St. Thérèse of Lisieux

The little way is her name for a holiness that does not depend on being strong. A soul too small to climb the stairs of perfection does not need to climb them. It asks to be carried. She did not invent this as a doctrine. She found it when she saw that she would never be a great saint by effort, and she stopped trying to become one that way.

“We live in an age of inventions… the lift that must raise me to Heaven is your arms, O Jesus!”

— Thérèse, Manuscript C, 2v–3r, written June 1897 for Mère Marie de Gonzague

She wrote it in the last summer of her life, at the request of the prioress, as the answer to the question of how a small soul reaches Heaven. Her own life shows the way in small things. As a novice she walked a difficult elderly sister to the refectory night after night, and she smiled at a sister who had a knack for getting on her nerves in everything. She counted these acts as the real substance of her vocation, and she wrote that to pick up a pin out of love can convert a soul.

“To pick up a pin out of love can convert a soul.”

— Thérèse, letter LT 164 to her sister Léonie, as quoted in Léonie's testimony at the Ordinary Process (PO 7, [493v])

Thérèse taught that fear leads away from God and trust leads toward him. She took this from her own temperament. She was a child who recoiled from any harsh word, and she knew that fear made her draw back. Love, she found, did the opposite.

“I’m made so that fear makes me back away; with love I don’t just go forward, I fly.”

— Thérèse, Manuscript A, 80v, on the retreat of October 1891

On 17 September 1896 her sister Marie asked whether she, too, could love God as Thérèse did. Thérèse answered in a letter that she wished to be loved for her smallness and not for any great desire. The letter ends with the line that became her best-known summary of the way.

“It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love.”

— Thérèse, letter LT 197 to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, 17 September 1896

She had given the same advice years before to her cousin Marie Guérin, who was tormented by scruples and stayed away from Communion. She told her that what wounds the heart of Jesus is lack of trust. Her own trust was tested to the end.

“What offends Jesus, what wounds his heart, is lack of trust!”

— Thérèse, letter LT 92 to Marie Guérin, 30 May 1889

On Trinity Sunday, 9 June 1895, Thérèse wrote and signed a short act offering herself to God's Merciful Love. She had heard other sisters offer themselves as victims to God's Justice, and she did not feel drawn to that. She asked instead whether Merciful Love did not need victims too. Her sister Pauline gave her leave to make the offering.

“I ask you, O my God, to be yourself my holiness.”

— Thérèse, Act of Oblation (Pri 6), 9 June 1895

The act expresses the same thought as the lift. She had no merits of her own to show, and she wished to appear before God with empty hands. She wrote that she could not receive Holy Communion as often as she wished, and she asked Jesus to stay in her as in the tabernacle. After the offering she wrote in Manuscript A that she could not fear purgatory. A few days later, beginning the Way of the Cross in choir, she felt as if plunged into fire, and she said it happened only once and for an instant.

At Easter 1896 the sense of Heaven left her. She wrote in Manuscript C, in June 1897, that it was no longer a veil between her and Heaven but a wall that rose to the sky. A voice in the darkness told her that death would give her not what she hoped for but a night of nothingness.

“It’s no longer a veil for me; it’s a wall that reaches to the heavens and hides the starry sky.”

— Thérèse, Manuscript C, 7v, written June 1897

She did not hide this from her sisters, and she did not describe it as peace. On 28 August 1897, in the garden, she pointed to a black gap under the chestnut trees and said that this was where she was, body and soul. Mère Agnès recorded the words. She did not stop loving, and she said she was at peace even there.

“That’s the kind of hole I’m in, body and soul. Ah yes, what darkness! But I’m at peace there.”

— Thérèse, 28 August 1897, as recorded by Mère Agnès in the Yellow Notebook (CJ 28.8.3)

Her sisters recorded that her last words, a little after seven on the evening of 30 September, were a plain act of love.

Thérèse wanted to be a missionary and could not leave the cloister. She wrote that she turned this desire into prayer and sacrifice. She came to Carmel, she told the examiners before her profession, to save souls and especially to pray for priests.

“Unable to be a missionary of action, I wanted to be one by love and penance, like St Teresa, my seraphic Mother.”

— Thérèse, letter LT 189 to Father Roulland, 23 June 1896

Her first spiritual brother was a condemned murderer. In 1887 she prayed and had a Mass said for Henri Pranzini and asked God for a sign of repentance. She read in La Croix that he had kissed the crucifix on the scaffold, and she called him her first child. In Carmel she took on two missionary brothers by letter, Abbé Bellière and Father Roulland. Before her death she said that her mission would begin after it.

“But above all I feel that my mission is going to begin, my mission of making the good God loved as I love Him, of giving my little way to souls.”

— Thérèse, 17 July 1897, as recorded by Mère Agnès in the Yellow Notebook (CJ 17.7)

Thérèse did not praise suffering in fine words, and she disliked it when others did. She wrote that she did not swim in consolations. She said that her consolation was to have none on earth. In September 1897, when the doctor praised her patience, she answered that it was a lie, and she told Mère Agnès that writing about suffering is nothing and that one has to be in it to know.

“It’s very easy to write fine things about suffering, but writing is nothing, nothing! You have to be in it to know!”

— Thérèse, 25 September 1897, as recorded by Mère Agnès in the Yellow Notebook (CJ 25.9.2)

She had coughed up blood for the first time in the night of Holy Thursday to Good Friday, 1896, and she took it as a call. In the infirmary she joked that her cough was like a railway engine pulling into the station. She could make a sweetness of a cup of bitter medicine. Her own summary of her life uses the image of a glass that looks like currant liqueur and holds bitterness.

“Don’t think I’m swimming in consolations; oh no! My consolation is to have none on earth.”

— Thérèse, Manuscript B, 1r, September 1896

These are the words of a person who lived the teaching and did not describe it from the outside. They do not claim that suffering is good in itself. They show a woman who loved at the point where she could feel nothing.

The teachings above are Thérèse's own words from her manuscripts, letters, and the Yellow Notebook. The words recorded by her sisters in 1897 were written down by Mère Agnès and labelled as such. Our English is a plain translation, and the biography gives the full story of each moment.