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Discalced Carmelite Secular Order Canada OCDS
Discalced Carmelite Secular Order Canada OCDS
Discalced Carmelite Secular Order Canada OCDS
Discalced Carmelite Secular Order Canada OCDS
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Discover The Little Way
"My Little way is the way of spiritual childhood, the way of trust and absolute self-surrender."
- St. Therese of Lisieux
St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus is among the most popular and most beloved saints in the Catholic Church. However, many have the mistaken idea that her life was easy and romantic and that her message can be reduced to the cute slogan: “Do little things with great love.” This view is far from accurate. St. Thérèse experienced life as all of us do, facing moments of joy, but also moments of profound crisis and pain. Sometimes she responded well to life’s challenges and other times she failed in her attempt. This is precisely why she is such a reliable witness to the Good News of God’s mercy and grace manifested in Jesus Christ, who came not to seek the just, but sinners. Thérèse reminds us that in his Son, God came to look for the weak and imperfect, and that He desires to be present and at work especially in the midst of our brokenness and sins, in the areas where we need Him the most.
Thérèse’s desires and her weakness
Thérèse entered Carmel at the age of fifteen with very intense desires and the firm resolution to bring about her ideal of sanctity, whatever the cost. “I want to be a saint… I am not perfect, but I want to become perfect” (LT 45). “To become a great saint” was the goal on which her eyes were fixed (LT 52, 80). In In entering Carmel Thérèse encountered suffering rather quickly. When she was sixteen years old, her beloved father Louis, who was a reflection of God’s fatherhood to her, became mentally ill due to brain arteriosclerosis.
Her father, a holy, wise, and gentle soul (now canonized), began behaving in incoherent and dangerous ways to the point that he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital (the “lunatic asylum”) where he had to stay for more than three years. Given the fact that in many cases mental illness can be hereditary, this brought about a stigma which affected the whole family. People gossiped, saying that Thérèse’s entrance into Carmel was the cause of his condition. This brought her great suffering and an intense purification of her faith. She says: “Our dear father would drink the most bitter and most humiliating of all chalices. Ah! On that day I didn’t say I was able to suffer more” (A 73r). “At the time, I was having great interior trials of all kinds, even to the point of asking myself whether heaven really existed” (A 80v).1
She often experienced pain and confusion and many times reacted to these trials poorly, weakly, without joy, courage, or strength. Thérèse later found some meaning to her father’s and her own suffering in contemplating the Holy Face of Christ, bruised, humiliated, and covered with wounds and tears. She pondered how much the resurrected Christ had first to suffer. As with his beloved Son, God doesn’t prevent suffering and death. For Thérèse, the incomprehensible mystery of suffering was no longer absurd nor a contradiction to God’s goodness. In the Holy Face, she saw how Jesus accepted his own death with a love that gave, forgave, and abandoned itself to God in redemptive confidence.2 Thérèse had to devote more than seven years to the religious life before understanding that to love as deeply as she desired, her own efforts were not enough. Jesus alone must give her Jesus.3 After years in Carmel, trying her best to love God as much as He loved her and trying to face suffering like the saints did, Thérèse admitted defeat. She always fell short and continued to experience her faults and weaknesses. “All our justice is stained” (Pri 6; SS 277), “no human life is exempt from faults” (LT 226), even “the most holy souls will be perfect only in heaven” (C 28r).
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Discovering the Little Way
Finding themselves in such a dilemma, most people would become discouraged and give up their ideal of sanctity or at least significantly lower their desires and aspirations. Thérèse, however, decided to take a different approach: “Instead of becoming discouraged, I said to myself: God cannot inspire unrealizable desires. I can, then, in spite of my littleness, aspire to holiness. It is impossible for me to grow up, and so I must bear with myself such as I am with all my imperfections. But I want to seek out a means of going to heaven by a little way, a way that is very straight, very short, and totally new” (C 3r).
She proceeded to look for an answer to this dilemma, reasoning that there must be a way since it was God himself who put those holy desires in her heart. There had to be “an elevator,” as Thérèse put it, which could help her climb the steep stairs of holiness. “I searched, then, in the Scriptures for some sign of this elevator, the object of my desires, and I read these words coming from the mouth of Eternal Wisdom: ‘Whoever is a little one, let him come to me’ (Prov 9:4). And so I succeeded. I felt I had found what I was looking for. But wanting to know, O my God, what you would do to the very little one who answered your call, I continued my search and this is what I discovered: ‘As one whom a mother caresses, so will I comfort you; you shall be carried at the breasts, and upon the knees they shall caress you’ (Is 66: 12-13). Ah! Never did words more tender and more melodious come to give joy to my soul. The elevator which must raise me to heaven is your arms, O Jesus! And for this I had no need to grow up, but rather I had to remain little and become this more and more” (C 3r).
She felt our Lord addressed those words to her personally. Littleness, which was precisely her difficulty on the way of becoming a great saint, suddenly appeared before her as the means to attain the goal. At last she had found her answer! The way that was very straight and short to become a great saint, her elevator was the arms of Jesus. Thérèse’s discovery was, in reality, a rediscovery of the very heart of the Gospel: “the revelation in Jesus Christ of God’s mercy to sinners” (CCC 1846). As Fr. Michael Gaitley says: “It’s the Good News that Jesus didn’t come for the righteous but for sinners… It’s the Good News that God doesn’t love us because we’re so good but because he’s so good, that he loves us not because we deserve it but because we desperately need it. It’s the Good News that God’s love is like water, which always goes to the lower place. It’s the Good News… that God isn’t attracted to our gifts, virtues, and talents, but rather to our weakness, brokenness, and sin.” 4
The Little Way, therefore, is about the compassionate heart of Jesus who, in seeing a weak and little soul sincerely trying in vain to love and serve Him in holiness, stoops down to her, picks her up and places her in the heights of the rough stair case of holiness. What lies at the very core of the Little Way is a profound awareness of and trust in the Merciful Love that overflows from the Heart of Christ. Let’s hear St. Thérèse again: “I have only to cast a glance in the Gospels and immediately I breathe in the perfumes of Jesus’ life, and I know on which side to run. I don’t hasten to the first place but to the last; rather than advance like the Pharisee, I repeat, filled with confidence, the publican’s prayer. Most of all I imitate the conduct of the Magdalene; her astonishing audacity which charms the Heart of Jesus also attracts my own. Yes, I feel it; even though I had on my conscience all the sins that can be committed, I would go, my heart broken with sorrow, and throw myself into Jesus’ arms, for I know how much he loves the prodigal son who returns to him” (C 36v).
Practicing the Little Way
St. Thérèse invites all little souls to acknowledge that we are as weak and powerless to live the Gospel as a little child who is trying to go up a stairway with steps too steep for him to reach. We are to trust God who will take us upstairs himself. Is she then saying that we only need to trust and remain passive, just waiting for the Lord to do it all? Not exactly. She is not advocating for us to fall into the vice of complacency. This is how she explains it: “Agree to be that little child. Through the practice of all the virtues, raise your little foot to the scale in the stairway of holiness. You won’t succeed in reaching the first step, but God requires you only to demonstrate your good will. Soon, conquered by your futile efforts, he will descend himself, gather you up in his arms, and carry you off to his kingdom for ever.” 5
In other words, we need to try, to make a sincere effort to practice virtue, to do the right thing, to act with love. Our efforts in themselves are useless, however, they are necessary because through them we show our good will, but most of all, our trust in God’s mercy. This can be a true challenge for those of us who are impatient with ourselves and who want to see immediate and measurable results and signs of progress. This could be a sign of pride disguised as zeal and love for God. Thérèse says: “And if God wanted you to be weak and powerless as a child, do you believe you would have fewer merits? Agree to stumble at every step, even to fall, to carry your crosses weakly; love your helplessness, your soul will benefit more from it than if, sustained by grace, you accomplished with enthusiasm heroic actions which would fill soul with personal satisfaction and pride.” 6
These words communicate a profound truth. Sometimes God allows us to continue struggling with certain weaknesses and sins in order to protect us from a more dangerous one; spiritual pride. It is crucial that we have a clear and profound awareness of our powerlessness to save ourselves and to grow in holiness without the aid of grace. Let us not forget that during his public life our Lord was able to touch the hearts of countless sinners, even great public sinners, and bring them to conversion. But there was a group of people He was unable to touch: those who were spiritually arrogant, who thought of themselves as righteous, holy, and above others, such as many of the Pharisees. This hardness of heart is what prompted Christ to say to them: “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you” (Mt 21: 31). In this sense, Thérèse’s Little Way can be a way of darkness. We are to put up with ourselves and the darkness of our sins and brokenness without getting discouraged. Very frequently we will be unable to see and measure our progress. This is precisely why hope and trust in God’s mercy are essential. Walking the Little Way may require us to realize, without despairing, that our vices and weakness may be with us until we die. More importantly, we must also have the certainty that these are not necessarily an obstacle for us to become saints. On the contrary, they could even be a means of sanctification if we persevere in hope.7
Thérèse knew that within someone who appeared to be a hopeless case could lie hidden a saint. Persons such as this could be especially pleasing to God because of their humility, unseen efforts, and relentless hope in God. “What we think of as negligence,” Thérèse wrote, “is often heroism in the eyes of God.” 8 Like the poor widow in the Gospel of Luke (21: 1-4) who put only two coins in the temple treasury, through their sincere and yet unsuccessful efforts such little souls may be giving all they can possibly give. One such soul at the Lisieux Carmel was Sr. Marie of St. Joseph. She suffered from mental illness and lived in the margins of the community. Nobody was willing to put up with her very difficult temper, except for Thérèse who got to know her tormented soul well. She once shared with Sr. Agnes: “If you knew her as well as I do, you would see that she is not responsible for all of the things that seem so awful to us… She is to be pitied… she is like an old clock that has to be re-wound every quarter of an hour. Yes, it is as bad as that… If I had an infirmity such as hers, and so defective a spirit, I would not do any better than she does, and then I would despair.” 9
Yet, Sr. Marie of St. Joseph did not despair, even after the death of Thérèse, her only friend in the convent, even after her mental illness meant she had to leave the convent at the age of 55 after 28 years of religious life, even after wandering aimlessly for years about the French countryside. Despite all this, amazingly, she could write the following words to Mother Agnes, through which she reveals her hidden sanctity: “The work of sanctification which my beloved Thérèse began so lovingly in me before she died continues. And I can say in all sincerity that my house is at rest. And I live now in complete abandonment. As long as I love Jesus, and he and Thérèse are pleased, nothing else matters to me.”
10 Sr. Marie of St. Joseph’s case shows us how the Little Way is precisely for weak and poor souls: Showing them how to find a way to holiness not despite their poverty, but precisely in the context of their indigence. Before she died, Thérèse expressed her burning desire that her little doctrine be known by all, so that God’s mercy may be glorified by an army of little souls like hers. She somehow knew that from heaven, her mission of making God loved would become more fruitful than ever. Three months before her death she wrote: “What attracts me to the homeland of heaven is the Lord’s call, the hope of loving him finally as I have so much desired to love him, and the thought that I shall be able to make him loved by a multitude of souls who will bless him eternally.” 11 Sometime later, seeing that her entrance into eternity was approaching, she expressed these prophetic words: “I feel especially that my mission is about to begin, my mission of making God loved as I love him, of giving my ‘little way’ to souls. If God answers my desires, my heaven will be spent on earth till the end of the world. Yes, I want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth.” 12
Thérèse had received and developed a liberating view of God, one that turned into an invitation to all to never stop believing and hoping in his merciful love. As Scripture tells us: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him” (1 Jn 4: 16). Through her life and teachings God reminds us that we can never trust too much in his love and mercy. He calls us to do our part, as insufficient and inadequate as it may be, and confidently surrender the rest to him who is always faithful and who will never leave nor forsake us (cf. Deut 31: 6). ​
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"I will spend my heaven doing good on earth.
I will let fall a shower of roses"
- St. Therese of Lisieux
In summary, those of us who follow the Little Way are called to do three things:
1
Recognize our weakness, sin and our powerlessness over them.
2
Keep trying to grow in holiness through prayer, the sacraments and in the constant and sincere attempt to practice virtue, such as doing little things with great love.
3
Keep trusting and hoping in God’s mercy, that he will satisfy our desires for holiness, even if we don’t understand how, even if we don’t see it in this life, but in heaven.
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This article was written by Fr. Jorge Cabrera, OCD