testify to her help over the past century – soldiers in the trenches during two World Wars, as well as some of the bright intellectual lights of our age, people like Paul Claudel, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Graham Greene and John Wu, the Chinese intellectual, who said of her: ‘If what she says is true, then even a man like me need not despair’. But most of all it’s the ordinary people who have found in her a friend and inspiration as they go about their daily lives. So many have experienced the fulfilment of her promise to ‘let fall a shower of roses’after her death.
On the day that Thérèse was canonised, a priest commented to a colleague in St. Peter’s Square: ‘You know’,he said, ‘It’s the Gospel that has been canonised today!’. And indeed, that’s it in a nutshell, for Thérèse recalled humanity to the beauty of the Christian calling and highlighted the loving friendship that should exist between us and God. Her life proclaims loud and clear that God is deeply in love with each one of us, He wants us to stretch out our hands and accept His goodness, to look on Him as our best friend and to unburden ourselves of the worries of life and leave them with Him.
Thérèse had a saint’s instinct which brought her ‘the freedom of the children of God’. She searched the Scriptures and found there the God of love and tenderness, a loving Father who welcomes His children with open arms and understands their frailties. Thérèse had an intensely loving relationship with her own father. She felt if God was anything like him, then not only had she nothing to fear, she could expect a lot from Him. And by all accounts, God was even better than any earthly father or mother, for all goodness and love has its source in God. She developed an unbounded trust in God, an attitude of loving dependence by which she looked to God for everything she needed. This trust was proof against any darkness or hard knocks that she received in life, and there were plenty of those, for she suffered intensely in her short life.
The Little Way
This trust and childlike attitude of Thérèse has come to be known as ‘The Little Way’. This Way has helped countless numbers of people, and it has brought a refreshing simplicity into the lives of so many. For we complicate life, don’t we, and yet the core of the Christian life is this loving bond with the God that Jesus has revealed to us. Not that the Little Way is an easy way. It takes courage to take God at His word, and to leave things to Him for we like to have a finger in the pie. It takes a lot of patience to wait for an answer to prayer in God’s time, not ours, and indeed to persevere in confident prayer when it seems God isn’t listening.
A major part of the appeal Thérèse has for people is that she was so ‘ordinary’, so people can relate to her. Alright, in many ways her lifestyle was a million miles from that of most people, for by and large she lived a very sheltered life, both at home and in the Carmel. But the biggest part of most people’s life is relationships, interacting with people in the cut and thrust of every day, and Thérèse has certainly something to say to us about all this. She became a saint, not because she lived in a perfect environment, but because of how she coped with what were often adverse circumstances. She came to see that grace is everywhere and that ‘Everything is a grace’. For her, every situation in life called for love, and there is no situation in which love is not possible, and that is a gift we can give to God and the one He wants most of all. So, when it comes down to it, this is the reality of every life, whether in palace or prison, in convent or crèche – it is our reaction to the circumstances in which we find ourselves that shapes us into what we become. And it is here that Thérèse meets us and walks with us, in the daily grind, in the ‘petty pace’of life. She reassures us that God is satisfied with small steps, the offering of the ‘bits and pieces of everyday’.
Writing to her sister Céline in 1893, she says:
‘When I am feeling nothing, when I am INCAPABLE of praying, of practising virtue, then is the moment for seeking opportunities, nothings, which please Jesus more than mastery of the world or even martyrdom suffered with generosity. For example, a smile, a friendly word, when I would want to say nothing, or put on a look of annoyance. It is not for the purpose of weaving my crown, gaining merits, it is in order to please Jesus. When I do not have any opportunities, I want at least to tell him frequently that I love him […] Céline, perhaps you will think I always do what I am saying. Oh no! I am not always faithful, but I never get discouraged; I abandon myself into the arms of Jesus.’1
Love
Love became the biggest single simplifying force in Thérèse’s life and it gave a focus and unity to everything she did. She had the good fortune to be surrounded by love within her own family from the beginning. She had personal experience of the doting love of a father who thought the world of her. Her First Communion was an experience of love. “I knew I was loved”, she said of her first encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist. As she grew spiritually, she came to see love as ‘the one thing necessary’ and she often quoted the words of St John of the Cross: ‘My one activity is in love alone’. One evening in the convent in Lisieux, the community were passing round some spiritual reflections among themselves. Sr Mary of the Trinity, one of Thérèse’s novices, takes up the story:
‘On July 29, 1894 (the day her father died), the community drew some pious sentences by lot. The note which fell to Thérèse was this: If you were asked each moment, What are you doing?, your reply should be: I love. In the refectory it should be: I love. At work: I love, etc. This note caused her great pleasure. She kept it until her death. She told me: It is an echo of my soul. For a long time now, I have thus understood love and tried to practise it.’
Thérèse was fond of saying: ‘God does not need our works, but only our love’. He thirsts for our love, and when all is said and done, it’s the only thing we can give Him that He doesn’t have. And we can love anywhere, anytime, as we go about our daily round. This is where Thérèse is very much the saint of the ordinary people. She shows us the preciousness of the small things in life – it’s love that makes the difference, she says, doing ordinary things with extraordinary love.
I have no other means of proving my love for you, Lord, other than that of strewing flowers, that is, not allowing one little sacrifice to escape, not one look, one word, profiting by all the smallest things and doing them through love.2
Christian love is always outgoing, and often involves going against self, but it is a journey to wholeness and freedom. Selfishness shrivels up the heart, love expands it. Thérèse says as much, when describing her early life: ‘I felt charity enter into my soul, and the need to forget myself and to please others; since then, I’ve been happy […] Charity alone can expand the heart.’ 3
Love focussed her life and simplified it too. The prism of love gave coherence and unity to everything. It was the golden thread that ran through the vicissitudes of her day and kept it all together. ‘All my activity is in love alone’.
Every human life is made up of situations that call for some response, some reaction. Greatness lies in the quality of our response. It’s not that saints had different circumstances than we have, but their reaction was different. The old cliche is uniquely true in Thérèse ‘s case: ‘It’s not what you do that matters, but the love with which you do it’.
So Thérèse had come to the refinement of love by which her love of God had merged into love of her Sisters and every situation in her daily life stoked the flames of that love to the point where she could say, not just ‘I live, now not I , but Christ lives in me’, but she could actually say: ‘I love, now not I, but Christ loves in me’.
So mighty and so merciful
The heart of Thérèse’s message is that God continues to be involved in our world, that He is irrevocably in love with each person in it, that each person is precious to Him, and that nobody need feel left out. Knowing this with the heart (Thérèse says) should engender a deep trust in God and lead to simplicity of life, looking to God for everything. Thérèse’s continued intercession before God is a powerful source of blessing for each of us for, as she said, she ‘took God by the heart’. Her unbounded trust in him, through thick and thin, led her to expect everything from God, and He didn’t disappoint her, and her plea to us is to place the same confidence in God – as she kept repeating:‘We can never have too much confidence in the good God; he is so mighty and so merciful’.
