Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Author’s Preface

1 Faith in Compassionate Love

2 The Desire to Love

3 Humility

4 Confidence

5 St. Thérèse and the Holy Ghost

6 Self-Denial in St. Thérèse

7 The Gifts of the Holy Ghost in St. Thérèse

8 The Prayer of St. Thérèse

9 St. Thérèse and Patience

10 St. Thérèse and the Love of Neighbor

11 The Simplicity of St. Thérèse

12 The Offering to Compassionate Love

A Retreat With

Saint Thérèse

by Pere Liagre, C.S.Sp

Translated by,

Dom P. J. Owen, O.S.B..

Loreto Publications

Fitzwilliam, NH 03447

A. D. 2013

Nihil obstat:

Dom Benedict Adams, O.S.B. Censor deputatis

Imprimatur:

Dom Herbert Byrne, O.S.B., Abbot President

Nihil obstat:

Eduardus C. Mahoney, S.Th.D., Censor deputatus.

Imprimatur:

B. Morough Bernard, Vic. .Gen.

Westmonasterii, die la marti 1947

Originally Published by

The Newman Press

Westminster, Maryland 1948

All rights reserved

2013 ebook edition by:

Loreto Publications

P. O. Box 603

Fitzwilliam, NH 03447

603-239-6671

www.loretopubs.org

ISBN: 978-1-62292-026-6

Printed in the United States of America

Foreword

This little volume is the first of what we hope will be a series of Sicut Parvuli handbooks produced by the Association of Priests of St. Teresa, of which Sicut Parvuli is the quarterly review. Their object is the exposition of the spiritual teaching of St. Thérèse known as the Little Way of Spiritual Childhood and so strongly recommended to the faithful by the Holy See.

“There is a call to the faithful of every nation, whatever their age or sex or state of life may be, to enter wholeheartedly into the Little Way which led Sister to the summit of heroic virtue.”

“In Spiritual Childhood lies the secret of sanctity for all the faithful throughout the whole world.”

“It is our special desire that the secret of Sister Thérèse’s sanctity may be disclosed to all our children.” –Benedict XV.

“Such is the Little Way and if it cannot lead each one of us to the lofty heights reached by little Thérèse it is, nevertheless, not merely a possible but an easy way for every soul.”

“We nourish the hope today of seeing springing up in the souls of the faithful of Christ a burning desire of leading a life of Spiritual Childhood.”

“We earnestly desire that all the faithful should study her in order to copy her, becoming children themselves, since otherwise they cannot, as the Master saith, enter into the kingdom of Heaven.” –Pius XI.

This little book is particularly fitted to be the first of this series, for it contains the very essence of St. Thérèse’s teaching expressed in the simplest manner possible, and is therefore excellent material either for our own meditation or for teaching the Little Way to others. The Association of Priests of St. Teresa, which has been in existence for eight years, now numbers over 1,400 priests.

Vernon Johnson

Preface

Year after year appear new books on St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and, though none of them can be a substitute for the Autobiography, they have a useful service to perform in emphasizing and systematizing its teaching. Many readers of St. Thérèse’s book, carried away by its charm and naiveté, its poetry and simple beauty, seem to overlook its fundamental teaching. Whether they praise or blame it, therefore, they think it is sentimental and pretty, but forget the hard core of simple Gospel truth which it enshrines. They at once assume that the Little Way is a short cut and an easy path to heaven. St. Thérèse, who was so deeply imbued with Our Lord’s teaching, would have reminded them that the easy way leads to destruction, whereas the way that leads to heaven is narrow and strait. Simple and direct the Little Way is, but if anyone thinks it is easy, let him give it an honest trial, and he will find out his mistake.

There is nothing new about the Little Way; it is the way of the saints, it is the way of Our Lady, it is the way of the Gospels. Its characteristics are humility, trust, constant self-sacrifice, simplicity, and love. ‘What saint has ever gained his crown in any other way? It is based on Our Lord’s words: “Unless ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Spiritual childhood, then, is not a luxury of devotion; it is an obligation, an essential passport to entry into heaven. St. Thérèse has but emphasized the simplicity of the Gospel teaching and guided us away from the bewildering complexity, the difficult intellectualism, the multiplied divisions, the tabulated schemes and even the calculations of many so-called spiritual books. “Sometimes,” she wrote to a brother missionary, “when I read books in which perfection is put before us with the goal obstructed by a thousand obstacles, my poor little head is quickly fatigued. I close the learned treatise which tires my brain and dries up my heart, and I turn to the Sacred Scriptures. Then all becomes clear and lightsome. . . . I rejoice in my littleness because ‘only little children and those who are like them shall be admitted to the heavenly banquet.’ Fortunately ‘there are many mansions in my Father’s house.’ If there were only those—to me—incomprehensible mansions with their baffling roads, I should certainly never enter there.” As Cardinal Bourne put it, in words which at the time of the saint’s beatification were circulated throughout France: “She has banished mathematics from our faith.”

There is still need, then, for books like the present one to insist on the simplicity and Gospel truth of her message, and to point out what on a cursory reading we might miss.
As G. K. Chesterton writes:[1]

The way is all so very plain

That we may lose the way . . .

So very simple is the road

That we may stray from it . . .

We walk bewildered in the light

For something is too large for sight

And something much too plain to say . . .

Go humbly, humble are the skies

And low and large and fierce the Star;

So very near the Manger lies

That we may travel far.

Fr. Liagre’s Retreat, here presented in an English dress, will be found to be a useful summary of the main lines of St. Thérèse’s teaching. It expounds them simply and shows how they must be at the basis of every truly spiritual life. Personally, we like especially the final chapter, but lovers of the humble little Carmelite will welcome the whole book and find therein abundant inspiration.

P. E. Hallett

[1]The Wise Men. Poem by G. K. Chesterton.

Author’s Preface

Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them to little ones.[1]

It is of these things that God reveals to little ones that I propose to speak, and Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus shall be our guide. For it seems clear that the canonization of the little Carmelite of Lisieux is a fact of outstanding importance in the history of holiness, and one, moreover, which should here and now be making its influence felt on every soul called to perfection and striving towards the sublime goal of sanctity. To these and to all living in this present age, Thérèse gives the light they need in order to tend to God as He desires, and in the particular way that He chooses for them in this twentieth century of ours. For whoever they may be, whether the ordinary faithful, religious or priests, the little saint would indeed seem to have been appointed by Almighty God to be the mistress of holiness whom they now require, speaking the language they understand, pointing out the way they ought to tread, giving them the teaching adapted to their present need and to the designs of Providence in their regard.

Therefore, it will, I think, be good for us (and perhaps nothing could be better) to put ourselves at her school, to place ourselves among those “little ones” to whom she had the very special mission of delivering God’s message, to whom she so persistently turns, and to whom her lessons in holiness are so particularly directed. Did not our Divine Master say that it is to the “little ones” that His Father reveals His secrets and teaches His Divine Life?

Our task, and it is no easy one, is to become “little ones.” We are so ready to think ourselves somebody, that we are clever, prudent, wise. Our very studies foster this illusion. Let us confess in all sincerity that, compared with the true knowledge of God, the way the saints know, all our knowledge is nothing. To learn and to advance in this true knowledge we must become “little ones.”

St. Paul said long ago: “If any man among you seem to be wise in this world let him become a fool, that he may be wise !”[2] And elsewhere he underlines this thought: “If any man thinketh he knoweth anything, he hath not known as he ought to know;”[3] that is to say, he does not yet know how to begin to learn. Let us, then, begin this retreat by becoming little in our own eyes and in our own estimation. Only so are we able to receive and profit by the divine teaching.

Long before St. Paul, Wisdom had said: “Whoever is a little one, let him come to Me.”[4] A soul must be little to draw near to God. During this retreat we shall meet these words of the Proverbs again, words which St. Thérèse understood so well and which to her were a beacon of light. Let us take them to our hearts at the beginning of our retreat, and meditate on them: “Whoever is a little one, let him come to Me.”

They recall another saying, this time of Our Lord Himself: “If any man thirst, let him come to Me, and drink.”[5] This invitation of Our Savior, and the accompanying promise, is sweet to a soul who thirsts for God, who yearns for union with God and the interior life. “If any man thirst,” Jesus says, “let him come to Me, and he will find wherewith to quench his thirst!” These words of comfort should be taken with those of Wisdom; by which their meaning is completed: “If any man thirst, and if any man is a little one, then let him come to Me with confidence and let him drink.”

The important thing, therefore, is not to thirst for spiritual things and feel a desire for them, though this is indeed something and a necessary condition: “If any man thirst, let him come to Me.” But in order to come to Our Lord there is another antecedent condition, an indispensable preliminary: it is to be a “little one,” to become little: “Whoever is a little one, let him come to Me.”

Once again, I say, let us distrust our knowledge, our views, our theories, our methods. If they give us any self-esteem, any feeling of wisdom, put them aside. There may be many delusions, and wrong ideas that way.

One day a novice, coming to Sister Thérèse for advice, said to her, “Oh, when I think of all I have yet to acquire.” “Say, rather, to lose,”[6] was the answer. An answer alight with wisdom. Let us think that we have much more to lose than to acquire if we are to profit in Thérèse’s school, and learn, from her the science of holiness.

Let us look on ourselves as knowing nothing, as mere beginners shedding all pretensions, all self-esteem. We must become “little ones,” become children once more, to be fit to receive the Kingdom of God. Let us tell ourself that we have much to lose before we can begin the science of which saints are made, for it is God, the Holy Ghost, who is to make the retreat in us. Our work, all we are asked to do, is to keep ourselves wholly little and as nothing under the divine action. Let us begin, then, by becoming little, by putting on one side every attachment of whatever kind which makes us important in our own eyes and gives us confidence in ourselves. Let us become children again. Let us begin the retreat with this thought, and work at this thought during its whole course. It would be an immense gain if we came out of our retreat truly little before God and in our own eyes. Let us become children again in spirit in conformity with the Gospels.

And let us pray, for prayer is the real work of the retreat. Let us ask St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, and through her, the humble heart of Mary and the Holy Ghost, for littleness of heart, for sincere and true humility before God. “Whoever is a little one, let him come to Me.” “Father, Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them to little ones.”

[1]Matt. 11:25.

[2]  1Cor. 3:18.

[3]  1Cor. 8:2.

[4]  Prov. 9:4.

[5]  John 7:37.

[6]  Autobiography, p. 297.

1 Faith in Compassionate Love

We have believed the charity which God hath to us.[1]

We can almost hear the beating of his heart as we read these words of St. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. It is a veritable shout of triumph coming from his inmost being: “I believe in God’s love for me.” Even so and with an equal fervor must the little Carmelite have told God of her faith in His infinite Love. Her whole life and sanctity and teaching are the expression of that faith. Her faith in Love is the very foundation of her soul, her inmost secret. This faith, in the Love of God, a faith which is unchanging, simple and ingenuous, explains everything in St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Without it no explanation is possible.

Much has been written, and very rightly, of her love of God. For her, Love is the first beginning, as well as the last end, of perfection and holiness. That is her special characteristic. Thérèse is the embodiment of filial love, the living expression of the Gospel. “I have never given God anything but love.”[2] “There is no more to say. Love is the only thing that matters.”[3] But, in general, the source, the real secret of this simple love of God, namely, her faith in God’s Love for her, is not mentioned. The reason is, I think, that the very simplicity of her faith makes any analysis seem superfluous; we succumb like her to its charm, without seeking to explain its nature.

It will be well for us to set out its nature, to begin our tête-a-tête, for that is what these days of retreat should be, with this consideration. Only so shall we really understand and profit by our retreat.

First then, What did faith in Love mean to Thérèse?

Secondly, What is this Love in which she believed?

First

The great St. Teresa defined prayer, that is, the entire spiritual life, as “A friendly communion between the soul and the God by whom she knows herself to be loved.” To know that we are loved, to be sure of it, to be continually conscious of being loved by our all-powerful God; in short, to believe, and believe with a divine faith, unfalteringly, in God’s Love for us, this (as the great contemplative knew) is the primary and indispensable condition for all real communion between the soul and God.

In Thérèse of the Child Jesus we see this condition perfectly realized. It seems as if she never thought of God other than as He has, in fact, willed to reveal Himself to be, as Love. So St. John defines Him: “God is Charity.”’[4] Losing her mother whilst very young, the childhood of Thérèse centered in her father; it was one long experience of the tenderest and most watchful paternal love. In that fact we can discern God’s special providence.

So it was that whenever God was spoken of to her, from the moment she was taught to say to God, “Our Father,” this childlike soul quite naturally pictured Him in the likeness of her father on earth. Proceeding, without knowing it, by the way theologians term via excellentiae, she attributed to God, but in an infinite degree, the goodness, tenderness and care, in a word, the love with which her earthly father surrounded her.

God appears to her understanding, and, above all, to her heart (for she lived much more by her heart than her understanding) as a Father, as her Father, as the most affectionate and tender of Fathers; in a word, as fatherly love, and that at its very highest perfection “Nemo tam Pater” (Tertull). “The Father. . . of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named.”[5] It is the very essence of the Gospel teaching that God is our Father. We shall have many occasions to repeat this. Thérèse is the living commentary of the Gospels, the most beautiful commentary because the most simple.

Faith in God’s Love for her, the Love of God her Father for the little helpless child that she was, this from her earliest days was the atmosphere in which she lived and breathed, in which her soul expanded and grew. This was the root from which her whole spiritual life sprang with its childlike love, its humility, confidence, self-surrender and joy. These simple evangelical virtues seemed to spring spontaneously from her wholly simple faith in the Love of God, the mustard seed planted by the hand of God Himself in her little soul. Little, but greatly privileged soul, you may say. Yes, indeed, but her only privilege was to understand better than we do, and to have the mission to make us understand that we have the same privilege as she had, the privilege of being God’s children, of being like her, infinitely loved, loved with a fatherly Love by God our Father.

Her life was, in all its simplicity, the life of faith, of that faith which the Gospel asks from us; of faith in God’s Love for us. Thérèse knew herself, believed herself infinitely loved. She answered that call of love by a fervent and wholly simple desire to love in return. And so she went her way free of all care, unperturbed, in the splendor of that light; everything is lit up, made clear for her by this pure faith.

Even when God led her in dark ways (and this was almost the continual state of her soul), even then it is her faith, her unwavering faith in her Father’s Love, which is her support and guide. She reveals her inmost heart when she says: “it is so sweet to serve God in obscurity and trial. We have only this life in which to live by faith.”[6] And when we seek the reason of her supreme trial, the eclipse of faith which lasted for a year and a half, the answer surely is that God willed, by it to perfect her faith, to raise her soul to a purer faith detached from all things of sense, from every conscious and felt intellectual perception. He willed, in this manner, to perfect her soul in sanctity.

Thérèse herself had written some months previously: “I know that, behind the dark clouds, my Sun is still shining.”[7] Her Sun. What is that? She tells us in the preceding line: “The star of love.” And how does she know? By faith! Faith in love was the key to her holiness. “Fides est initium, radix est fundamentum omnis justjificationis;” “faith is the beginning, root and foundation of all justification,” says the Council of Trent. We may say that faith in Love was, for Thérèse, the beginning, root and foundation of her sanctity.

And this is of sovereign importance for us to know. The faith of the Gospel is a simple steadfast gaze upon Divine Love. Everything follows from that; the understanding of the things of God comes after. “Credo ut intelligam”: “I believe in order that I may be able to understand.”

Second

But there is something more to add before we can fully understand what faith in the love of God meant to St. Thérèse; there is a further step to take if we would sound her secret to its very depths. The Love in which Thérèse believed with her whole soul has a special name; it is Compassionate Love. And here again, here above all, do we not see the special message of the Gospel?

In man’s actual state after the Fall, God has loved us not only gratuitously, and without any merit on our part; He has loved us, and still loves us just as we are, regardless of our utter wretchedness and destitution; or, to speak more correctly, He has loved us precisely because of our utter wretchedness and destitution.

That is His glory. It is to manifest His Compassionate Love that He has created the world as it now is, the world in which we live, even though He foresaw sin and all the miseries consequent on it. God’s glory lies in our believing in this Love, in this wholly Compassionate Love. It is His will that we believe in it; and that is what our pride will not let us do. It will not let us admit to being wholly worthless; it refuses to be the object of the pure compassion of God. Pride does not understand Compassionate Love.

However, it is not a question of understanding this Love, but of believing in it, simply and steadfastly as Thérèse did. Then, later, we shall understand. We shall understand everything, in the right way, in the light of God.

How, in actual fact, do we understand—I mean really understand—the Incarnation, Redemption by God’s Blood, the Eucharist? Is it through metaphysical treatises with their subtleties and arguments? No, it is in the humility of spirit, which acknowledges the absolute misery of man, and believes in the incomprehensible compassion of God for that misery; which believes in it and surrenders itself to it, without explanations, without claiming to understand, with the utter simplicity of Thérèse.

And if this faith in Compassionate Love is the condition for the understanding of these mysteries, how much more necessary it is for our effective participation in them, for receiving into our souls the grace, the fruits of these mysteries. “What delights God in my soul,” she writes in one of her letters, “is to see me loving my littleness and poverty, to see the blind trust I have in His Compassion.”[8] What depth of meaning there is in these words and how much we can learn from them!

We theologians are often much too fond of trying to explain everything, to understand everything, to rationalize everything. And yet God is only known by humbling the spirit and by approaching Him by faith, pure faith, the faith which the Gospel proposes and enjoins, faith in Love which is wholly compassionate of our utter wretchedness.

Thérèse understood this instinctively. She understood by that glance which St. Paul calls: “the enlightened eye of the heart,” that is to say, more with the heart than the mind, by loving rather than by understanding, Thérèse had been enlightened; she knew God as He desires to be known. She dared to love God as a child loves. She dared with all her wretchedness to enter into a wholly simple and familiar relationship with God. How was this? Because she felt herself loved, believed herself loved, loved by God who is Love; with unfaltering faith she believed herself infinitely loved by Infinite Love, and lastly, and most important of all, she believed herself compassionately loved by God who is—and He is jealous of the title—the Father of Compassion.

To surrender ourselves, poor and needing compassion, to the Love of God, to God who reveals Himself precisely as Compassionate, this is life itself for our souls. But to believe firmly in Compassionate Love is, obviously, the indispensable condition for such a surrender. Believe? Let us be quite clear. Faith is certainly an intellectual virtue, but the heart and will also have their part. Love, charity, in a special way enlarges the range, the keenness of vision of the mind which is enlightened by faith. Such was the faith of Thérèse, the glance of her faith (the “enlightened eye of the heart”); the intuition of the mind under the impulse of love. The truth is, that it is only by loving that we can know as we should the God whom faith reveals to us. That, I believe, is what St. John really meant when he wrote: “He that loveth not knoweth not God.”[9]

Faith, in proposing God to us as Compassionate Love, entices our poor hearts to dare to love Him. And if the heart yields, then faith enters into a more complete possession of its divine object, seeing that this is indeed the God whom our poor heart needs. And so faith is at rest with a more perfect certitude, in a kind of tranquil vision, in this God of Love and Compassion, which she has found.

God, Love, Infinite Love and Compassionate Love; this is indeed He whom St. Paul and St. John present to our faith: “God who is rich in mercy for His exceeding charity with which He loved us. . . when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together in Christ.”[10] “In this is charity, not as though we had loved God, but because He hath first loved us (a wholly Compassionate Love) and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins.”[11] “And we have known, and have believed the charity which God hath to us. God is charity.”[12]

This is the faith asked of us by the Gospel. Thérèse understood. Let us ask her that we too may understand. Let us believe in all simplicity, in all humility, in the Compassionate, wholly Compassionate, Love of our God for us poor sinners. Let us lay our proud knowledge in the dust, acknowledge our ignorance and wretchedness, and beg that grace of graces, the grace humbly and simply to live that faith to the full. Such is holiness.

[1] 1 John 4:6.

[2]Noviisima Verba, (1928 Edition), p. 82.

[3]Ibid., p. 184

[4] 1 John 4:16.

[5] Eph. 3:14.

[6] Autobiography (1927 Edition), p. 318.

[7] Ibid., p. 207.

[8] Ibid., p. 360.

[9] 1John 4:18.

[10] Eph. 2:4.

[11] John 4:10.

[12] Ibid, 16.

2 The Desire to Love

Let us therefore love God because God hath first loved us.[1]

The inevitable effect of faith in the Compassionate Love of God is to arouse within us, if we are sincere, the desire to love God in return. We will therefore consider the desire to love, which, after her faith in love, is the essential element in Thérèse’s spirituality and doctrine.

When a soul sincerely believes itself loved, infinitely, compassionately loved by God, in spite of, nay, because of, its very wretchedness; when it believes this with deep, unfaltering faith and feels, too, its powerlessness to return that love, what will its response be but a desire to surrender its wretchedness to that Love, that He may do in it His work of compassion and love? It is love beginning to awaken in the human soul, which is created for love, and it awakens in the form of desire, the desire to love, though the soul is conscious of being unable to do so. Is it not, in fact, the whole purpose of the Gospel to awaken just this desire in fallen man?

We recall Our Lord’s words to the Samaritan woman: “If thou didst know the gift of God. . . thou wouldst have asked it of Him.” Compassionate Love, made man, here excites that sinful soul to ask for Love; our Divine Savior seeks to awaken in her the desire to love.

And He succeeds: “Lord, give me this water?”[2] It sums up the whole Gospel. The miracle of the Gospel is in having aroused, and so simply, the confidence to love, the desire to love, in poor fallen man. The Gospel life consists in the realization of the words of St. Augustine: “Deus sitit sitiri”, “God thirsts to be thirsted for.”

When Thérèse read this conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, she did not miss its meaning. “God who says: ‘If I should be hungry, I would not tell thee’ (Psalm 49:12), does not hesitate to beg the Samaritan woman for a little water. He was thirsty. But when He said: ‘Give me to drink,’ it was then His poor creature’s love He sought; He was athirst for love.”[3] And the little saint reveals her inmost soul when she says: “The cry of the dying Jesus ‘I thirst’ goes on echoing in the depths of my heart, kindling within it new fires of zeal. I would give my Beloved to drink. . .”[4]

The part that this desire to love plays in the understanding of the spiritual life of St. Thérèse can be reduced, I think, to two very simple propositions.

First, this desire is the beginning of the spiritual life, that is to say, of the way of perfection.

Secondly, it is the term of the spiritual life, of sanctity.

First:

There are two conceptions, two schools of the spiritual life. The one puts love at the end, and the other at the very beginning. Thérèse is definitely of the second school, so definitely that, at first, holders of the opposite opinion were scandalized. Love, for her, is the lever, the initial force, which lifts up the soul and strengthens it in the path of self-denial. It is in this sense that it can be said that she was “an ascetic because a mystic;” her asceticism is from the very first, of a mystical character.

In principle, all spiritual writers and every school of thought put the “desire of perfection,” the desire to live wholly for God, at the beginning of the spiritual life, but many of them hesitate to call this desire of perfection by its right name. They hesitate to call it love. We are left with the impression that love is possible only at the end, as a kind of reward for services rendered. Meanwhile the soul is made to walk by hard and painful ways; progress is slow and often sorrowful, because it is so dry and arid, and the soul easily falls into discouragement.

It is quite otherwise with Thérèse. She enlarges the soul from the very first by confidence and the desire to love; she inspires the soul with the courage to love at once, and in this way she lifts the soul up, fills it with joy and courage, and makes it valiant and strong, in the very midst of its misery. She reveals her thoughts clearly in a letter to her cousin, Maria Guerin[5]: “You want me to tell you a means to become perfect. I know only one, Love.” There is no doubt what she thought; Love is the means, the only means. We are no bolder than she is. She tells us herself how, on her journey to perfection, she puts this unique means into practice: “My one desire is to please Jesus.”[6] But this desire to please God is the desire to love, and that, I think, is the whole of Thérèse’s secret, the humble and confident desire to love God. Humble, that is, in full view of our wretchedness; confident, counting on God, because He is Compassionate Love, to implant into our wretchedness the love which is not there.

Here, more clearly than ever, we see how necessary is faith in Compassionate Love. We see its necessity and, at the same time, its supreme efficacy, because it makes our very wretchedness a motive for believing ourselves capable of love, and it enlarges the soul, cast down by the feeling of her wretchedness, by turning it towards this God of such unbounded goodness and compassion. To believe in the love of God and to look to God Himself for the gift of love—that is the great glory which our God is eager for us to give Him.

And once again, this is the Gospel. There Love calls to love those who have no love, the Prodigal Son, the woman taken in adultery, the woman of Samaria, Mary Magdalen. Every word of the Holy Gospel if we read aright, is but Love calling for love, for the love of the wretched, the needy, the helpless, of fallen creatures like ourselves, calling them and at the same time giving them the confident joy of once again being able to love; the joy of surrendering their wretchedness to Compassionate Love so that He may cause love to gush forth; granting them the healing and strengthening desire to love, while they are yet conscious of their wretchedness. The “Come to me, all you that labor, and are burdened, and I will refresh you”[7] has no other meaning.

Secondly

We must now see how the desire to love is the term, as well as the beginning, of perfection. The task is easy. In the last years of her short life Thérèse makes it quite clear to us.

In what did her sanctity consist? In a desire to love which has now become boundless. The little Carmelite once remarked frankly to a Retreat Father: “Father, I want to love God as much as, and even more than, St. Teresa.” The confessor rebuked her sharply: it was pride! presumption! “I do not think so, Father, for Our Lord said: ‘Be you therefore perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’.” A very good answer. Thérèse believed quite simply in the Gospel, in the words of Our Lord. There must be no limits in our desire to love. This explains the famous passage of the Autobiography, where Thérèse surrenders herself without restraint to desires, humanly speaking, mad, foolish, inordinate. She longs for contradictory and impossible vocations, to be priest, apostle, missionary, martyr—humanly speaking, unreasonable, but how reasonable to the eyes of faith.

Who is He who allures her? He is the infinitely lovable infinite Love, who thirsts for the love of her—His poor helpless creature. Face to face with the infinite, how can she set reasonable limits to her loving desires? “Oh my Beloved, forgive me if I speak foolishly in wanting to tell again my infinite desires.”[8] And notice the consciousness of her littleness, poverty and weakness; her helplessness increases in proportion to her love.

Thérèse is the type of soul that has surrendered itself simply and wholeheartedly, to the desire to love, a desire that (of its very nature) becomes unlimited. And why? Because God implants in that soul His own thirst to be loved (sitit sitiri). “Our God is a consuming fire.” When a soul, in its poverty and wretchedness, opens itself to Him, this consuming fire enters in and consumes it in very truth, with desires of like strength, measureless, unlimited, immense, infinite.

Can the sufferings of the surrendered soul be otherwise? Theology tells us of our participation in the divine nature, of the divinization of the soul by grace, of the divine likeness given to the soul in which God dwells. What does all this amount to, what else does it mean, but that God, who is Love, is striving to transform the soul into love—through our ever increasing desire to love Him, a desire which becomes ever more vehement and pure, the measureless and insatiable desire of Thérèse?

We restrain, we cramp our desires of loving much too much by our so-called prudence. Once we admit—and this is of faith—that the regenerated soul is possessed by God, and that God is Love, what else can be the effect of this loving indwelling of God but the continual working of Divine Charity within the soul, to transform its human wretchedness into Charity? “He who is joined to the Lord, is one spirit.”[9] “We are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.”[10]

St. Thérèse’s life is but a living illustration of this profound doctrine, and it is an illustration that everyone can understand; it is the actual demonstration of the possibility of love, and of perfect love, for “little souls,” and that without any great deeds, without anything out of the ordinary, without ecstasies or revelation; with only the desire to love: a doctrine wholly consistent with our wretchedness and weakness, once we are granted the faith in Compassionate Love.

We can believe Thérèse when she tells us: “I have never given God anything but love.” And let us treasure that answer of hers to one of her Sisters who, on the night of her death, asked her for a final message: “There is no more to say. Love is the only thing that matters.”[11] We could find no better summary of the Gospel teaching.

God, who is Love, has an infinite desire to give Himself: as theologians tell us “Bonum est diffusivum sui.” Being Love, He can only give Himself in making Himself loved. He thirsts to be loved. What He excites from the first is the desire to love Him. If the soul opens itself, surrenders itself to this desire, God in an instant fills the void, that open mouth. “Delata os tuum et implebo illud.”[12] Then, since the God she possesses is infinitely lovable, the soul feels fresh desires to love, desires more urgent still, desires which in their turn are satisfied. This alternate movement of desire and its fulfillment is the whole story of the Autobiography. It is also the whole of ascetical and mystic theology. It is the only true spirituality, the only way which leads souls easily, each according to its capacity, to union with God, which is the essence of the spiritual life.

The asceticism which best frees this essential element of the spiritual life from everything accessory and accidental, which concentrates, as much as possible, the whole effort of the soul on this one thing, the desire to love, seems to me the most perfect doctrine, and most conformable to the Gospel.

Everything, in short, comes down to these two thirsts: God’s thirst, and that of His creatures. In God, the thirst to be loved, in the creature, the thirst to love; on the one hand, Infinite Love thirsting to give Himself; on the other, poor nothingness thirsting to be filled, possessed and transformed by Love. In these two thirsts, each craving the other, meeting and mingling, is found, reduced to its simplest terms, the whole story of the true relations between God and the human soul, from the first stirrings of grace until the heights of sanctity and the everlasting union of heaven. The desire to love, if sincere, is everything, and great indeed is our debt of gratitude to St. Thérèse for having told us this so clearly.

[1] John 4:29.

[2] John 4:10–15.

[3] Autobiography, p. 198.

[4] Ibid., p. 88.

[5] Ibid., p.367.

[6] Ibid., p. 152.

[7] Matt. 11:28.

[8] Autobiography, p. 201.

[9] 1Cor. 6:27.

[10] 2Cor. 3:8.

[11] Novissima Verba, p. 82

[12] Ibid., p. 184.

3 Humility

And Jesus calling unto Him a little child. . . said: whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven.[1]

These words from the lips of our Savior Himself reveal the sanctity of “little Thérèse.” Humility, we are inclined to say, is the secret of the saint. But we have already spoken of her “secret” in the preceding chapters and no doubt we shall do so again. It is strange how when we contemplate St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, each virtue we examine seems to be her secret. And the reason is, I think, because all virtues in her are one and the same perfectly simple thing. They are only different aspects of one single virtue which, in her, more than dominates, even more than fosters all the rest, a virtue which is their very soul and foundation: Love. As we shall see, this is especially true of her humility.

There is a story of a reply St. Francis of Sales gave to one of his daughters of the Visitation, which shows the kinship of soul between the holy Bishop and the little Carmelite. “I want to acquire love through humility,” she said. “And I,” he replied, “want to acquire humility through love.” A profound saying which St. Thérèse will make us understand. Let us see:

First, how, in her, love engendered humility.

Second, how love perfected humility.

First

Let us consider the childlike soul of St. Thérèse which was moved and possessed to its very depths by faith in God’s Compassionate Love for her. What effect will her wretchedness, her littleness, her nothingness have on her?

She will realize that this wretchedness is the very reason for God’s stooping to His needy creature in order to manifest His Compassionate Love for her. Far from wishing to leave her misery and littleness, she will be glad to see it and to acknowledge it before God, she will delight in it. She will feel that it is the means, the indispensable condition, for communion with Compassionate Love—and that to wish to close her eyes and lose the feeling of her misery would be to lose the Love of God. Wrapped as she sees herself in infinite Compassion, she will rest quietly in the knowledge of her wretchedness; she will see it through the very eyes of God. The sight of her poverty, her weakness, and her worthlessness will fill her with joy.

This is the foundation of Thérèse’s soul. Her soul is penetrated by the light of Divine Truth. It seems to her that she understands God—Compassionate Love—all the better, the more worthless she sees herself to be and the more simply she acknowledges this worthlessness.

To rest in her wretchedness is, for her, to rest in God. The rest of this little soul in God involuntarily recalls the words of St. Augustine: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless ‘till they rest in Thee.”[2] Our hearts are restless. What is this restlessness which will not allow our hearts to rest, but pride, which will not admit, and acknowledge its wretchedness? Only in humility can our heart find rest: then requiescat in pace in Deo. The great Teresa of Avila says: “Humility is truth.” This is a sober fact. But Thérèse, by her little way, has thrown a wonderful light upon it. I know of no treatise on humility which so brings home the meaning of this virtue as does the soul of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. It seems to me that treatises on humility, and especially those that aim at being learned, easily, almost inevitably give a wrong impression of this delicate virtue. Why? Because they tend to complicate it and, as a consequence, to complicate its practice. Now nothing is less complicated and more simple, than humility. To complicate it is to falsify it. To set forth the steps to acquire humility, to analyze it, to lay down its degrees, all this almost inevitably turns the soul inward and makes it think of self, whereas humility really consists in turning the eyes, the glance of the soul, away from self: “Tolle oculum tuum a te.” In practice it consists in forgetting self, in looking on self, in fact, as nothing. How are we to do this? By turning our eyes, our gaze, towards God. By profiting from every fresh proof of our misery and imperfection to turn gently and confidently to God, trusting in His Compassionate Love. Such homage to the love of the Father of Compassion is infinitely pleasing to Him, while faith in His love and trust in His compassion are the only means by which we in our wretchedness can ever truly unite ourselves to God.

The desire to love, if it is sincere, will be humble; it will be the desire to draw love into ourself rather than any pretension to draw it out of ourself, “Lord, behold he whom thou lovest is sick.” How true, then, are the words of St. Francis of Sales: “As for me, I want to acquire humility through love.”

To desire to love Compassionate Love is, first of all, to acknowledge our wretchedness, and then to keep ourself thus before God with all our wretchedness, so that He may change it into love for His sole glory. Then, and then only, can we understand how it is possible to love our wretchedness and abjection, and how the saints, and our little saint in particular, found joy in the simple, sincere contemplation of their wretchedness and abjection. “Yes, my God, I am happy to feel my littleness and helplessness in Thy Presence, and my heart rests in peace.” [3]

Sometimes we ask ourselves whether the love of God and the love of our nothingness are not one and the same thing. It is only in the light of Compassionate Love that we can love our nothingness, happy to surrender that nothingness to God, to surrender ourselves in peace to the desire to love.

Second

Let us now see how love, after establishing Thérèse’s soul in humility, preserves and perfects it in humility. Her humility grows with her love, and her love with her humility. The more we love, the more clearly we see our defects, our imperfections, our love of creatures, in short, our egoism in all its forms. The more, too, we despise ourself, the more we are led to ignore and forget ourself. “When we really see our wretchedness, we no longer wish to look at ourself, we look only at our Beloved.”[4] Herein is true self-contempt, true-forgetfulness of self. And Thérèse has no wish to escape from it. On the contrary, she feels a constant need to return to it, to sink herself more and more in self forgetfulness and to abide in this state.

She does not deceive herself and it is in all sincerity that during the last weeks of her life she says: “How happy it makes me to see myself so imperfect and to have so great a need of God’s mercy, at the very moment of death.”[5] And again: “I see myself subject to many frailties, but they never surprise me. . . it is so sweet to feel thyself weak and little.”[6] What relish there is in these words: “It is so sweet.” The sweetness of feeling ourself one with the plain truth, of standing before God as we really are and of acknowledging this in all simplicity. For Thérèse to lose this feeling is to lose God, and conversely, to rest in that peaceful and joyful contempt of self is to draw nearer to God, to think like God, to be united to God.

What must we do when we fall, when we experience fresh proof of our weakness and misery? “ One glance at Jesus (always this glance of trust and love), with the consciousness of our wretchedness makes amends for everything.”[7] It makes amends for everything and transforms everything into love. Thérèse sincerely loves her littleness and her helplessness, because she sees that it is thus God sees and loves her. She loves her littleness because she loves God, and because she sees that until she ceases to love self, she cannot love God purely, cannot love Him alone.

And it is not only to God she is glad to acknowledge her misery, but to men also. During her illness she showed a slight impatience towards a Sister who indiscreetly asked her a favor: “How glad I am that you have seen my imperfection,” she confided to another Sister, “I am strengthened by the thought that that Sister has seen my lack of virtue; I am glad to see myself as I really am.”[8] Not to be disturbed or worried in such circumstances is a sign of truth in a soul.

There was no posing with Thérèse, no pretension, no seeking or desire to be thought well of, to appear better than she was. Everything grand is distasteful to her; she does not want it; grand mortifications, grand visions, grand actions; she thrusts them all away. Does this mean that she refused to see the graces and gifts which God gave her, His operations in her soul? No, indeed. She sees and acknowledges with equal clearness both the wonderful effect in her of God’s compassion and love, and her own poverty and weakness, her personal worthlessness and nothingness. It is precisely here that the depths of her humility are seen in the clarity, and, at the same time, the equanimity with which she sees herself as a little atom lost in the immensity of the Divine Goodness. The more she experiences the prodigalities of Compassionate Love towards her, the more she loses herself in the consciousness of how utterly needy and unworthy she still really is in God’s sight. The more love grows in her, the deeper grows her humility.

Another wonderful characteristic of her humility is the boldness, the audacity, I might almost say the temerity, to which her desires to love lead her. Since it is infinite Love who invites her to love, and He alone who will effect love in her, since it is solely His glory which will result from all the love she gives to God, weak, little and worthless as she knows herself to be, she does not think it in any way rash to aspire to the most perfect and, in a sense, infinite love. On the contrary, her very littleness, her poverty, her helplessness are, to her, the precise reason for believing herself qualified to glorify God by love and therefore a reason for desiring to love.

Humility is certainly not faintheartedness. After surrendering herself, as we have seen, to a kind of ecstasy of folly, longing for the impossible, the unreasonable, to be at one and the same time priest, missionary, doctor, martyr, she realizes that none of these things are for her, nor she for them; she realizes, too, that it is not her desire to do great things which makes her pleasing to God nor is it the real proof of her love. But is she for that to subdue her desire? Because she is little and weak must she set limits to her love? No, indeed. Listen to her conclusion: “My vocation is love!” And love she will be!

Realizing that in God’s eyes it is only love that matters, she prefers little acts, little sacrifices, little mortifications, in short, little things to great ones; with measureless desires to love, she will spend her life in trifles. “Brilliant deeds,” she said, “are not for me. . . . How then, shall I prove my love, for love is proved by deeds? “By my little actions and my little sacrifices! The little child will cast her flowers to God.” And she adds (let us note): “And these nothings, O Jesus, will give Thee joy!” [9]

Humility and Love. Utter littleness of person and actions, unlimited greatness of desires and love. These two extremes meet in the same saint; a lesson indeed for us. And humility and love, which produced which? It is quite clear that in Thérèse it is love which produced and perfected humility. God’s love flows freely into the heart that surrenders itself to Him, and it must needs possess and consume this heart, expelling therefrom all self-esteem, all self-love, all pride. Shadows flee before the light.

Thérèse knows what she is saying when she sets out to convince “little souls” that they are qualified to love and to love greatly, “on condition,” she adds, “that they are ready to remain little and needy; “and that, she says, is just what they refuse to do. “We must be little to abide with Jesus.  . . in that lies perfection. It is also a great privilege: but what simplicity is needed if we are to respond to it! Oh, how few souls there are who desire to be little and unknown.”[10]

Let us pause here. It is the crux of the whole matter. Almost unconsciously in our desire for perfection we cherish a secret self-esteem. At that instant love is checked; it meets an obstacle. It cannot go on with its work which is to sweep away all thought of self, to make the soul humble, to perfect humility. Love is only true in and through humility. A short time before her death, Thérèse, now made perfect in love yet stripped of every light of faith even to the dark night of the soul, said: “As for me, the only light I have is to see my utter nothingness.”[11] After reading this we can subscribe without difficulty to those other words of hers. “The greatest thing that the Almighty has worked in me, is to have made me see my littleness and my powerlessness for all good.”[12]

Almighty Love emptied this surrendered soul of all self-love. It is His work, and in the case of St. Thérèse it is a masterpiece.

[1] Matt. 18:2–4.

[2] Confessions, I. i.

[3] Autobiography, p. 207.

[4] Ibid., p. 367.

[5] Novissima Verba, p. 91

[6] Ibid., p. 38.

[7] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 165.

[8] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 121–122.

[9] Autobiography, p. 205.

[10] Ibid., p. 343.

[11] Novissima Verba, p. 13.

[12] Autobiography, p. 154.

4 Confidence

When I am weak, then am I powerful.[1]

“The humility which leads to discouragement is wrong,” says the holy Curé d’Ars. But how can we help being discouraged when we see our weakness, our helplessness and our nothingness? The answer is summed up in one word—Confidence. The chapter on St. Thérèse’s humility calls for one on confidence, a feature which is, perhaps, not spoken of enough.

“Holiness consists in a disposition of the heart, which places us in the arms of God, little and humble, conscious of our weakness and trusting blindly in His Fatherly goodness.”[2] It is always the Gospel teaching. Confidence keeps the soul in equilibrium. Should we call it the corrective of humility? No, humility needs no corrective; let us call it, rather, its counterbalance.

Humility and confidence, I sometimes feel tempted to sum up the whole of St. Thérèse’s spirituality in these two words. They are, in fact, the normal fruit in this soul, and in every soul, of faith in Love, infinitely Compassionate for the misery of His creatures. From this point of view, humility and confidence merge into each other and seem almost to become one, for the soul can only be at peace at the sight of its nothingness and weakness, when certain that by this very means it places itself in the hands of All-Powerful Love. Then, the more it feels its littleness and nothingness, the happier it is, happy to have to depend wholly on another, especially when that other is, as it knows, both infinite Love and infinite Power. If “the humility which leads to discouragement is wrong,” it is because it is not humility. And why is it not humility? Because it is not balanced by confidence in Love, or rather, because it is not rooted in faith in the Compassionate Love from which confidence spontaneously flows. Humility and confidence are two virtues inseparable in Christian perfection, inseparable because complementary. Humility without confidence turns to pusillanimity or discouragement. Confidence without humility would turn to presumption and temerity.

Confidence, a childlike confidence, is the air which Thérèse breathes. This is the explanation of her truly childlike humility, her preference for every turn of speech and illustration which leads the soul to spiritual childhood; all is lit up with filial confidence.

Let us examine the confidence of St. Thérèse. First, in her personal life. Second, in her activities and works.

First

As we have said, everything in the Saint’s spiritual life springs from her desire to love, a desire which is immeasurable and limitless. What is the explanation of these immense desires in one so conscious of her littleness? It lies clearly in her confidence, her childlike confidence in the goodness of God her Father. She know and believes herself gratuitously loved by God. She knows and believes with all the strength of her faith that desire of this God, who is Love, is to communicate Himself to the nothingness which she is. Henceforth, to limit her desires to love would be to fail in trust, not in herself (she distrusts herself utterly), but in God. The measure of her desires to love is her confidence in God’s love for her. And so all she does is to let herself be drawn by this fire, this furnace of love, who longs (why, we cannot tell, but so it is) to unite Himself to the atom which He has made capable of love; to fill it with Himself; to absorb it in Himself; to transform it into the Love that He is.

Indeed, with such faith, such certitude, confidence ought normally to be limitless; it ought to blossom into equally limitless desires for love, for perfection and for holiness.

When I meditate on the soul of St. Thérèse I often think of those words of Father Faber, and realize their truth: The virtue most needed in the spiritual life is hope. St. Thérèse’s life is a clear and decisive confirmation of these words. It is hope, “confidence,” which opens the wings of her soul and bears her to the heights of holiness. Confidence plays a leading part of supreme importance in the holiness of Thérèse.

At the sight of this holiness, so simple and so winning, many good people let a discouraging thought hold them back. “Thérèse,” they say, “was favored by extraordinary graces.” And why do they say this? Because they have not given confidence its rightful place at the very center of Thérèse’s life and doctrine. Once confidence is given its place as the essential and primary foundation of holiness, no soul, however little and needy it sees itself to be, will see anything improbable in the idea of God wishing to raise it to a life of friendship, of intimacy, of love with Himself. And it is clear, too, that without this confidence, a confidence based on and measured only by God’s All-Powerful Love, the very starting point of all endeavor, of all effectual desire, will be lacking Confidence is, in fact, the key of the “Little Way.”

Confidence is the unique and indispensable link between the soul’s weakness and the strength it needs; the necessary bridge between humility and courage. Therefore, once there is confidence, the more the soul sees and feels its weakness, the more courageous it will be. “When I am weak, then am I powerful.” The link between the two terms of this paradox is confidence.

By confidence the soul steals the strength of Almighty God. A confident soul, if really, confident, constrains God in the name of His own gratuitous Love, to work in it all that it desires. Thérèse was wholly conscious that it is God who does everything in us, love and sanctity are His work. Seeing her own weakness and impotence, she captures by confidence the almighty power of the God by whom she knows herself infinitely and gratuitously loved. Henceforth she is strong; henceforth her desires, her resolutions, her actions break all bounds. It would seem that at this point we have fathomed the depths of Thérèse’s soul, that soul so simple and yet so sublime, so sublime because it is so simple. After all, is not this the sublimity which the Gospel taught, and taught as if especially for us, in a way we can understand?

Must we marshal texts to prove her confidence? There are plenty of them, and even when she does not use the actual word, all she says and does is full of it. Here is one to begin with: “Jesus can do anything: confidence works miracles.”[3] And that that heartfelt cry (which must not be minimized by stressing her exceptional gifts): “Oh, if weak and imperfect souls like mine felt as I do, no one would despair of attaining the heights of the mountain of Love.”[4] And what does she feel? That it is enough to have confidence in order to do what of ourselves we cannot do. Confidence works miracles! “The memory of my faults casts me down. . . but this memory speaks still more of compassion and love. When we cast our faults with childlike confidence into the flaming furnace of Love, how should they not be utterly consumed?”[5]

The sight, then, of her faults and infidelities is, for her, a ground for confidence. “I am not always faithful, but I never lose heart. I commit myself to the arms of Jesus . . . and I find there all, and much more, than I have lost.” “I confide in Jesus, I tell Him all my infidelities in detail.” By so doing she naively hopes “to gain more dominion over His Heart and to draw down more Love.”[6] “I always know how to be happy and to profit from my wretchedness. It is a way in which Our Lord Himself encourages me.”[7]

Then there are the terrible trials of faith: aridity, obscurities, weariness, temptations. “Nothing shall have power to frighten me, neither wind, nor rain, not thick clouds which would hide the Star of Love. That will be the time to stretch my confidence to the uttermost limits. . . knowing that behind those sad clouds, my sweet Sun still shines.”[8] Faith in Love, and to the death. “Who shall separate me from the love of Christ? . . . I am sure that nothing shall be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[9] One day, seeing the distress of her sister, Mother Agnes, at the sight of her sufferings, she said: “Oh, don’t worry! If I suffocate, God will give me strength. I love Him. Never will He forsake me.”[10]

Second, confidence in God, which supports her on her way to holiness, strengthened her, too, in action, in her exterior works. Let us see her at work in the three tasks which Providence laid upon her: One, the direction of novices; two, the writing of her life; three, her work for the missions.

One: When quite young, at 22, she was appointed as assistant to the Novice Mistress, Mother Mary of Gonzaga, in the delicate work of the direction of souls. Let us see what she thought of this charge and on whom she relies for fulfilling it. In a few lines she teaches us a whole theory of direction. “I made up my mind from the very first that the task was beyond me and placing myself quickly in God’s arms, I said; “Lord, Thou seest that I am too little to feed Thy children. If Thou wishest to give to each what she needs through me, then do Thou fill my hands and, without leaving Thy arms, without even turning my head, I will distribute Thy treasures to every soul who comes to ask me for her food.” [11]

This is the right method of direction. Let the director keep himself united to God, under God’s guidance, by confidence in God, based on humility and mistrust of self, and the Holy Ghost will enlighten him and will guide him by the gifts of Wisdom and Counsel. This was Thérèse’s method. And she claims that in her case it was perfectly successful. “Whensoever it was necessary, my hands were always full.”[12]

How much better, this simple confidence, than the carefully thought-out plans, the fuss and worldly wisdom of some directors!

Two: With the same quiet confidence the little Carmelite began that story, so simple, so full of light, which we know as The Autobiography. When Mother Agnes, who was then Prioress, ordered Thérèse to write the memoirs of her childhood, St. Thérèse experienced some reluctance. She thought, not without reason, that it would “dissipate her heart.”[13] But on Mother Agnes insisting, Thérèse, without worrying about any set plan or method or arrangement, put her confidence in God.

Kneeling before the statue of Our Lady, she prayed: “Before taking pen in hand, I knelt before the statue of Mary. . . I begged her to guide my hand, so that I might not write a single line which was not to her liking. Then opening the Gospel, I saw these words: ‘Jesus having gone up into a mountain, called to Him those whom He would Himself have loved. . .’.”[14] Such was the spirit, the disposition of soul which guided this simple book, that has charmed and edified millions of souls. Humility, simplicity, confidence in God, this is the sole secret of her writing.

After recalling in burning words the Incarnation, the Passion and the Cross, the Blessed Sacrament and Holy Communion, the book closes with this outburst of confidence: “O Jesus, I must needs tell Thee that Thy Love is foolishness . . . Before this foolishness, how should I not want my heart to fly to Thee? How should I set bounds to my confidence?[15]

Three: Lastly, Thérèse was led to interest herself in the missions and even to help some of the missionaries. Young and inexperienced as she was, what made her undertake this co-operation in the active apostolate and what supported her in doing so? It was confidence, her confidence in the apostolic value of her little sacrifices offered through love. She wrote to Father Roulland: “I am truly glad to work with you for the salvation of souls. It was for that I became a Carmelite. As I could not be a missionary in deed, I wanted to be one by love and penance.” By love and penance![16] Thérèse is confident that these are accepted by God and applied to souls and the missionaries who work for the salvation of souls. It was this confidence, so she tells us, which led her to Carmel. This confidence in the apostolic value of love and sacrifice through love was the little Sister’s greatest strength. And who can say how far the influence of that hidden action went, an influence all the more powerful because of its hiddenness? Did not St. John of the Cross say that one act of pure love is of more value to souls and to the Church than all exterior activities?

We can now understand the deep meaning of that famous passage in the Autobiography, which seems, at first sight, to be a mere flight of the imagination—the passage where Thérèse explains how she discovered her vocation. Reading one day the twelfth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Thérèse could not recognize her vocation in any of the members described by St. Paul. Yet she dreams of recognizing herself in them all! The Church has a heart; that is the source of every vocation. So Thérèse cries out: “This is my vocation! My vocation is love! I shall be love in the Heart of my Mother the Church! So all vocations will be mine.” And she explains her meaning like a true theologian: “I understand that love includes every vocation, that love is everything, that it embraces all times and all places.”[17] Here is a wonderful subject for meditation for all who work in the Church: “Love is the only thing that matters!”[18] Faith and confidence in the efficacious power of Love; behold Thérèse the missionary!

Thérèse was the living example of strength in weakness. But let us notice very specially, for it is a point which is usually overlooked that it is confidence which turns her weakness into strength, a confidence which is unconquerable, determined heroic.

Faith in love and, as a result, confidence strengthened her soul and surrendered it to this all-powerful Love; so it was that every obstacle, even her weakness, became a source of power. What discourages many souls and separates them from God, namely the sight of their misery and weakness, is the very thing that raises Thérèse above herself and lifts her up to God! The weaker she sees herself to be, the more she counts on Love. We are reminded of St. Paul’s words “Charity is not confounded.” It is the inmost meaning of his “When I am weak, then am I powerful!”

[1] 2 Cor. 12:10.

[2] Novissima Verba, p. 105.

[3] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 130.

[4] Autobiography, 197.

[5] Ibid., p. 371.

[6] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 129.

[7] Autobiography, p. 142.

[8] Ibid., p. 207.

[9] Rom. 8:35.

[10] Novissima Verba, p. 89.

[11] Autobiography, p. 175.

[12] Ibid., p. 176.

[13] Ibid., p. 29.

[14] Ibid., p. 29.

[15] Ibid., p. 208.

[16] Annals of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Aug., 1934.

[17] Autobiography, p. 203.

[18] Novissima Verba, p. 184.

5 St. Thérèse and the Holy Ghost

Whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.[1]

The outstanding characteristic of St. Thérèse is her devotion to and exposition of the doctrine of Christian childhood. Her little way is the “Way of Childhood;” she is the living example of the “child of God” in the Gospel sense. Now St. Paul has expressly said that the children of God are they who let themselves be guided by the Spirit of God. Here, it seems to me, lies the theological explanation of the life and spirituality of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus.

All agree that the purpose of asceticism is to subject souls to the interior action of the Holy Ghost. The theological reason of this is that it is God, the Holy Ghost, who alone produces, who alone can make present in the soul, the supernatural life, the divine life, holiness. All agree in that, but not all put this principle as the foundation of asceticism with equal clearness. Some leave it almost in the shade. They seem, in practice, to lead the soul to believe that everything depends, first and foremost, on its personal efforts, on its own multiple and complicated resolutions.

Instead of first enlarging the soul and making it forget self by turning it to God through faith in His love, through humility and confidence, these methods turn the soul in on itself so that it wears itself out in self analysis and laborious efforts, which are often quite fruitless. It is true that the soul is told that it must pray, because nothing can be done without God, but, in practice, instead of turning the soul to God, these methods turn it in upon self; instead of encouraging the soul to leave itself, so that God may perfect it, they cause it to shut itself up in itself in order to attain perfection. Hence those complicated rules for practicing each of the virtues, with their innumerable degrees, their endless divisions and subdivisions.

It is to these methods, I think, that Thérèse was referring when she said: “Sometimes, when I read certain treatises where the road to perfection is pictured as encumbered with a thousand obstacles, my poor little heart is very soon tired. I close the learned book which makes my head ache and my heart turn dry, and I take up the Holy Scriptures. Everything then seems as clear as day; . . . perfection seems easy; I see that it is enough to acknowledge my nothingness and to surrender myself, like a child, into God’s arms.”[2] “Whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.” The words are almost identical. Grand books that she cannot understand, much less put into practice, Thérèse leaves to great souls and is glad to be little, because only little children, and those who are like them, will be admitted into heaven.

These methods take us far from the simplicity of the Gospel. Simplicity in the spiritual life is most certainly the hallmark of Thérèse’s asceticism. She teaches souls to go to God for deliverance from their miseries, to let themselves be drawn by God, to rely on Him, to surrender themselves to Him; this simply means that Thérèse aims at establishing and keeping the soul under the action and guidance of the Holy Ghost. Her whole life is but the practical and extremely suggestive example of that basic principle of asceticism and mystical theology: “Whosoever are led by the Spirit of God . . .” I said, theological principle, for it is Thérèse, the theologian, that I envisage in this conference. I openly confess my unqualified admiration for the solidity and depth of her theology. I am persuaded that, unconsciously, without being aware of it, she has reduced theology, and the most profound theology, the only true theology, to this: the life of God in our souls.

I propose to take two pages from her book. The more I meditate oh these two pages, the more they seem to sum up the whole of Thérèse’s ascetic doctrine. The first passage seems to me to be, in plain and simple language, the very expression of St. Paul’s “Whosoever are led by the Spirit of God . . .” This is what she says: “I have always longed to become a saint, but, alas, I have always found that when I compare myself to them, there is the same difference that we see in nature between the mountain peak lost in the clouds, and the tiny grain of sand trodden under the feet of the passers-by. Far from being discouraged, I say to myself: God would never put unrealizable desires into our hearts
. . . ”[3] Let us pause here for a moment. The saint’s reasoning is admirable. God, the Holy Ghost, never inspires the soul with desires that cannot be gratified. He only awakens desires in order to satisfy them, and more completely than we can imagine or ask for.

The desires of the soul, therefore, come wholly from God. The word “desire” is constantly on Thérèse’s lips, and this, by itself, says much. Her personal desires are classical; they pass all bounds, even all reason; they are immense, infinite. “I told myself: God cannot inspire unrealizable desires: therefore, in spite of my littleness, I can aspire to sanctity. I cannot make myself bigger. Therefore, I must be content to stay as I am with my innumerable imperfections. But I want to try and find a very direct little way to heaven—a short cut—a perfectly new little way. Ours is a century of inventions; there is no need now to climb a staircase step by step; in rich men’s houses a lift is a very convenient substitute. I, too, want to discover a lift to carry me up to Jesus, for I am far too little to climb the steep stairway of perfection.” How many souls say the same thing, and remain discouraged at the foot of the stairs! “Then I began to search the Holy Scriptures for some indication of this lift which my soul desired: and I read these words, straight from the lips of Wisdom Himself. ‘Whosoever is a little one, let him come to Me!’[4] Then God drew near, for I knew I had found what I was looking for. Wanting now to know what He would do to the little one, I went on with my search, and this is what I found ‘As one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you I will carry you in My bosom, and I will caress you upon my knees.”[5] Oh, never did tenderer, sweeter words gladden my heart. The lift which is to carry up to heaven is Thy arms O Jesus! There is no need for me to grow bigger, on the contrary, I must stay, little, and I must become so more and more.”[6]

“The arms of Jesus”—in theological terms this metaphor means the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Ghost with His gifts, which are, as it were, the arms with which He lifts us up. “Lift” is a wonderfully apt description of the Holy Ghost. It is the modern equivalent of St. Paul’s: “Whosoever are led by the Spirit of God.” In the matter of sanctity it is indeed the Holy Ghost who sets us in motion and lifts us up, who carries us and raises us to the perfection of love, to sanctity.

What is required from us? Humility and confidence: Whosoever is a little one, let him come to me!

Enlightened by the Holy Ghost, Thérèse perfectly understood these words of Wisdom. “To be wholly little,” that is to say, to know and love our helplessness, and for that reason “to go to Him,” that is to Infinite Love; this is how we enter the lift. And then He carries us up; He does it, not we ourselves. All we have to do is not to interfere, to yield ourselves to His upward movement. He lifts us up above ourselves, above our wretchedness and our shortcomings, and, little by little, will free us from ourselves, from our egoism! That is His work, His essential work. He will do this Divine work if, while desiring its realization in us, we rely in no way on ourselves, but rather, fearlessly, unhesitatingly and unreservedly on Him, on His gratuitous and all-powerful Love. The desire to love, humility, confidence; that is all.

There we have the whole of Thérèse, so it seems to me: the whole of her sanctity, the whole of her spirituality. First, the desire to love God, to love Him perfectly; then humility. “Whosoever is a little one;” and lastly, confidence: “Let him come to Me.” The soul surrenders itself; it steps into the lift; it is borne upwards, “led by the Spirit of God.”

Having tried to reduce Thérèse’s “Little Way” to its theological elements, I repeat that I think her whole doctrine is contained in this page. But, it may be asked, what about correcting faults and acquiring virtues? What of the human co-operation in the path of perfection? I am certain that, for Thérèse, all this was contained in a better way in the simple formula, self-surrender with humility and confidence. The soul must be sincere in this gift of self, yielding itself just as it is, with all its shortcomings and all its wretchedness, to the all-powerful Compassionate Love in whom it believes. In whom it believes, I say, for here we see the sovereign importance of faith in the Love, in the Compassionate Love, of our Heavenly Father for our wretchedness. The soul is not, of course, dispensed from taking its part, from working and striving. But in doing so, it looks more to God than to itself; it puts its confidence in God and surrenders itself to God’s action rather than acts itself. “Led by the Spirit of God.” Throughout, the chief part, the first movement, the primary action is God’s. The soul acts and strives, but it is aware that, first and foremost, it is carried by God, by Love; it knows itself loved. Hence its confidence, which is its strength. Its efforts, too, are humble and calm, without disturbance or impatience, without haste or anxiety: and, more important than all, without discouragement.

Secondly, let us now turn to the second page I mentioned. This page, which treats directly of the soul’s striving, clarifies and completes the theology of the lift in a wonderful way.

Thérèse was then Novice Mistress. One of the novices was discouraged at her failure to correct her imperfections. “You remind me,” said Thérèse, “of a tiny child beginning to stand upright, but unable as yet to walk. Longing to reach her mother at the top of the stairs, she keeps lifting her little foot to mount the first step; a fruitless task. She falls over again and again, unable to make any progress. Well! you must be that little child. By the practice of every virtue, keep on lifting your little foot to scale the stair of perfection and do not imagine that you will be able to mount the first step. No, but God does not ask more than your goodwill. From the top of the stairs He is lovingly watching you. Soon, won by your fruitless efforts, He will Himself come down, and taking you in His arms, will bear you away for ever to His kingdom—which you will never leave again.”[7]

That is an exact description of our co-operation in the work of our sanctification; that is what God wants; our goodwill, our desire to please Him, and our own poor little efforts. That is all we are capable of, little fruitless efforts. When God decides that we have shown enough goodwill, that is to say, when we go on, humbly and patiently, always trying to please Him, in spite of the uselessness of all we do, when He comes down and takes us in His arms and carries us: it is the lift again! But this time our part and God’s…

What peace, what calm there is in her way of describing the striving after perfection, the labor of acquiring the virtues! We feel that the soul is wholly turned to God, wholly rests in Him, even when it is acting and working, confiding wholly in Him, even in its failures and imperfections. We feel that the soul is too busy with God to think of itself, that, even when striving to make this or that progress, to gain this or that virtue, its aim is more to make itself pleasing to God than to perfect itself, which is, in fact, a very different thing.

To surrender oneself, to yield oneself without thought of self or preoccupation with self: renunciation. That is all! That is why “Holiness is not to be found in this or that practice. It consists in a disposition of the heart which yields us humble and little into God’s arms, conscious of our weakness and wholly and utterly confident in His fatherly goodness.”[8] But how few there are who know how to do this! “We must be willing to remain little and weak always and there is the difficulty. . . Let us love our littleness, love to feel our nothingness, then we shall be truly poor in spirit, and, however far away we are, Jesus will come and seek us. He will transform us into living flames of love.”[9] Everything, then, serves to unite the soul to God, which is the one thing necessary.

Such is the state in which Thérèse invites souls, “little souls,” to establish themselves; that of a child of God who in all things lets himself be drawn, lifted, carried by the arms of Jesus, that is to say, by the Spirit of Love. It is the Gospel teaching. Let us become little children again!

[1] Rom. 8:14.

[2] Autobiography, pp. 372–3.

[3] Ibid., p. 151.

[4] Prov. 9:4.

[5] Is. 66:13.

[6] Autobiography, p. 152.

[7] Autobiography, p. 293.

[8] Novissima Verba, p. 105.

[9] Autobiography, p. 360.

6 Self-Denial in St. Thérèse

If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself.[1]

What place does this fundamental precept of our Divine Master hold in the spirituality of St. Thérèse? What does she understand by self-denial? In one of the numbers of the Vie Spirituelle I read these words from a Sketch of St. Francis of Assisi entitled Self-denial and sacrifice through love. “With Francis, austerity had an infinitely tender motive. His was a loving asceticism, lit up all through with the sweet flame of love, and no one has shown more clearly, nor in a more encouraging way, how love makes everything pleasant and easy. It is this which makes his spirituality so lovable, so merry, so full of joy. He always speaks to the heart.”[2]

This is just as true of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus as it is of St. Francis of Assisi. In the Christian life self-denial appears under two aspects; it fulfils two functions: One, to prepare the soul to love; two, to express that love.

Of these two aspects, these two functions of self-denial, it would almost seem as if Thérèse, like Francis, knew only the second. It was the heart which governed their asceticism; it was a “loving asceticism.” In St. Thérèse, self-denial is seen to be the very life of love: of love’s beginnings, i.e. the state of desiring to love, of love in growth, of love made perfect.

To love, for her, was to renounce self, for to love self no more is the irresistible need of the desire to love God. That is what makes her self-denial so joyous and attractive; it is but the inverse side of love. And, indeed, is not this what the Gospel teaches? Before uttering those stern words: “let him deny himself,” did not Our Lord speak those other infinitely sweet and winning words: “If any man will come after Me”?

It is love, the desire to love Our Lord, which moves the will and turns it away from love of self. The Gospel, after all, is simply love. It simply asks us to renounce self love, so that the love of God, the only love which can satisfy us, can enter our hearts. It is in the name of Love, by Love, and for Love, that it wins us to self-denial. Is not this the meaning of those lovely words of the Master: “My yoke is sweet and My burden light”?[3] Sweet yoke, light burden, because it is love which lays it upon us and love which bears it.

Just now we applied to Thérèse the words which were said of St. Francis of Assisi: “No one has shown more clearly, and in a more encouraging way (than he) how love makes all things pleasant and easy.” We see how akin to the Gospel is this self-denial: “A light burden, an easy yoke.” It is this characteristic, above all others, that makes the spirituality of St. Thérèse a living interpretation of the Gospel.

Let us study her thoughts on self denial. First, her conception of it. We shall see that it does away with the common prejudice against self-denial. With her, self-denial is seen to be the theory of little sacrifices. “I do not want to let any little sacrifice escape me,”[4] she writes: and what was the cause of this resolution? It was her desire to please God, to do everything to delight her heavenly Father. That is her starting point; the desire to love, the need to manifest her love to God.

This starting point, her desire to love, was also her support, the lever which raised her soul above itself the force which lifted it up and freed it from the ties of self. Once she has opened her heart to the desire of loving God, this desire urges her away from self-love, on the one hand, and forwards to renunciation and sacrifice on the other.

She tells us plainly that, at first, self-denial cost her dear: “My face,” she says, “betrayed my struggle.” But she followed the impulse of love to which she had yielded, and she soon experienced the sweetness, the joy of sacrifice: she found it easy. “Little by little self denial became easy to me, even in its very beginnings. For one grace received, Jesus granted me many others.”[5] Then came “the resolution to miss no opportunity of little sacrifices.” And these opportunities she found at every step of her way, at every moment, in every detail of her daily life.

It is the same in the lives of us all but these constantly occurring opportunities escape us; we let them pass, we do not even notice them. Why? Because the eyes of our love are only half open, our vision is not sufficiently keen; the desire to please our Father is not lively enough. The sacrifices for which Thérèse found so many opportunities were indeed small, very small, often insignificant.

But where does the Gospel ask for great sacrifices, or say that Our Lord’s “let him deny himself” implies the need of great renunciations, outstanding opportunities? Opportunities for great sacrifices, though sometimes met with, are rare, and the self-denial which Our Lord demands is constant and continuous.

The Master’s mind has been well expressed in the Imitation, where the author asks “Lord, how often and in what things shall I deny myself?” The Master replies: “Always and at all times; as in little, so in great; I make no exceptions, but will have thee to be found in all things divested of thyself.”[6]

Always, at all times, in all things: obviously it must be so. There is no hour, no moment, no occasion, when we can live for ourself and our own pleasure. This being so, it is clear that self-denial, for the most part, will have to do with little, very little things, with little opportunities. Our lives for the most part are made up of very little things. For all of us, therefore, for every Christian soul, it is in little things that the practical fulfillment of the let him deny himself will be found.

This is a lesson which St. Thérèse is especially qualified to teach us all. She offered little sacrifices, but she offered them continually, at every instant, in one constant stream; therein lies her heroism, that is her sanctity. And, in practice, the greatness, the only true greatness in God’s eyes of every human life, consists in doing little things with a great love; that is to say, in denying ourselves in the series of insignificant actions of which our life is made up, and in doing them not for self, but for God.

One more point, so that we may have a perfectly clear idea of St. Thérèse’s self-denial. Generally speaking we have a too material, too external idea of self-denial; we almost always picture self-denial under the form of privation, as the sacrifice of something material, or again, as some external mortification. And so we tire ourselves out looking for something to give up, instead of, as we ought, denying ourselves always and in everything.

Self-denial is primarily and often solely, something interior, spiritual; it is in no way synonymous with mortification, with privation. Even when there is no mortification, there ought always to be self-denial. Self-denial is simply the disposition of the soul to live for self in nothing, a sincere and constant disposition, a fixed determination to turn the soul from its natural tendency to make self the center of its life, a fixed determination not to think of self, to put self on one side. It is the “tolle oculum tuum a te” of St. Augustine.

St. Thérese’s self-denial was often of this kind, wholly interior; the not doing something, the repressing of a natural eagerness, of a too vehement desire, of over curiosity, of a feeling of antipathy, of feelings of complacency or gratification. Outwardly these little sacrifices were often imperceptible. Even when expressed by an exterior and material sacrifice, it was in the interior turning away from self, the interior turning to God, that they primarily consisted. The turning of the heart to God, and so, away from self—that is self-denial.

If this interior movement is sincere, the exterior and material detachment will correspond to it when the occasion arises, but the exterior part is far from being the whole, the essential part of it. The essential part is the glance of the heart turned, not to self, but to God.

We can now see why Thérèse’s care not to miss any opportunity of little sacrifices, did not result, with her, in preoccupation, or anxiety, constraint or scrupulosity, no more than did her desire to please God her Father in all things. Joyfully she goes on her way borne up by her all-absorbing desire. The very sincerity, the integrity of her desire to please God, tells her when, in this or that, there would be a slight self-satisfaction, and that she can please God by sacrificing it to Him. She makes her little sacrifice and passes on. A moment later a fresh opportunity comes, and she makes another; so she goes on, freely, in simplicity. She is sincere in her desire to do everything to please God. That is all.

Her little sacrifices—of which she misses no opportunity—are but the spontaneous fruit of her ever watchful desire to love. There is no anxiety, no uneasiness no narrowness, no restless preoccupation with self, no constraint of the heart. On the contrary, the heart is enlarged, the soul expands, there is joy; the joy of giving which is one with the joy of loving.

How ill understood, as a rule, is self-denial! It is pictured as a gloomy, forbidding practice, painful, irksome, tiring. That is chiefly because only the negative side is looked at, and that cannot but be painful. It is death, and death of its very nature makes us recoil and shrink. Thérèse sees, and makes us see, something else in renunciation. For her it is love, it is life.

Another reason, another prejudice against renunciation is this. We think of it as a continual turning inward upon self, a constant self-examination, a violent and almost uninterrupted control of every movement of soul and body, a kind of pitiless constraint imposed on the normal way of living, an exercise directed against nature. It has been Thérèse’s mission, it seems, to do away with this prejudice, this almost universal and forbidding idea of renunciation.

In all her little sacrifices which were indeed a continual self-denial, we always find Thérèse with a smile on her lips, joyful, cheerful and gay. “As I never seek myself, I lead the happiest life in the world.”[7] The reason is always the same. There is nothing wearisome or complicated, nothing narrowing or sad, in her self-denial and sacrifice. It is the exact opposite of absorption with self; it is forgetfulness of self; it is, in practice, the loving movement of the soul to God, shedding as it goes everything which weighs it down, everything which delays or hinders it. This she does almost naturally, almost without thinking about it. She may be said to be lifted out of self rather than to renounce self. In fact, I think that is how it was.

I close with an incident from Thérèse’s life which is little known; this incident is quite unremarkable yet, in my opinion, it is very significant and revealing on the question we are discussing. One day towards the end of her life, Mother Agnes made this remark to her: “You must have fought hard to have conquered self so perfectly.” With a thoughtful look Thérèse replied simply: “Oh, it was not that. It was not that.”[8] Had she not fought? Obviously she had, but it was not the kind of struggle that her questioner meant, violent, painful, toilsome, sad. What Thérèse meant, I think, was: “No, I did not fight hard, I loved, loved deeply! That is all.” Struggle to one who loves is struggle no longer. It is what love craves for, what alone can satisfy love.

To sum up, Thérèse, in her own way, laid down the principle of ascetic psychology formulated by St. Augustine: “Ubi amatur non laboratur. . . labor amatur: He who loves does not toil: the toil is loved.”

I will end by repeating what I said at the beginning: No one has shown more clearly than Thérèse, nor in a more encouraging way, how love makes everything pleasant and easy.

[1] Matt. 16:24.

[2] Vie Spirituelle, March 1927

[3]Matt. 11:30.

[4] Autobiography, p. 205.

[5]  Ibid., pp. 91–92.

[6] Imit. Bk. 3. Chap. 37.

[7] Autobiography, p. 305.

[8] Novissima Verba, p. 10.

7 The Gifts of the Holy Ghost in St. Thérèse

If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.[1]

In this conference we are going to consider the operation of the gifts of the Holy Ghost in St. Thérèse.

In the preceding conference, I suggested in passing, that perfect self-denial is the work of the Holy Ghost; that it is He who effects it, who realizes it in us. In this conference I want to describe more exactly how He does it, and explain especially, what He asks and expects from the soul in order that His work may be effective. It is the question of the putting into activity, the “activating,” of the gifts of the Holy Ghost in the Christian soul—a question of supreme importance, for sanctity depends on the answer.

St. Thérèse once said: “I want Jesus to possess Himself of my faculties in such a way that everything I do, from being merely human and personal, may be wholly divine, inspired and directed by the Spirit of Love.”[2] No longer to perform human actions but wholly divine ones, inspired and directed by the Spirit of Love, this should be the desire of every soul that sincerely aims at perfection, at sanctity. Thérèse realized this desire and it was this that made her a saint.

How did she realize it? And, since she states that she wants “little souls to have nothing to envy in her,” how is every soul of goodwill to realize this ideal of the divine life?

I will just remind you of these fundamental truths:

First, that the gifts of the Holy Ghost are given to every soul with sanctifying grace (and the supernatural virtues).

Second, that these gifts are not given to Christian souls to remain, for the most part, barren and inactive, but, on the contrary, to produce in the soul the full wring of the life of grace.

Third, the gifts differ from the virtues in this, that they dispose the Christian, not to put himself in action, to “activate” himself, but to receive the impulse to act from God, from the Holy Ghost. The gifts suppose the supernatural virtues and perfect their mode of action. It is through them that the Christian becomes fully Christian, that is, acts and lives divinely.

Fourth, it follows that the gifts of the Holy Ghost and, therefore, the special actual graces which set these gifts in motion—“activate” them—are not in any way exceptional favors, extraordinary graces, given to privileged souls (to Thérèse of the Child Jesus, for example), but graces offered and granted to every Christian soul of genuine goodwill.

Father Petitot writes: “It is evident that in her mystical life St. Thérèse is governed primarily by the gifts of the Holy Ghost.” And he is right. The same author adds: “We ought to have greater recourse to the gifts of the Holy Ghost.” Once more he is right. But he does not tell us how Thérèse went to work so as to be governed by the gifts, nor what we have to do, so that we may act and live under the action of the Holy Ghost.

Moreover, spiritual writers are generally vague on this point. They all say that we must act by virtue of the gifts, but what must the soul do for the gifts to act? The answer, as a rule, is not clear; it is too speculative, too wrapped up in theological formulae or mystical terms.

Let us turn to our little saint and learn from her, first, how to be guided by the gifts of the Holy Ghost. We shall then add some explanation of her teaching, underlining its meaning and scope.

First, it is here, I think, that Thérèse renders her greatest service to spirituality and souls of goodwill who long to lead the spiritual life to the full. With Thérèse there are no formulae, no complicated words; no learned disquisitions. Everything is simple, so simple that we can easily misunderstand her, and mistake her “little way” for the simple way of the virtues, a method of ordinary asceticism.

Well then, what must the soul do to enter that higher way where, to use Thérèse’s expression, we shall no longer perform human and personal actions but wholly divine ones? For this is really the point.

What the soul obviously must not do is “activate” itself, put itself in motion, act on its own initiative, but, on the contrary, rather aim at, becoming passive, so that it can be moved to action, be “activated,” by the Holy Ghost. In the problem we are considering, this is obvious. In order to be “moved,” or “activated,” by another, we must clearly become passive.

It is our inveterate habit, our natural tendency to want to act for ourselves. If we do not do so, we think that nothing is being done towards perfection, towards sanctity; we think that our sanctification depends chiefly and primarily on our personal activity. Our small minds love any notion which gives them importance. Hence our busyness, our restlessness, our natural activity. This is so true that when it is a question of submitting ourselves, of obedience to the guidance of the Holy Ghost, we immediately, instinctively, begin to wonder what we ought to do; this is our first thought. It is obvious that by so doing we turn our backs on the true solution.

In order to let the Holy Ghost put us into action—“activate” us—(for that is the question), what is necessary is to be still, to be quiet, to keep ourselves in interior rest and peace. Only then can the Holy Spirit activate us.

So, for our saint, the answer is again found in two words, very simple ones (which sum up her little life and her little way); two words we know already, but whose whole meaning; scope and value we now see in an entirely new light. Humility and confidence. That is all. Let us look no further, but let us consider them carefully, let us examine them thoroughly and as simply as possible, without complicating then by unnecessary considerations—these two words humility and confidence.

Two passive dispositions.

First, the tranquil view, sincerely accepted, of our helplessness, our radical weakness, our nothingness. This, really and freely accepted and confessed in the presence of God, is the first passive disposition. It is, simply, sincere humility.

Then, the confident turning of the soul’s gaze to the infinite, infinitely compassionate, Love of God; the tranquil and confident waiting for God’s all-powerful action on the nothingness which surrenders itself to His will; in short, a sincere and unhesitating confidence. This is the second passive disposition.

Put these two dispositions in a soul of real goodwill, for Thérèse evidently takes goodwill, the sincere desire to love God, to do everything to please God, for granted, put these two dispositions—humility and confidence—in that soul, and we can be absolutely certain that the Holy Ghost will act in it, will guide and enlighten it, support and strengthen it, and lead it rapidly to the degree of sanctity destined for it by God, a degree which will certainly be a very high one.[3]

Let such a soul, interiorly calm and recollected, do in simplicity each moment, what it thinks to be God’s will, putting self on one side, not worrying about itself, about its own wishes or desires. That is sufficient The Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Love, will then be free to act; He will move that soul; the gifts of the Holy Ghost will enter into action, ceaselessly and with ever-growing perfection.

What Thérèse desired will be realized in that soul: “Jesus will possess Himself of her faculties, in such a way that her actions will be no longer human and the normal action of the Holy Ghost on souls (save in exceptional cases) is gentle, sweet, silent . . . He is the Spirit of Love, personal, but wholly divine, inspired and directed by the Spirit of Love.” Happy are the “little souls” who let themselves be thus led by the Holy Ghost. “Little” for, note this, to be thus led we must no longer expect or desire to understand what is being done in us, nor the end to which the Holy Spirit is leading us, the purpose of His moving; no longer want to scrutinize the way by which He is guiding us; no longer wish to guide ourselves. That is no longer our business; it is that of our Divine Guide. Why wish to interfere? Let us trust ourselves, little, weak, ignorant as we are, to this Guide who knows all things, who can do all things, and who loves us.

Humility and confidence, how simple it is, yet how far-reaching. True self-denial, in short, is only this. Enlightened by the Holy Ghost, Thérèse understood this, for herself and for us.

Second, I promised that, to end this conference, I would give some explanations for the better understanding of the way of humility and confidence. These explanations are not mine, but are those of the Venerable Father Libermann. While I was considering the subject of this conference, my eyes fell on three letters from that great spiritual man and great director of souls; two were written to seminarists, one was written to a Rector of a seminary. In them I found what is almost a direct commentary on the “Little Way” of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Two seminarists, paralyzed at the sight of their faults and wretchedness, and a Rector of a seminary, anxious and full of fear. Humility, confidence, abandonment to the action of God—this is the road along which the holy man leads them to perfect love and to sanctity.

Listen to him: “Surrender yourself,” he says to one of the seminarists, “to a holy and loving confidence.”[4] And to the other seminarist: “Strive to walk, in humility and simplicity, in the way of confidence and loving abandonment.”[5] And once more (to the Rector of the seminary): “This humble confidence is of inestimable importance.”[6]

The Venerable Father notes very clearly the immense progress made by the soul when it leaves the uphill road of the virtues in which personal effort and toil hold the first place, and enters on the “easy” and “rapid” way of humility, confidence, and abandonment to God. “Up till now,” he writes, “you have been in the habit of doing the work yourself and of esteeming your work and industry highly: that is why you have become discouraged at seeing your weakness, but once you yield yourself into God’s hands, you will become accustomed to seeing your utter uselessness and helplessness; you will realize that God alone ought to be and do everything in you and you will cast yourself headlong into His arms and welcome the sight of your vileness and poverty. The sight of it will fill you with a special joy. And then you will begin to make some progress.”[7]

“And then you will begin to make some progress.” These words are very suggestive. It is the passing from the way where the soul crawls along by its own efforts, to the way where it takes wings, borne by the Holy Ghost. “God does everything in it.” The gifts enter into action. From being merely human, its life becomes divine. This does not mean the end of difficulties, of sufferings, of obstacles, or work, but that in all these, the soul advances a long way with little toil, where formerly it toiled more with little result. It is carried.

The Venerable Father terms those souls “imperfect” who are still on the toilsome way. “Their life,” he says, “is one of labor and sorrow, without, for all that, attaining to true self-denial or the true knowledge and love of God.”[8] This is very revealing. There is no true self-denial, we do not really begin to know and love God until we ourselves cease to act, and let ourselves be guided, enlightened and moved by the gifts. In what way? By confidence and abandonment: “If, on the contrary, God is pleased to lead you into the easy way of abandonment, every difficulty, every obstacle will be immeasurably lessened by the confidence and love with which you place yourself wholly in Our Lord’s hands.”[9]

Thus “perfect” souls are not those without weaknesses and faults, without miseries and failings, but those who, more enlightened, make use of all these things to place themselves, by humility and confidence, under the action and guidance of the Holy Ghost.

Then, and only then, the way is clear. The Holy Ghost touches the soul at its points of supernatural sensitiveness, which He Himself has made in it and which we term the gifts. He moves the soul; it is He, in short, who effectively and efficaciously frees it from egotism, its self-love, and all the failings which, alas, taint our natural and human life. Then, then only, the virtues of faith, hope and charity and the rest yield their full fruit. The soul begins to live a divine life; the life of grace attains its full growth. Shall I say what I really think? It seems to me that these two dispositions “humility and confidence” are the line of demarcation between the purely ascetic spiritual life and the beginnings of the mystical life, the life, that is to say, where the divine action definitely begins to outweigh the human. Humility and confidence, but in a degree, or rather a depth, where they, in some manner, reduce the soul to a state of nothingness in God’s presence. If the soul resolutely lays aside self, surrenders itself to the Spirit of God, it begins the true divine life; it enters the way of sanctity.

When does this often decisive crisis in the spiritual life take place? It seems that it may well be very early. I think the tendency to place it in what is termed the illuminative way, often even at its very threshold, is quite correct. The Venerable Father Libermann, without using technical language (any more than does Thérèse), seems to be of this opinion. His method of direction, from the very first, is clearly orientated towards the mystical life. And, indeed, is not this the right method of spiritual direction, the one which alone corresponds with the truths taught in the Treatise on Grace.

Let us listen to this experienced director on the use we should make of our wretchedness, our weaknesses and faults, and learn how they should be transformed for us into humility and confidence. When we read his words we ask whether they were written by him or the little Carmelite of Lisieux, so identical are they in their doctrine.

He is writing to a seminarist who is discouraged by his faults: “Never let yourself be cast down or discouraged by your frailties. When you think you have committed a fault, gently enter again into yourself; then place yourself before Our Lord with deep, but sweet and gentle interior humility at the sight of your wretchedness. There is no need for great efforts in doing this. Open your heart so that He may see your wounded soul. Keeping it thus open before Him, remain with a feeling of deep humiliation and abasement in His presence.[10] This is indeed the humility of Thérèse, the true, deep humility of the Gospel. But let us read further. It seems more and more to be Thérèse who is speaking, giving us a summary of her little way. “But this feeling (of abasement) must be accompanied by filial love, by the desire to please Him, and by a sweet and heartfelt confidence that Jesus will have compassion on your weakness, on your misery and poverty. That done, keep your soul in peace and learn that you are always most dear to Jesus. Stir up immense desires to please Him.”

Thérèse once said: “One glance towards Jesus, with the acknowledgment of our wretchedness, makes amends for everything.”[11] Are not the lines we have just read a literal commentary on these simple and instructive words?

And again: here is another passage of the man of God, which, slightly amplified, is word for word the teaching of Thérèse of the Child Jesus. He is dealing with the fears and distrustful thoughts which threatened to delay a seminarist recently entered into the way of true humility and confidence. “Don’t reason,” he writes, “with these mistrustful thoughts (it is no longer a question of reasoning, but of self-surrender); that is not the way to cure them. Directly they come, turn your soul gently to Our Lord, so as to yield yourself with confidence, humility and love to His guidance and good pleasure.”[12] Confidence, humility, love, to surrender ourself to the guidance of the Holy Ghost. That is all. The gifts will be set in motion.

Let us listen to the Venerable Father to the end; his words become more and more divine: “Do this by an act most sweet and calm, as it were by a glance of love.” Thérèse says, “One glance towards Jesus, with the acknowledgment of our wretchedness, makes amends for everything.” Is not exactly the same thought implicitly contained in Thérèse’s words? “As it were by a glance of love, one glance towards Jesus.”

Humility, confidence, love, how closely these three are knit together. In reality, confidence already includes love, to tend and attain to love by humility and confidence is just what the Gospel teaches. But who will lead us to love? Who will effect love in us? Not we ourselves, certainly. Love Himself will do it; the Spirit who is Love.

When I say that Love must do everything in us, the word Love does not denote an abstraction, or a moral tendency of the will. Love is a concrete Being, personal and loving God Himself (who is Charity), or, what is the same thing, His Spirit of Love. This all-powerful Love, which is present in us, is there for one purpose only: to make our soul like Himself, to transform it into Love. He is literally (the expression is Father Libermann’s) “the soul of our soul.”[13] What does He require for this? Humility and confidence; given this He will make us live by love.

One last word of the Venerable Father Libermann a word full of encouragement: “Only in this Life of divine love is true greatness to be found. I am well aware that it is not the work of a moment; time and fidelity are necessary. . . But have no fear, my dearly beloved, Our Lord has opened the door to you. He bids you enter on the way; He will know how to lead you to its end.[14]

It is He who will lead us: that is to say, His Spirit, who is in us. The gifts of the Holy Ghost are in us solely to make us sensitive, supple and pliable to the action of the Spirit of Love. And where will He lead us? To perfect the point (these are the very words of the Servant of God) where “it will no more be we who live, but Our Lord who will live and act in our soul, in all His sweetness and peace, in all His power and love.”[15]

Humility and confidence; how important it is to inculcate these two things in the direction of souls. It is the privilege of Thérèse of the Child Jesus to have set her feet on this way from the very first. Her “little way,” as she tells us again and again, is open to every soul that desires, as she did, to love God. Like her, every soul has received the gifts of the Holy Ghost; like her, every soul has within it this Divine Guide, the Holy Ghost, who longs to lead it, as He led Thérèse to the highest peak of Love.

The door which admits us to the “Little Way” and which Our Lord opens to every soul of real goodwill is humble confidence, or confident humility.

[1]Gal. 5:25.

[2] Autobiography, p. 318.

[3]NB. Such a soul must not desire or expect extraordinary lights from the Holy Ghost, words distinctly heard, revelations . . . or sensible, impetuous impulses towards unusual and striking actions . . . The normal action of the Holy Ghost on souls (save in exceptional cases) is gentle, sweet, silent . . . He is the Spirit of Love.

[4] Spiritual Letters, Vol. II, p. 208.

[5] Ibid., p. 232.

[6] Ibid., P. 217

[7] Ibid., p. 231.

[8] Ibid., p. 229.

[9] Ibid., p. 229.

[10] Spiritual Letters, Vol. II, p. 208.

[11] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 165.

[12] Spiritual Letters, Vol. II, p. 231.

[13] Spiritual Letters, Vol. III, p. 14.

[14] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 230.

[15] Ibid.

8 The Prayer of St. Thérèse

I confess to Thee, O Father. . . because Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones.[1]

We are now going to speak of St. Thérèse’s prayer. I wondered whether I should treat of this subject at all. At first it greatly attracted me. But, on second thoughts, I asked myself whether it was not attempting the impossible. It is commonly said, and very truly, that Thérèse never had and never followed, any method of prayer. But this is negative, eliminative only, and cannot of itself provide material for a conference, much less for a useful and practical one.

I felt, therefore, that we should look for something positive, and it was this desire which first of all made me eager to treat this subject. Positive data were required. But the difficulty narrowed down. Where to find positive data about the saint’s prayer, when she has nowhere given us any account of it? And this is a characteristic which differentiates her from her Sisters in sanctity and mysticism, the great St. Teresa, her mother, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Margaret Mary, St. Mary Magdalen of Pazzi, and others, and quite recently, Elizabeth of the Trinity.

It seemed strange that the “Story of a Soul,” a soul as contemplative and mystical as Thérèse’s, should tell us nothing directly about her interior life and reveal nothing about her prayer. And the thought sprang spontaneously to my mind: since Thérèse has told us nothing about her prayer, is it not presumptuous, an idle task for me to say anything? Is it not, almost inevitably, to risk giving nothing but gratuitous assumptions or fanciful ideas? But the reply to this objection sprang no less spontaneously and urgently to my mind and I asked myself; can it be admitted that we are reduced to saying nothing, to knowing nothing, of the prayer of this saint?

We are trying, God Himself calls us to do so, to understand this privileged soul. But one only gets to understand a soul, especially a deep interior soul like Thérèse’s by following it in its intimate relations with God by understanding its prayer. And Thérèse herself never tired of repeating that there was nothing in her “way” which “little souls” cannot imitate and follow.

Can we admit, therefore, that her way of prayer—an essential element in every spiritual life—be wholly and invincibly unknown, impossible to describe, and consequently impossible to propose to little souls? Can this be the one point where she escapes us? It is a vitally important one. If such were indeed the case, then her whole life and teaching would, one feels, become inaccessible. This is wholly unacceptable and we utterly refuse to admit such an idea. So let us try, with the help of her whose dearest wish must be to enlighten us on this point, let us try to grasp the secret of St. Thérèse’s prayer. Let us in all confidence place ourselves in her school.

But, and this is vital, let us not go to her for a method; to do this would, most certainly, be to turn our backs on what we are looking for. And this suggests an observation which is important and necessary from the outset. It is obvious that Thérèse is dealing with souls, for whom so-called methods of prayer are no longer necessary, for whom these methods would be harmful and a hindrance. There is, therefore, another practical remark to make, something Thérèse makes perfectly clear, namely, that a time comes when the soul must be freed from method, and that, contrary to general opinion, this time comes soon to every soul which is in earnest in the spiritual life.

First, most souls need a method to begin with. I say most souls: because some more intuitive souls—and Thérèse is one of them—never need one. The others, the majority, need one, but even for them it is only a makeshift, a means, and a means evidently provisional. Souls only really pray in so far as they free themselves from the artificial scaffolding of method. It is for the director prudently to decide when the moment for freedom has arrived: sooner or later according to each soul. But, and this Thérèse tells us clearly and emphatically, for “little souls,” for upright and sincere souls, this moment comes fairly soon.

Here Saint Thérèse does us a great service. As a rule we are too fond of our own ways, and methods, for others, as well as, unconsciously, for ourselves. We confuse the means with the end, and we end—it is the case with many souls, I think—in believing, for all practical purposes, that the method is the prayer. We will not give it up. We should feel uneasy if we did so, however difficult we may find it. To rid ourselves of the artificial and to enter reality, that is essential to prayer. Nothing is less suited to prayer than method. Prayer is the soul sincerely submitting itself to the action of God, that is to say, to Infinite Love; the soul surrendering itself to Him in all humility, but at the same time with absolute confidence. Here again, it is confidence in God that many souls lack. Unconsciously they trust in themselves, in their own efforts, in their own industry, in their own practices; they trust to these, and so, inevitably, it is to these things that they are most attached.

I am very tempted to say what a tragedy this is. For it is to forget that our sanctification is God’s work and His alone. Only He can fashion a saint. All that the soul has to do, is to surrender itself, in all simplicity, to His action. This is elementary, and, in theory, everyone admits it, but how often practice ignores theory, even when not in flat contradiction to it. The right way to begin prayer is by a strong and fervent act of faith in God’s Love for our needy soul, accompanied by a desire to learn from Him how to respond to that love. This is the only true way, as Cardinal Mercier wisely says, to put ourselves in the presence of God “God is Charity.”

And here again we begin to see the very positive service that little Thérèse has done us, by praying without method. By that very fact she tells us, or reminds us, what prayer is: a loving communion between the wretchedness of the creature and the loving compassion of the Creator. That is prayer. Everything else is but a means. What we call “meditation,” the activity of the mind, of the understanding, of the active reason, is, then, but a means, only a means, only the antechamber. A necessary means, if you like, but one which can and ought to be gradually reduced to a minimum—to a very secondary place in fact; to just what is sufficient to stir the heart, and awaken love.

Here, again, how invaluable a teacher is Thérèse! We overcomplicate the work of the mind, of the reason, in our prayers. . . We reason, we dissect, we draw fine distinctions; we divide and subdivide our subject; we exhaust its rational content; we exhaust it and are ourselves exhausted. And at last we come to a logical, a very logical conclusion, which we dignify by the name of resolution, very fine in theory, but which will prove quite barren in practice, which will soon be forgotten, an unreal resolution, out of touch with truth, the fruit of human effort alone.

Dare I whisper what I really think of books of meditation? We are being submerged under an increasing flood of these books, crammed from cover to cover with long and complicated “considerations.” In fact, it seems to me, from one point of view, nearly all books of meditation are an obstacle to prayer. There is a danger of these interminable subjects—a real torture to most people—burdening the soul with thoughts and ideas that are not its own, with reflections which have no relation to its particular state or needs, and, above all, to the action of grace, the real work of the Holy Ghost in the soul.

What, too often, is the result? That meditation (wrongly called prayer) is something unreal, shallow, artificial, superficial, and, for this reason, wearisome, so that, far from growing to love prayer, to hunger and thirst for it, souls feel a distaste and, if they do not give it up, only go on with it for form’s sake and with painful violence to the soul. So prayer becomes an utterly mechanical exercise without any practical results. How true, then, are the words of the great St. Teresa: “Prayer consists not in much thinking, but in much loving.” St. Thérèse, her daughter, tells us the same thing in a simpler way, not by speaking about prayer, but by praying in the way she did, with the heart, by loving.

Before proceeding further, let us sum up what she has taught us so far, what she would have us learn. What she clearly teaches is that “prayer is quite a simple thing.” This is a lesson of great spiritual value, and we should be grateful to our saint for having, by her very silence, taught it us. Let us try to simplify, rather than complicate, our prayer.

One thing that Thérèse says helps us on another step: “I can find nothing in books,” she tells us: “the Gospels are all I need.” The Gospels are all I need.[2] These simple words are a light. I like to quote them, and I often add: “They are divine.” For, indeed, Jesus Christ—God made Man—came down to earth to tell us everything we need to know, so that we can tend and actually attain to sanctity, to the highest sanctity. He tells us this, not by reasoning and philosophizing but by His life and actions, by His words and example, by the light and inspiration of His teaching; in short, by everything we find in the Gospels. They are the best “Books of Meditation;” four books, written by God Himself, which show us perfection as practiced by a God, by our God made Man.

Would it not be only reasonable for all Christians especially those who hunger after perfection to say with Thérèse of the Child Jesus: “The Gospels are all I need”! The more so, as, if they are sincere, they could all, from their own experience, say first “I can find nothing in books.” Yet how true it is that we readily depart from the simple truth and involve ourselves in what is false, artificial, complicated and discouraging.

Secondly, and now, I think, we have reached the heart of the matter. It will be comparatively easy for us to understand what the little Carmelite’s prayer was like. She would open the Gospels and read a few verses, not many, for the Gospels, if they are to be assimilated, are not the kind of book to be taken in large doses, or, at any rate, in bulk. Then, renewing her simple, childlike faith in God’s love, she would humbly adore this Infinite Love; she would beg for a better understanding of the Love which is in Jesus Christ; and she would offer herself to that Love, for Him to work His will in her and teach her to love Him in return.

In this attitude of faith, humility, adoration and desire, she would gaze at Jesus and listen to Him. By this wholly simple look she would let what the Gospels had told her of Christ’s actions and words be imprinted on her soul. She only looked for Love and so was able to see, between the lines of the Gospels, the spirit of life which is in them. Gently, quietly, without eager activity, she received these illuminations. God revealed Himself to her more and more as her infinitely loving Father. She yielded herself to the impulse of Love and she learnt from Jesus, she saw in Him, how to love God; how she, His poor child, could and should love Him her heavenly Father.

And so, without hint of plan, of artificiality, almost without thinking about it, some particular resolution, if God should suggest one, took shape in her, but she would not always feel herself bound to end by what books call “the daily resolution.” What she did renew, however, and continually deepened, was, above all, the one great resolution to do everything to please God. She left her prayer, her mind at rest and her heart enlarged, not with many beautiful thoughts, but with love, resolved to miss no opportunity for little sacrifices, to prove (by these little nothings, as she says) the sincerity of her love. Grand and beautiful thoughts she would soon have forgotten; this desire to love went with her, always living in her heart, and remained, active and effective, throughout her daily work. This was the prayer of St. Thérèse; this is why the Gospels were all she needed and, indeed, it is greatly to be regretted that we too do not find in them all we need.

And here a question arises which needs answering. Why is it that many who, like her, read the Gospels, find nothing in them and consequently remain unmoved? Why do not they find them sufficient? It is usually because they approach them intellectually, to find matter for fresh ideas, and new thoughts. They search for what is not there and miss what is.

The secret of the Gospels is Love; they are the books of Love; it is love which gives them light and which illumines the soul.

I do not know if Thérèse read many Gospel commentaries. There are human commentaries as there are books of meditation. They are necessary to begin with, to explain difficulties and obscurities that may be met with. But it is not to men that we should turn for a commentary on the Gospels; the only true commentary is the Holy Ghost in the depth of each soul. Our Lord said: “When He, the Spirit of Truth is come. . . He will bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you.”[3] Only thus can we understand, without forcing the sense, or rather by giving their full meaning, these words of the Imitation: “All Holy Scripture ought to be read in the same Spirit with which it was written.”[4] It was the Holy Ghost who wrote the Gospels; He alone can make us read them as we ought; He alone can make us really understand them.

Was Thérèse’s prayer contemplative? Yes, but of so simple a kind as to be within our reach, as to encourage us to desire it—us who, like her, have the Holy Ghost in our souls, together with the gifts from which contemplation comes, the gifts of Understanding, of Wisdom, and, above all, of Piety.

It is a pity that writers on contemplation neglect the Gift of Piety. It is by this Gift, I think, that souls receive mystical grace in the strict sense, which is, pre-eminently, an impulse of love received in the soul, before being a grace of illumination in the understanding. Let this be said in passing. The prayer, the contemplation of Thérèse was, above all, and first of all, a prayer of love.

Now we can understand and appreciate what Thérèse thought of aridities and distractions in prayer. Her distractions and her drowsiness are almost the only thing she tells us about her prayer. These well-known distractions of ours, of which we complain so much, occur precisely because we make our prayer chiefly an intellectual exercise; distractions seem to endanger and ruin prayer. Little Thérèse, like the great Teresa, her Mother, thought otherwise.

Let us listen to her naive and, for that reason, wise confidences: “I ought to ascribe my aridity to my lack of fervor and fidelity. I ought to be miserable at constantly falling to sleep during my prayers and thanksgivings. Ah well. I do not break my heart about it. I think how little children are just as pleasing to their parents when they are asleep as when they are awake. I remember that Our Lord ‘knoweth our frame. He remembereth that we are but dust’ ”[5] “In all my relations with Jesus I feel nothing. Aridity and drowsiness! As my well-beloved wants to sleep I shall not hinder Him. I am glad to see He does not treat me like a stranger, that He treats me without ceremony; for, I can assure you, He does not trouble Himself to make conversation. [6]

It is clear that all this only makes sense by our putting prayer in its true place, not in the intellect, but in the heart, in the will, in the affective union with God by love. Then distractions like all other human weaknesses automatically turn into humility, an increase of confidence and, finally, a childlike love for God.

To conclude I am going to quote something which Father Petitot says about St. Thérèse’s prayer, something which at first sight seems paradoxical and exaggerated, but which, if we look more closely, is extremely apt: “We shall pray (virtually) all day or we shall not pray at all.” That is to say, a soul who is not habitually recollected throughout the day may indeed make what it calls its “meditation”, an exercise of fixed duration, in which it applies its mind with more or less difficulty, to various supernatural thoughts and considerations, but it will not in fact be praying in the real sense of the word. And this gives us one more indication—a very necessary one—to put us on the way of prayer trodden by our little saint.

Her wholly simple way of setting herself to pray, by means of the Gospels, can only be understood, can only be explained, by her habitual recollection.

But we have still to determine and see in what this habitual recollection consisted. Habitual recollection is usually said to be a preparation, a condition of prayer. But in what do many souls make recollection consist? In an effort of the intellect, in a more or less frequent renewal of the thought of God. Thought, intellect: a meritorious work, no doubt, but of little profit—a wearisome effort of which many souls soon tire. Quite other was St. Thérèse’s recollection. Quite other, in fact, is real habitual recollection, which is a matter, not of the intellect, but of the heart, not of thinking, but of loving. This is very suggestive. For habitual recollection and prayer are no longer two distinct exercises; one being the condition of the other, they are one and the same thing, they are one continuous, uninterrupted process. Together they are the very life of the soul, whose only life is love.

This sums up the prayer of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. It is the only explanation of the simplicity and ease with which she puts herself in touch with God in prayer. Prayer was her life. Her desire to please God in all things, and her prayer, were one and the same thing—love. No more need, then, of method: “Ama et fac quod vis.”

[1]Luke 10:21.

[2] Novissima Verba, p. 4.

[3] John 16:13; 14:26.

[4] Book I, chap. 5

[5] Autobiography, p. 134.

[6] The Spirit of Thérèse, p. 35

9 St. Thérèse and Patience

Patience hath a perfect work.[1]

These words of St. James are indeed verified in St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Patience was a factor of first importance in her perfection. Her humility, confidence and love were made perfect above all by patience.

And in this Thérèse entered fully into God’s mind and plan. It is clear that God’s mind, God’s plan, in the actual world, as it now exists after sin, is to make the punishments of sin, the consequences of sin, serve not only to save and restore man, but to raise him to the highest degree of moral perfection. There is no doubt about this, God has chosen the world in which we live, the present order of Providence, to draw sanctity from man’s very wretchedness, and, for this, the essential means is patience.

Suffering, as a result of sin being inevitable, and in one shape or another continual, here on earth, the key, the secret of perfection, of sanctity, will be to find in this very suffering the means to leave self in order to be united to God; in other words, the means to love. This is the part which patience plays in the work of perfection, of sanctity, and this is what St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus so wonderfully understood and practiced. To her, patience is love in act—love in its most ordinary and authentic form.

First, let us see what Thérèse thinks of patience. It will then be a simple matter to understand the special character of her patience.

First

In the first place—and this is essential in order to understand her patience—her faith in Love makes her see, as if by instinct, God’s Love, the Father’s Love in every form of suffering. So deep, so simple, is her faith in God’s Love for her, that what seems and, in fact, is hard and painful to nature, she sees as a manifestation, as an expression of His Love. Every suffering, for Thérèse, is a messenger of God’s Love for her. Suffering is the will of God offered for her acceptance, and God’s will, she believes with her whole heart, is always Love. So little Thérèse sees through the exterior—the rough and painful shell—and reaches the divine reality—Love. It is this she first looks for, and with what profound penetration and discernment she does so.

Thérèse is a theologian by intuition; she does not reason—she sees. It is the authentic glance of faith enlightened by charity: “The eyes of our heart enlightened.”[2] And how clearly she sees! Listen to her: “How,” she asks herself, “can God who loves us be happy when we suffer?” She replies without hesitation: “Our suffering never does make Him happy, but it is necessary for us. So (mark her simple and sublime words), He permits it, while looking the other way, as it were.”[3] How clearly and precisely we are here shown the place, the meaning of suffering in the Divine mind.

Like St. John, Thérèse sees that God, who is Love, and Love alone—“God is Charity”[4] —does not will and never has willed our suffering for its own sake. He wills it, indeed, but as it were against His will, with what we theologians would term (but how cold it sounds after the intuitive language of Thérèse) His subsequent will. Sin, having made suffering necessary, God wills it, but, even then, He only wills it by Love, as being the necessary means to lead men to love Him, to find their blessedness in loving Him. How well Thérèse puts it: “He wills it while looking the other way.” He wills it only in view of something else, in view of man’s happiness—a painful remedy, but, man’s egoism being what it is, one necessary for the health and happiness of his soul.

Let us listen once more to our little theologian: It pains God to make us drink at the fountain of tears, but He knows it is the only way to prepare us to know Him as He knows Himself—to become ourselves as gods.”[5] Does not this, indeed, perfectly explain why the world is as it is, does it not give the supreme answer to the problem of evil? God has foreseen sin, He has permitted it, with a view to a higher manifestation of His Love, so that by suffering consequent on sin (first, the suffering of His Son, then our suffering), His own Love might be more clearly manifested, and our love for Him raised higher, to glorify yet more His Compassionate Love. In this way suffering is seen as bathed and immersed in Love.

Here is one more of Thérèse’s sayings which sums up all the rest: “Time is but a dream; God sees us already in glory. Oh, how much good I derive from this thought. Now I understand why He lets us suffer.”[6] Thérèse thinks as God does; her thoughts are divine. And, in fact, is it not for this purpose that faith is given us? Thinking divinely, Thérèse acts divinely when suffering comes. She acts like a true child of God. This childlike delicacy which understands God’s Heart so well, makes such exquisite thoughts as these fall from her lips: “God suffers enough—He who loves us so dearly—in being obliged to leave us on earth to finish our time of trial—without our continually reminding Him how uncomfortable we are. We ought to look as if we were not aware of it.”[7]

Now we see how, looking at suffering in this light, we are, gently and almost naturally, led to patience, but to patience as it was understood and practiced by our saint—patience through love, patience which is the very act itself of filial love.

Second

In fact, given the desire to please God in everything, which was the one wish of her heart, and the resolution never to miss an opportunity for little sacrifices, what could, what must have been the reaction of this upright and simple soul to suffering? It could only be its spontaneous acceptance, an acceptance at first submissive, and then cheerful and smiling.

Submission and joy; two degrees of St. Thérèse’s patience of which something must be said. Let us begin by recalling a simile which she made during her last illness. A tumbler filled with an agreeable looking red medicine had been placed near her. “You see that little tumbler,” she said: “to look at it you would think it contained a delicious cordial, whereas in reality, I have never tasted anything more bitter. My life has been like that. To others it has appeared in smiling colors, they thought I was drinking a delicious cordial. And it was gall.”[8]

What is the point of this illustration? The point, which is one of the greatest interest to us, is that in reality Thérèse’s patience was almost always tried by just such sufferings as we all meet with every day, at every step of our way. Little, hidden sufferings which her sensitive nature felt keenly, the sort which wound and hurt us, too, but which for lack of a lively and loving faith discourage and sadden us, making us almost unconsciously sullen and disagreeable, a burden to ourselves and others.

Opportunities for practicing patience constantly come to us, as they did to Thérèse, but we miss them. Why? Because of our lack of faith in God’s Love, and of vigilance in our desire to love. The impacts of suffering—and they are frequent—almost always make us turn inwards upon ourselves, instead of, as God’s loving Providence desires, making us raise out eyes to God, uniting ourselves to Him by the prompt and spontaneous sacrifice of our will—our egoism—to the will of God, that is to say to His Love. What a tragedy this is! What an incalculable loss!

Since, according to St. Gregory, patience is the root and guardian of all the virtues: “Radix et custos omnium virtutum,” Thérèse’s life by its sanctity and its virtues is the proof of this maxim, for both her holiness and her virtues throw light on patience and are themselves enlightened by it.

We recall for our encouragement some of the little trials which were the matter of Thérèse’s patience. The discomforts of the weather—the cold—she felt “as if she would die of it.” She lets this slip out at the end of her life. It had never been suspected so patiently had she borne it. And then, the rubs, the vexations of community life. Thérèse experienced them from her Prioress and her Sisters. Her lovable charity throughout them all can only be explained by her patience: “Radix et custos.”

Similarly with our own imperfections our failings and our faults, everything which, alas, casts us down and makes us gloomy and irritable, for we are in ourselves the abundant source of many little sufferings the remedy is, above all, patience. “How glad I am,” said Thérèse, “to see my imperfection and my need of God’s Compassion”[9] Here patience is the root and guardian of her humility.

The little Carmelite, like us, experienced the sorrows of the soul, interior trials, aridities, obscurities, temptations. It even seems that aridity and obscurity were, from her novitiate until her last days, the almost permanent atmosphere of her soul. Her faith in Love led her to accept them all, to endure them all. So, too with family trials, her father’s illness; so, too, with her own illness. All these trials, great or small, found her always resigned, tranquil, and even smiling.

This brings us to the joyful acceptance of suffering. Joy in suffering was the common characteristic of Thérèse’s patience.

I confess that here—on this question of joy in suffering—St. Thérèse has taught me something new, and it seems as if she herself wanted to dispel the difficulty usually experienced in understanding joy in suffering. At first I was disconcerted on reading these words of hers: “Let us suffer, if necessary, without courage. Jesus suffered many things in sadness. Without sadness, how can the soul be said to suffer? And we would like to suffer generously, in the grand manner! “What a delusion!” Almost always when patience is spoken of, we are told to suffer with courage, with generosity. “What a delusion!”[10] says Thérèse: we must learn how to suffer without courage, feebly, with sadness.

Here, I think, we come to grips with the difficulty which prevents our understanding joy in suffering and in believing in its possibility for us. We have a wrong idea of this joy; we conceive it as a joy of the senses, a joy which is obviously incompatible with suffering. Instinctively, we picture to ourselves a manner of suffering which will raise us in our own eyes, which will tickle our self-esteem, suffering in the grand manner, generously, courageously, and instinctively; we always picture joy in suffering in this way. Evidently it is not this kind of joy. That the pain of suffering should be felt is an essential element of suffering. Let us be quite clear on this point. To feel its bitterness, to feel the weakness of our nature, to see ourselves without courage, overwhelmed by the suffering, to feel this and accept it—this is patience.

While still feeling all the bitterness, we must go beyond what is bitter in all these natural results of suffering, and, rising above them, find rest and joy. Rest in what? In God’s good pleasure alone, absolutely alone. Joy in what? Solely in pleasing God without feeling any joy ourselves, without any human or personal consolation. This was the joy of Thérèse.

And so let us listen to her speaking of it. What she says will help us to understand. “If you want to feel joy, feel an attraction to suffering, then you are seeking your own consolation, because, when, we love something, the pain disappears.”[11] And again: “My only joy is to suffer for Jesus, and this unfelt joy is above all other joy.”[12] “Unfelt joy.” It is not a question, then, of feeling joy in suffering considered in itself but of being thoroughly convinced of the truth of faith, that in accepting suffering we please God our Father; of telling ourselves this the moment suffering comes and of resting there in God’s good pleasure and of placing our joy in that. Unfelt joy, joy spiritual and divine.

I do not think I am wrong, or misinterpreting the mind of the saint who wished to encourage our “little souls.” if I say that this joy is intended for us, as well as for her, that we can attain to it, as she did. What must we do? Like her, we must see in suffering an effect of God’s love for us. Like her, make patience an exercise of love, a delicate and childlike love of God. Then, the Holy Ghost, who is in our souls as in hers, will work in us what He did in her; from the pain and sadness inseparable from suffering He will bring forth joy, joy which as St. Paul tells us, is, after the love of Charity, the first fruit of the Holy Ghost: “The fruit of the Spirit is charity, joy . . .” [13] and then it will be easy for a smile to reflect outwardly the inward joy of the soul.

“I forced myself to smile at suffering,” Thérèse tells us. And let us hear the reason—its naivety may well be its highest wisdom. “I forced myself to smile at suffering so that God, as it were deceived by my expression, might not know I was suffering at all.”[14]

She was a soul who understood God, and showed Him she did. That was all!

[1] James 1:4.

[2] Eph. 1:28.

[3] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 96–7

[4] John 4:8.

[5] Autobiography, p. 333.

[6] Ibid., p. 338.

[7] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 43.

[8] Autobiography, p.221.

[9] Novissima Verba, p. 91.

[10] The Spirit of St.Thérèse p. 108.

[11] Autobiography, p. 360.

[12] Ibid., p. 335.

[13] Gal. 5:22.

[14] Spirit., p. 44.

10 St. Thérèse and the Love of Neighbor

If any man love Me, he will keep My word.[1] These things I command you, that you love one another.[2] All my commandments are contained in one—love one another.

It is clear that for Thérèse, to love our neighbor is to love God, and to love God is to love man.

She understood this by instinct, and she reveals her own thoughts about it: “I strove above all else to love God. It was by loving Him that He made me understand to the full the great duty of charity.”[3] “The more united I am to Jesus, the more I love my Sisters.”[4] She understood her Master, Jesus. For Him, to love God was to love those whom His Father loved and to give Himself to them. “If any man say, ‘I love God’, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.”[5] The reason is very simple: “For he that loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not?”[6] To love God who loves us, is to love those whom God loves; this sums up the teaching of the Gospels. Thérèse understood it, and she put it into practice.

And this is where we see, in the Gospels as in Thérèse, the identity between the law of renunciation and the law of love. They are one and the same. To observe the law of charity is to renounce self, to live, not for self, but for others.

The Wisdom of the Gospels, like that of Thérèse, can be summed up in one word: “To love.” To love God and all men in God: “Love is the fulfilling of the law.”[7] But, let us note well, the practice of this wisdom must be very humble, very unpretending. Humble and unpretending—this is essential if our charity is to be real and not imaginary; if it is to exist, not in mere words and phrases, but, in fact, in truth: “Let us not love in word, nor in tongue, but in deed and in truth.”[8]

The actual life of all of us, our relations with our fellow-creatures, our brethren, is made up of a series of events, very ordinary in themselves, of petty incidents, insignificant and commonplace. The whole point is that it is in precisely these circumstances that we have to be charitable, forget self, exercise self-restraint, give ourselves to others. To ignore these little opportunities is to leave charity in the realm of dream and fancy. To be on the watch for, to notice from the very first, and to seize hold of these little opportunities is, in fact, the only true way of practicing charity. This is what Thérèse did—by giving herself to others and by bearing with them.

Let us see her charity in action under this two-fold form; in the gift of herself; in her bearing with others.

First: Her gift of self.

It is a real joy to recall the following example of her little sacrifices: “A smile, a kind word when I would have liked to be silent and to show my boredom.”[9] This is a way of self-giving well within our reach, and it could be practiced almost every day. And again: “I helped others in little ways without making any fuss about it.”[10] “If anything given me for my use is taken away, I must look as if I were glad to get rid of it.”[11] These minute touches show the delicacy of her charity. Above all, they teach us this important truth, that genuine, true charity consists in the forgetfulness of self. It is what is so often wanting. Even when we want to be charitable, we keep thinking of self. Is it not this secret self-love which calls attention to our charity?

There is nothing of this sort in our little saint: “I must not be obliging in order to appear so, in the hope that later on, the Sister I oblige will do the same for me.”[12] And she recalls Our Lord’s words: “If you lend to them of whom you hope to receive, what thanks are to you? For sinners do likewise.”[13] Even more suggestive is her very practical interpretation of those other words of Our Lord: “Give to him that asketh of you and if a man. . . take away thy coat, let go thy cloak also unto him.”[14] To “let go our cloak,” what does that mean? It means, Thérèse answers, to renounce our ultimate rights and to esteem ourself as the servant, the slave of others. This is indeed the Gospel teaching. And notice, that Thérèse foresees quite well that a particular Sister will take advantage of her readiness to oblige. “Less ceremony is used”, she noticed, “in asking the help of those who are always ready to oblige.”[15]

But the practical conclusion she comes to is this—and it is well worth emphasizing: “I must not keep out of the way of those Sisters who are always seeking my help.”[16] She is up to all the subterfuges of egoism, and her motives are always those of the Gospels: “for,” she writes, “Our Divine Master has said: ‘From him that would borrow from thee turn not away.’”[17] After this we are not surprised at her laying down this rule of conduct for herself: It is not enough for me to give to him who asks. I ought to forestall his wishes, appear very grateful, highly honored at being able to help him.”[18]

Here is a story that shows this principle in action. At the Carmel there was an old Sister, so aged and infirm, that she could hardly walk. No one could satisfy her; she must be supported in front and from behind; they must walk neither too fast nor too slowly; on reaching the refectory, she must be installed in her place in a particular way, her sleeves turned back just as she fancied, her table things arranged, her bread cut, according to certain complicated rules. And the poor sufferer never ceased complaining. Thérèse volunteered to look after her and became her servant, her slave. And, by dint of patience she so far succeeded as to coax a smile from the poor old Sister. How suggestive this is. It is not by cold and correct gestures that souls are won, but by love and the gift of self. That is charity; the gift of self, practical self-forgetfulness. That is what Christ said. Thérèse read her Gospels rightly.

Second: Bearing with others.

It is in bearing with others even more, perhaps, than by the gift of self, that self-forgetfulness is seen. True charity consists more in enduring, in suffering, than in doing. And, in reality, the gift of self is never complete unless, first and foremost, we bear patiently with others. Patiently—again and always patience is the root: “Root and guardian of all the virtues.” St. Paul begins his eulogy of charity with these words: “Charity is patient.”[19]

To be charitable, the first and indispensable condition is the resolution to compel ourselves, cost what it may, to be patient: “Charity is patient,” towards everything and everyone: bearing everything from our neighbors—their peculiarities, failings, bad manners, faults and imperfections. Of this forbearance with others, Thérèse, as we shall see, is the living example.

Let us recall a story which has now become classical, and which is widely quoted. We shall leave her to tell it. Thérèse felt a natural antipathy—a very strong one—to a certain religious of the community, who had the “gift” of irritating her by everything she did. Refusing to give in to these feelings, she thought of an ingenious ruse which she put into practice for many long months until she had won complete victory. “I set myself,” she says, “to do for that Sister what I would have done for the person I loved best of all. Whenever we met I prayed for her; but not satisfied with that, I tried to do her every service in my power; and when tempted to answer sharply, I forced myself to give her a pleasant smile. Often, too, when violently tempted by the devil, if I could slip away without her guessing my motive, I would turn and run away like a deserter . . .” [20] She laughingly admits “that this last method, though not very creditable, was always perfectly successful for her.”

The example is typical. The Sister in question had the gift of irritating her in everything she did; this “everything” is conclusive. On the other hand, St. Thérèse’s tactics are instructive. She takes the offensive. She is not satisfied with avoiding the outward signs of her “natural antipathy”—of her “egoistic reactions,” shall we say? In order really to conquer herself she goes to the length of showing sympathy and affection. These tactics are, in fact, not only the most efficacious; they are the easiest, the only ones which lift up the soul and give it joy, the joy of fully satisfied love. Her victory was complete; so complete that Marie, her eldest sister, took her to task for loving this particular Religious more than herself and the other Sisters; so complete that this Religious who, naturally, was wholly distasteful to her, ended by thinking herself her best friend. That is the way the saints fight.

We can then believe Thérèse when she shares her discovery with us: “Ah, I know now, that true charity consists in bearing with our neighbors’ shortcomings, in not being surprised at their frailties.”[21] Not only does Thérèse bear with her neighbors’ faults and failings, she sees them with the ever open eye of love as the means, prepared by God for her own deliverance from self-love, from her egoism. That is why she asked and obtained permission to be placed in the linen-room—one of the convent offices—with a Sister whose difficult character she knew would inevitably cause her much pain. And the result is the same: victory, or rather a series of victories.

She knew the cost of the advice she gave her novices: “When you are tempted, even if it is to anger, against any one, the way to recover peace . . . is to beg God to reward that person for having made you suffer.”[22] In fact, if we really understand the part patience plays in our sanctification, those who make us suffer have a right to our gratitude. One weakness we all share which is but a disguised impatience; it is this. When someone is really in the wrong we will persist in wanting to make him admit it. See what our little Carmelite thought of this contrariness. “To want to persuade our Sisters that they are in the wrong, even when this is perfectly true, is not the way to fight (she is always the good soldier studying the best tactics). We must not be justices of the peace, but only angels of peace.”[23] Angels of peace: a phrase not found in the Gospels, but eminently evangelical all the same.

But the little Novice Mistress knew that some offices carry with them a duty to rebuke, to correct, to enlighten souls. And she did so. But how delicately! It was really her charity that supported these sick souls she wanted to heal and strengthen. “I feel,” she says, “that I must be as compassionate to the spiritual infirmities of my Sisters, as you are, my Mother, to my physical ones.”[24] She was ill when she said this, and her reflection was suggested by her Mother Prioress’s loving care of her.

And what supernatural and evangelical insight there is in the following rules for the direction of souls: “It is with like care that suffering souls must be treated even the most imperfect. Very often they are wounded by slights, by neglect, by lack of consideration, when they ought to have been cared for and comforted by every means in our power.”[25]

We sense the spirit of the Gospels in her actions and thoughts, but it is the Gospel brought to bear on the little events of ordinary life, on the daily round. It is the practice of the Gospel, not at long intervals, but at every smallest opportunity, and, so to speak, in an uninterrupted flow. Patient forbearance with others, carried to the utmost delicacy—that is what lies at the very root of the charity of Christ.

Carried to the utmost delicacy! The following story shows this delicacy in the concrete, and, at the same time, how much these victories of charity cost her-as they will cost us. Here again we shall find cause for encouragement. It had to do with one of those irritating habits which try our patience so severely, and which, however short their duration, usually end by defeating us. A certain Sister had a habit of fidgeting with her rosary as she said her prayers. This made a little noise which Thérèse, who was very sensitive to noises, found irksome and exasperating. “I should have liked,” she says, “to turn my head and look at the offender so as to make her stop her fidgeting (a little movement which we, no doubt, would not have failed to make), but at the bottom of my heart I felt that it was more perfect to bear it patiently, so as to spare the Sister embarrassment.” Notice her delicacy. And now the toil of the struggle. “So I remained perfectly still, though sometimes sweat poured from me. I could only make a prayer of endurance.” And, perhaps, she might have ended by giving in, but for a ruse which her charity invented, and which changed the whole course of the battle, a childish ruse perhaps, but one which might be of great service to us in similar circumstances. “I tried to get to love that irritating little noise. Instead of trying not to hear it, which was impossible, I set myself to listen to it as attentively as if it had been delightful music. And my prayer, which was not a prayer of quiet, was spent in offering this concert to Jesus.”[26]

Naive? Childlike? Perhaps: but is it not by becoming as little children that we enter the kingdom of heaven? I think the offering of this “music” cannot have been displeasing to Our Lord. Nothing is little which is done by charity and for charity. Such is the spirit of childhood of the Gospels, and Thérèse understood it.

[1] John 14:23

[2] John 15:17

[3] Autobiography, p. 162.

[4] Ibid., p.163.

[5] 1 John 4:20.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Rom. 13:10.

[8] John 3:18.

[9] Autobiography, p. 345.

[10] Ibid., p. 120.

[11] Ibid., p. 166

[12] Ibid., p. 167.

[13] Luke 6:34.

[14] Matt. 5:40–42.

[15] Autobiography, p. 266.

[16] Ibid., p. 166.

[17] Ibid., p. 166–7.

[18] Ibid., p. 166.

[19] 1 Cor. 13:4.

[20] Autobiography, p. 168.

[21] Ibid., p. 162.

[22] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 77.

[23] Autobiography, pp. 312–313.

[24] Ibid., p. 182.

[25] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 78.

[26] Autobiography, p. 186.

11 The Simplicity of St. Thérèse

If thy eye be single, thy whole body will be lightsome.[1]

I would like to speak of the simplicity of St. Thérèse; the simplicity of her spiritual life and her spiritual doctrine. Perhaps I ought to have begun by doing this. After attempting to analyze the “sanctity” of the saint, I have felt a scruple, lest, in trying to explain it, I have perhaps distorted it and taken away its special character and charm, namely, its simplicity. Everything in this soul is so one, so simple; by dividing it up, is there not a danger of mutilating it, of complicating it? It would be a tragedy if this were so, and, in so far as I may have been guilty. I hope this conference will make amends.

Simplicity is, indisputably, the characteristic note of Thérèse’s sanctity. But this very fact places us in a difficulty. This simplicity is something almost inexpressible. In wishing to speak of it, is there not a danger of misinterpreting it? We are so complex, that the true idea of simplicity eludes us directly we try to describe it and put it into words. We end by complicating and obscuring this essentially simple thing—simplicity. And yet, it is necessary to emphasize this feature of Thérèse’s spiritual portrait; necessary, because this feature is her special characteristic. Only by considering it can we usefully understand it and profit by it. It is, indeed, a wonderful grace of God, to have set before our eyes a living example of the moral quality which we find so difficult to apprehend and express—simplicity. For that is what Thérèse of the Child Jesus is—the living example of simplicity.

First

Let us begin by a process of elimination; let us see what Thérèse excludes, what she does not admit in her spiritual life. In this way we shall arrive—at least try to—at an ultimate residue, a single element. This residue will be simplicity.

First, then, as to what Thérèse has excluded.

By a supernatural instinct she gradually and increasingly eliminated from her life: Artificiality, complexity, and Multiplicity.

Artificiality: There was nothing formal about her, nothing contrived or pre-arranged. We recall her words: “I no longer find any help in books: the Gospels are all I need.” Artificiality repelled her. Another familiar passage throws light on this short statement: “Sometimes, when I read certain treatises, where the way of devotion is pictured as strewn with a thousand obstacles, my poor little heart soon grows weary: I close the learned book which makes my head ache and my heart turn dry, and I take up the Holy Scriptures. Then everything seems as clear as day . . . Perfection seems easy.”[2]

Thérèse knew what a hindrance artificiality is to sincere souls, and how simplicity can be lost by rigid methods, set forms, examens, arranged like a problem in arithmetic. Unintentionally, without adverting to it, by going back to the Scriptures, to the Gospels, Thérèse returned to the Christian asceticism of the earliest ages, of those long centuries of sanctity previous to modern times. And in returning to them she has invited, and, as it were, compelled us, too, to return to them. This, it seems to me, was her mission. Only on this supposition can her “Little Way” be rightly understood.

Thérèse did not reject these methods of set purpose. God drew her gently towards a freer and truer way—the way of the Gospels. Let us keep to it in the guidance of our souls.

Complexity: If there was nothing artificial in her way, neither was there anything complicated; the second negative note of her simplicity. “Simple souls, and I am one of them, ought not to use complicated methods.”[3]

There was nothing finicky in her practice of the virtues. She did not try to understand her way of prayer, or seek to determine its degrees, its different states. It would seem as if it never entered her head to cut up the practice of a virtue, humility, for example, or charity, into multiple degrees. Did she ever try to acquire each virtue methodically, one after another? I think, rather, that she practiced them all as circumstances dictated, according to the opportunities she met with in her daily life. Did she ever make a “particular examen” on such and such a virtue? There is no sign of it. I think her examens must have been anything but complicated or difficult; she did not like counting her good deeds. “Some directors advise us to count our acts of virtue in order to advance in perfection. But my director, who is Jesus, does not teach me to count my good actions; He teaches me to do everything for love.”[4] The Venerable Father Libermann used to say: “The best examen is to keep oneself all day in a quiet attention to God; then, without adverting to it, we make a very good examen of everything we do.”[5] This, I think, is what Thérèse did.

Multiplicity: Enemy of artificiality and the complicated, she was equally so of all multiplicity.

She instinctively disliked a multiplicity of practices. One day there was a discussion as to which practices best conduced to perfection. “No,” said Thérèse, “sanctity is not to be found in this or that practice; it consists in a disposition of the heart which surrenders us, humble and little, into God’s hands.”[6]

Nor did she demand a multiplicity of intentions. A novice spoke of her regret at not being able to imitate her in the frequent direction of her intention, of her will, to God. “For a soul wholly surrendered to Our Lord,” she answered, “such direction is unnecessary.” Let us note these words—“A soul wholly surrendered”: perhaps it is here that we shall find the real key to simplicity. And she goes on: “Recollect yourself, but do it gently, for constraint does not glorify God . . . He well knows the loving phrases we would like to find for Him and He is content with our desires; is He not our Father, and are we not His little children?”[7]

She did not like to see her Sisters distracted by the multiplicity of their duties and employments: “You are too immersed in what you are doing,” she used to say. She saw in this a sign of multiplicity in their souls; that multiplicity which Our Lord blamed in Martha: “Thou art careful and art troubled about many things.” He felt deeply and keenly that “but one thing is necessary,”[8] that the life and strength of our souls is in unity; that to simplify the soul is to unify it; and that to do this we must, avoid the multiplicity of works. Remember, that as one thing alone is necessary, they must all be reduced to unity.

Let us repeat; if Thérèse multiplied her little sacrifices, careful to miss no opportunity of making them, yet even then she was not “troubled about many things.” There was no multiplicity in her thoughts, no restlessness, no dissipation of soul; hence the peace and ease, the liberty and joy with which her little sacrifices were made.

After eliminating artificiality, complexity and multiplicity from Thérèse’s life and way, need we add that the extraordinary is also excluded? The extraordinary finds no place in her sanctity.

God and Thérèse if one may so speak, had come to an agreement about this. The few incidents in her life which are a little out of the ordinary are so accidental, so unimportant, that they leave her life to unfold in the normal routine of the religious life, and these few incidents should not, I think, be exaggerated. Rather, I should be inclined to minimize them. And in doing so I should, I think, be quite in accord with the mind of God, who has clearly willed, in Thérèse, to put sanctity before us under a perfectly ordinary form and, for that reason, a wholly simple one.

God and Thérèse, I said, were in agreement about this. Over and over again she tells us that she wanted nothing extraordinary in her life; she understood her mission. “The macerations of the saints,” she says, “are not for me, nor for the little souls who are to walk in the little way of childhood, where nothing is out of the ordinary.”[9] “Little souls must have nothing to envy in me.” “I make use of little opportunities to mortify myself.” Little opportunities, little mortifications, little actions; this is where Thérèse placed sanctity, and where she attained it.

She goes on repeating this to the last. They hoped she might die on the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, after Holy Communion: “That is much too fine for me,” she said, “little souls could not imitate that; in my little way there are only very ordinary things.”[10]

Second

By dint of exclusion, by elimination, we are now, it seems to me, in a position to see in the concrete—in Thérèse—what simplicity is. What do we see? A soul possessed, and to the very depths, by one desire—the desire to please God in everything.

In a soul which has surrendered to this one desire, and which does everything, therefore, in virtue, and under the impulse, of this desire, we find the “wholly surrendered soul” of which Thérèse speaks, and for which the constant renewal of particular intentions is unnecessary. A wholly surrendered soul; surrendered to whom? To the Holy Ghost; surrendered through its own desire to love, to the infinite Love who longs to possess it.

We can see, then, how the soul is free and at her ease; and we see how formality, artificiality, complexity, and multiplicity will be but hindrances and obstacles. This is simplicity; a soul reduced to one single movement, one single tendency, one resolution, one sole occupation; the desire to love, to please God its Father in all things; a sincere and deep, but wholly simple, desire. If that is present in a soul, it is on the high road to perfection and to sanctity.

And, in fact, ought not we who direct souls, to recognize once and for all that in so far as this desire has not been awakened in a soul, all that we may make it do, all the recipes and formulae, all the methods, examens it makes use of, its reading, especially of mystical books, its resolutions, the practice of this virtue or that, all these will bear little or no fruit?

On the other hand, the moment a soul lets this desire take possession of it, and begins to surrender itself thereto, its progress increases, it begins to walk at its ease, to breathe freely—its sails are unfurled. The Holy Spirit breathes into them, guiding and impelling the soul on its way. Thus He bears it to Love, to the greatest Love of all.

That profound director of souls, the Venerable Father Libermann, in a precious letter in which he humbly submits his mode of direction to an experienced priest, tells us that he used to begin his work with souls by awakening, by stirring up in them the desire to live wholly for God, the desire to love God perfectly. “I set myself,” he says, “to implant in their souls the burning desire to belong wholly to God.” He felt that, without this, nothing deep, serious, lasting, could be done. What does this mean but that he set himself to put souls on the way of simplicity; that he put on one side the restless multiplicity of desires and resolutions, eliminated the artificial, the formal, the complicated, and tried to establish the soul firmly in the “unum necessarium”? At first, he tells us, he did not even speak to them about their prayer, that is to say, about its method, its degrees; instead, in one sweep, he opened to them the way of renunciation, complete renunciation. He adds that almost always souls arrived quickly at contemplation.

There is a great similarity (not in form and words, but in substance) between Thérèse’s way of love, and the Venerable Father’s way of renunciation. They are not only similar, they are identical. They are, both of them, the way of simplicity.

Here there is an important fact to note. All agree that simplicity is the term itself of the perfect way, the virtue of the saints. This is true. But, it seems to me, this can be misleading. With this idea that simplicity is the term of the way, souls are led to it by a complicated road, a road cluttered up with factitious practices and methods; there is an attempt to lead souls to simplicity by complexity.

Thérèse’s originality—and she is only original in recalling us to the Gospels—is in placing simplicity not only at the term of the way of sanctity, but at the beginning, on the very threshold, at the point of departure. And it is this that makes her way accessible to all sincere and upright souls; it is this which really make, it the “Little Way,” the “Way of Childhood.” Thérèse aims at establishing the soul in simplicity at the very outset. She tells us that all that is necessary is one desire, only one, a desire wholly simple and uncomplicated, the desire to love God; that that is to say, in the concrete, the desire to please God in everything.

Does this mean that, forthwith, the soul attains simplicity? Clearly not; but it has simplicity in the intention, simplicity in view. By this simplicity it enters on the way of simplicity: it tends to the simplicity of the term by its simplicity of outlook, by the simplicity of its way.

In short, the road which leads to sanctity is a constant, uninterrupted, progress in simplicity. At first, simplicity will exist, only in the intention and in the desire to attain it. Under the impulse of this initial desire the soul will free itself, as it goes along, of everything that is not simple; it is the way of little sacrifices, of progressive renunciation. So, little by little, it will come to perfect simplicity, the simplicity of the perfect, of the saints; in short, to the “oculus simplex” of the Gospels; the “single eye,” the eye the heart, simplicity of the gaze of the soul.

As for exterior simplicity, of behavior, in our words and actions—these flow naturally from the simplicity of the heart. Without that, everything exterior will be but a façade, a want of simplicity. We are then conscious at once of being in the truth, in the simplicity of the Gospels; we realize what St. Thérèse meant when she said “The Gospels are all I need.”

We directors should only add to the Gospels what is strictly necessary in order to enable the soul to understand them in all their simplicity and to find Love in them. How grand and sublime is a soul wholly surrendered to God! And how good, how comforting it is for us, directors, to know that all we have to do is to free the soul and lead it to surrender itself to the only true director—to the Holy Spirit within it! What frees the soul thus is this wholly simple disposition, provided only it is sincere, the desire to do but one thing, to have, amidst all the activities of life, but one sole thought: to please God its Father.

He who has this desire is, from that instant, delivered up to the Holy Ghost. The Spirit of God will make him a true “child of God.” The only Son of the Father, the model of all the saints, did nothing else: “I do always the things that please Him.”[11] St. Paul teaches no other way to sanctity: “Prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God.”[12]

St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus came with the mission to remind us that the way, as well as the term, of sanctity, is simplicity. On the evening of her death she could say: “Love is the only thing that matters.”[13] Yes, for Love sums up the Gospels.

[1] Luke 11:34.

[2] Autobiography, pp. 372–373.

[3] Ibid., p. 190.

[4] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, p. 4.

[5] Spiritual Letters, Vol. II p. 274.

[6] Novissima Verba, p. 10.

[7] The Spirit of St. Thérèse, pp. 179–180

[8] Luke 10:41–42.

[9] Autobiography, p. 218.

[10] Ibid., p. 232.

[11] John 7:29.

[12] Rom. 12:2.

[13] Novissima Verba, p. 184.

12 The Offering to Compassionate Love

O My God, Most Blessed Trinity . . . I offer myself as a holocaust to Thy Compassionate Love.

I do not think there can be a better way to close this retreat than by commenting on Thérèse’s act of offering to Compassionate Love.

To me it is a wonderful act, wonderful in its simplicity, in its truth, in its completeness. It contains the whole of her “Little Way,” the humble and confident desire to love, all strengthened and upheld by faith in Compassionate Love.

One word of explanation. Thérèse does not offer herself to the Divine Majesty; she offers herself to Love. She offers herself not as a victim of God’s justice, but as a victim to His Compassionate Love.

Let us explain these two words: Compassionate Love.

First

What really is this act? Quite simply it is the exact and complete expression of the desire to love, of the desire to please God in everything. The soul which has felt within it the stirring of this desire, and has surrendered itself thereto, sees and feels itself incapable of loving. It resolves to make every little sacrifice which opportunity affords in order to please God, and it is this motive which is at the root of all it does. But this is as nothing to the love it would like to give to God, so it offers itself.

Offers itself to what? To Holiness, in reparation? No. To justice, in satisfaction? No. It offers itself to Love so that He may delight Himself in it.

This is indeed to understand the Heart of God! God, says St. John, is Love. He is athirst with love. He, who is Love, feels, if we may so speak, the need to enlarge Himself by making Himself loved. What better response can nothingness of the creature make to Him than to say “O Love, create in me all the love that thou wishest; come Thyself and love Thyself in me, as Thou wilt and as much as Thou wilt!”

This is what Thérèse does. She does not offer her love to God; she sees her poverty, her powerlessness to love. She offers her poverty, so that He may enrich it with the love that is not there. She understands God; she knows that God, Infinite Love, has an infinitely greater desire to communicate Himself to us than we can ever feel to receive Him. “Bonum diffusivum sui.”

Therefore, quite simply, to show that she understands Him, to please Him, she shows Him the emptiness of her created heart, and by her desire opens it before Him as widely as she can; she offers Him that empty vessel for Him to fill. In other words she offers herself to Love. Thérèse instinctively feels with St. Paul: “The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us.”[1] It is not we who draw the love of God from our hearts; it is the Holy Ghost who is Love, who pours it into our hearts.

This offering is, in reality, a demand, but one wholly unselfish, pure and divine. By so offering herself, Thérèse calls on God to satisfy Himself in her, as much as He desires, to quench in her His infinite thirst for love.

To me, this act is the concrete and living realization of those unutterable and unuttered prayers described by St. Paul, which the Holy Ghost inspires in the depths of the souls who submit themselves to Him: “The Spirit Himself asketh for us with unspeakable groanings.”[2]

What else are those wordless, inexpressible groanings but the desire to love, which can only be expressed by the offering of ourself to Love, by putting ourselves into the hands of Infinite Love, to do with us what He wills?

And Thérèse knows that this is that true prayer which God can never fail to understand: “He that searcheth the hearts, knoweth what the Spirit desireth: because He seeketh for the saints according to God.”[3] Because, that is, He only asks for things that are pleasing to God. This simple offering, without actually asking for anything, without putting its request into words, asks more than any formulated prayer; it asks “according to God,” as God does with the saints: “He seeketh for according to God.” By this simple offering Thérèse, so to speak, provokes Infinite Love, who is God, wholly to satisfy in her (if this were possible) His desire to be loved.

The little Sister did indeed understand God better than many theologians who think they know Him; she understands Him with the heart humbly, simply, ingenuously. She realizes that the need to love, which she feels in the depths of her heart, is an echo of the infinite need to be loved, which is in God and which is God. Her act of offering is simply that.

But there is another point which will, I think, add further light to our retreat.

Second

What is it which stands between many souls and the life of pure love? It is this. They say “That is too advanced, too high for me. I am not good enough to think of a life of love; I am not fit for it.” Thérèse foresaw this objection. Always anxious to encourage “little souls,” she adds an important and decisive word to her offering to Love—the word “Compassionate.” This is infinitely encouraging and wholly in the spirit of the Gospels.

The clear vision of our miseries and imperfections is not a reason for not surrendering ourselves to Love; rather, as this Love is Compassionate, it is a reason for doing so. To think ourselves unworthy to offer ourself as a Victim to Divine justice, that is understandable, but it is not a question of offering ourself to justice, but to Compassion. We offer our wretchedness which is the proper object of Compassion and greater our wretchedness is, the more we should see ourselves as fit subjects for the manifestation of Infinite Compassion.

We can offer our miseries freely to Compassion. He needs them in order to be able to act and manifest Himself. Here again Thérèse perfectly understands God’s mind. It is certain that God’s plan, the end He proposed Himself in creating the actual world with sin and the consequences of sin, was to manifest and glorify His Compassionate Love, and precisely because that Love is Compassionate.

That is what our pride finds so hard to understand, to understand practically. To offer our wretchedness to God is to give Him glory, to please Him; it is to give Him an opportunity of manifesting that very attribute which He specially wishes to be glorified—His Compassion. We offer Him our miseries so as to be freed from them, to be eased and cured, not because we deserve it, but to give God’s Love the opportunity to show itself as it really is—as “compassionate.”

Here a thought naturally arises. Is not this very often the only practical way of getting out of our unhappy state, of ridding ourselves of the miseries which cling so closely to us? It is a fact, and it is wise to admit it, that there are many obstinate imperfections so subtle as to be almost impossible to lay hold of, which all our efforts, our sincere efforts, all our toil, all our resolutions, are unable to eradicate or correct; the remains of egoism, of secret self-love, of vanity, of more or less willful attachments. This is where God’s compassion comes in, this is the point when we must turn to Compassionate Love and commit ourselves humbly to the compassion of our loving God. This offering to His Compassionate Love is our last resource, and, thanks be to God, it is an infallible one, the supreme remedy of all our ills.

Wretchedness commits itself to Compassion. How will Compassionate Love heal us? What remedies will He use? Will He make use of trials, of interior or exterior sufferings? As to that we do not trouble ourselves; in all simplicity, we commit ourselves to Compassionate Love. If Compassion is pleased to do His work through suffering, so be it! But we are not thinking of justice, but of Compassion. It is to Compassionate Love that we offer ourselves. And, indeed, I think that God is but waiting for such an act, such an offering to bear certain timorous souls, who because of their wretchedness judge themselves unfit and unworthy, very high and very far in love.

This word “Compassionate” should be meditated upon at length, and in the light of the Holy Ghost. I think that the whole force and meaning of this offering lies in this word. It would seem that Thérèse thought so too. “Oh, understand me,” she says, “try and understand, that to be a victim of Love, the weaker and more wretched we are, the more fit we are for the operations of this consuming and transforming Love. It is sufficient to desire to be a victim, but we must be willing to remain poor and helpless always and that is what is so difficult.”[4] The wretchedness which offers itself humbly (that is the condition) to Compassionate Love will be lifted up by this all-powerful Love, which lets Himself be led captive by wretchedness, the instant it humbles itself and commits itself to Him.

To inspire “little souls” with the bold and reckless desire to love in spite of their wretchedness, or rather by making their very wretchedness a claim on Compassionate Love, this, if we may say so, is the genius of St. Thérèse—and indeed of the Gospel. Did not Christ come to call the poor, the little, the humble, to the life of Love?

And is not the right way to respond to this invitation, to offer ourselves, conscious of our weakness, to Compassionate Love, trusting that out of pure compassion He will create and pour out Love in us? This is what inspired Thérèse to that bold and fearless offering of herself as victim to Compassionate Love. She understood the Gospels, because she believed them.

And now let us go back in mind to the Carmel of Lisieux on the Feast of the Blessed Trinity, June 9th, 1895, and picture St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus as she offers herself as a holocaust to Compassionate Love. We seem to see her soul filled with an immense peace. And what made that peace? Humility, tranquil faith in Compassionate Love, confidence, the desire to love.

Let us establish ourselves in that peace. What is asked of us? A firm faith in God’s Love for our wretchedness: humility: confidence: the desire to love. That is the whole of her “Little Way”: but, once more, it is also the whole of the Gospels.

[1] Rom. 5:5.

[2] Rom. 8:26.

[3] Rom. 8:27.

[4] Autobiography, p. 160.