Therese of Lisieux was born in 1873. She is the youngest doctor of the church and, amazingly as she never left the convent walls, due to her support of missionaries by letters, patroness of the Missions.
Her earliest years were happy, but her life was full of
losses and suffering. Her mother died when she was four, and soon after that her two older sisters who were like substitute mothers to her, left to join the convent. Her father later suffered from dementia. She contracted tuberculosis and after a painful illness died at the age of twenty-four. While she wanted to do many things with her life – including desires to be a missionary and a priest, she came to an awareness of her vocation as love.
She was stubborn as a child and always determined. She wanted to enter the enclosed life of Carmel at the age of 15 but was told she was too young. When she had no joy with her appeal to the bishop, she even found an opportunity to ask the Pope for permission.
She was not particularly well-educated, but she could share the simple ways that she showed her love for God. In her “Story of a Soul” she writes of daily events,
personal struggles and her deep longings and we can relate to her in our own ordinary situations.
She is most well-known for her “Little Way.” This is a spirituality that recognises our littleness and nothingness before God. She said: "The Little Way ‘is the way of trust and absolute surrender'." In a time influenced by Calvinism, when people had a sense of God as distant and punitive, Therese had a very
different image of God as a loving parent into whose arms she could fling herself with total trust and surrender no matter what difficulty she found herself in. Her “Little Way” also meant offering Jesus the gift of small sacrifices and gestures of love for which every ordinary day presents many opportunities.
Her spirituality is challenging, and yet one all of us can try to live. It invites us to see in each moment,
small ways to express our love for God in and through the way we come to the simple daily events of our lives, whether answering an email, fetching a child from school, doing the grocery shopping or engaging in a business meeting. The challenge she leaves us with is to be willing to ask, in every moment and circumstance, “What is the demand of love?” and then to make that choice. That means staying constantly aware of Christ. When we struggle, to choose love flinging ourselves on the lap
of the Father as a child asking for help.
