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Thérèse of Lisieux
The Little Way
She waited, shifting from one foot to the other and wringing her hands as the long line inched forward. No one spoke. The shuffling of feet and the clinking of rosary beads were the only sounds heard in the grand room as the pilgrims filed toward the seated figure. Craning to catch a glimpse of the distinguished face and robed form of Pope Leo XIII, Thérèse watched from her place in line as each pilgrim kneeled silently in front him, bending low to kiss first the foot and then the hand of the pontiff before receiving his benediction.
Thérèse was on a mission. She had resolved to break the reverent silence during her brief audience with the pope, to ask him to bless her entry into the Carmel cloister at the age of fifteen, a full six years ahead of the typical entry age. But as one pilgrim and then another took their turn with Pope Leo, Thérèse began to lose her nerve, especially when a papal guard reminded the visitors that conversation with the Holy Father was strictly forbidden. Panicked, she whirled around to face her sister, Céline, who stood in line behind her. “Speak!” Céline urged.
Suddenly it was Thérèse’s turn. Her eyes on the ground, she kneeled before Pope Leo, lowering her head to kiss his slipper. Then, as the pope presented his hand to her, Thérèse raised her tear-streaked face, looked the pope in the eye, and whispered her question with conviction. “Most Holy Father, I have a great favour to ask of you. Most Holy Father, in honour of your Jubilee, allow me to enter Carmel at fifteen!”1
Pope Leo, Thérèse wrote later, gave her his full attention, bending down so that his head nearly touched hers, “as though his black and profound eyes wanted to penetrate me into the recesses of my soul.”2 But before he could answer, the vicar-general of Bayeux interrupted. Standing to the right of the pope and familiar with Thérèse’s unrelenting zeal to gain admission to the Carmelite monastery at Lisieux, he stated curtly that local church authorities were already investigating Thérèse’s request.
“Well, then, my child,” Pope Leo said gently, “do whatever the authorities decide.” Undeterred, Thérèse clasped her hands together and pressed them onto the pope’s knees. “O! Most Holy Father,” she implored, “if only you would say yes, everyone would be willing!” Before the papal guards forcibly removed Thérèse from the room, she heard Pope Leo’s response: “He looked at me very fixedly and pronounced these words, weighting each syllable in a penetrating tone, ‘Come now . . . come now . . . you will enter if God wills it.’”3
Five months later, Thérèse was accepted into the convent at Lisieux as a Carmelite postulant.
Saved from Grief
Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin was born weak and ill with a failure to thrive. At two days old, she was whisked by her despairing mother to the countryside, where a peasant woman with a houseful of her own children nursed and cared for her. Rose raised Thérèse in her humble cottage, pushing her through the fields in a wheelbarrow full of hay and wrapping her in her apron as she went about her work, until, at fifteen months old, Thérèse was finally strong enough to return home to her parents and sisters in Alencon.
Thérèse’s pleasant childhood didn’t last long. When she was four years old, her mother succumbed to breast cancer at the age of forty-six. As the youngest children, Thérèse and her sister Céline were shielded from their mother’s suffering, but they were both summoned to her bedside to witness the sacrament of last rites during her final hours. It was a pivotal moment in Thérèse’s life and faith. She remembered kneeling in the corner of the bedroom as the priest administered the sacrament to the still, gray form in the bed. Later, she recalled kissing her mother’s cold forehead. On her way out of the bedroom, she glimpsed a coffin towering upright in the hallway outside the door.
Later Thérèse admitted to her sister that her mother’s death changed her, and that it was only God who saved her from her grief: “If God had not lavished His beneficent rays on His little flower, she would never have been able to acclimatise herself on this Earth.”4 Previously an exuberant and even mischievous child, Thérèse was now serious and sensitive, prone to tears and bouts of melancholy and hysteria.
She was also increasingly drawn to God and the religious life. The first word Thérèse learned to read was heaven, and it’s said that at a young age she informed her father that her name was written in heaven. She told him that she had glimpsed the letter T in the constellation of Orion on a bright winter night and considered it a sign. At age nine, she approached the mother prioress of the Carmel convent to seek entrance as a postulant and was undeterred when she was informed she must wait until she was at least sixteen. Later the mother prioress amended the age to twenty-one, further delaying Thérèse’s entrance.
A Sudden Maturation
In addition to her mother’s death, Thérèse cited one other event that profoundly impacted her spiritual life. On Christmas Eve 1886, when Thérèse was thirteen years old, she experienced what she called her “complete conversion,” a moment in which she matured from a child to an adult in a single instant.
It was just after one in the morning, and Thérèse, her sisters, and their father had returned home from midnight Mass at the cathedral in Lisieux. Thérèse was eager to discover what treats Father Christmas had left in her empty shoes, which had been arranged, as was the Christmas Eve custom, on the hearth. But as she climbed the stairs, she overheard her father mutter to her older sister that Thérèse was too old for such nonsense, and he hoped this year would be the last of the silly tradition. Thérèse was crushed by her father’s callous words, but instead of dissolving into tears as she typically would have, she steeled herself, entered the living room, and delighted over her gifts as if she hadn’t overheard a word. Later, she said that Christmas Eve was the moment she crossed from childhood to adulthood. “Thérèse instantly understood what had happened to her when she won this banal little victory over her sensitivity, which she had borne for so long,” observes Ida Gorres in her biography The Hidden Face. “She had been vouchsafed a freedom which all her efforts had been unable to win.”5
Following this revelation and “complete conversion,” Thérèse pursued her goal of entering the convent at Lisieux with renewed determination. First she approached the bishop of Bayeux for his permission and then later Pope Leo XIII himself while she was on a pilgrimage to Rome with her father and sister. Finally, on April 9, 1888, Thérèse, wearing white velvet trimmed in swans’ down, a bouquet of white lilies in her hand, was led by her father down the center aisle of the chapel to be received as a postulant. Kneeling before the priest, she renounced all earthly pleasures and then was led into the convent, where her shoulder-length hair was shorn to her scalp and she exchanged her luxurious clothing for the brown tunic, white cloak, scapular, and sandals of the Carmelite novice.
The Little Way
Confined within the convent’s walls, Thérèse felt her ambition to serve her God intensify with each passing day. Simply being a nun, she felt, was not enough. “To be Thy spouse, O my Jesus, to be a daughter of Carmel and by my union with Thee to be the mother of souls, should not all this content me?” Thérèse pondered. Yet she was not content. She yearned for more, to be a “priest, an apostle, a martyr, a doctor of the church. . . . Martyrdom was the dream of my youth and the dream has only grown more vivid in Carmel’s narrow cell.”6
Finally, after much contemplation, Thérèse understood a way in which she could fulfill her desire to serve the Lord. Her service would not, as she had once imagined, be realized through dramatic acts as a martyr or even through ecstatic visions, as was the case for Teresa of Ávila and other mystics. Instead, Thérèse vowed to serve God through the smallest, seemingly most insignificant acts of love. While reading Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Thérèse found her answer in what she called the petite voie, or the “little way.”
“I realized that love includes every vocation, that love is all things. . . . Beside myself with joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love, my vocation is found at last—my vocation is love!”7 Thérèse later wrote to her sister Céline that she aimed to strip herself of self, to descend lower toward humility, rather than aspire to greater and greater heights. Thérèse’s little way was a means to live out her devotion and service to God in the people and circumstances of everyday life. “In my Little Way,” she said, “there is nothing but very ordinary things; little souls must be able to do everything that I do.”8 As biographer Vita Sackville-West noted, Thérèse aimed “not to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things extraordinarily well.”9
Thérèse approached her daily tasks at the convent as a tangible way to illustrate her love for God and others. Even the smallest duty, from maintaining the altar as a sacristan to serving in the laundry room, became an opportunity for Thérèse to demonstrate her devotion to God.
She also aspired to love her fellow nuns as deeply and purely as she could—even those with the most difficult personalities. In fact, Thérèse often requested to minister particularly to the most grouchy and quarrelsome nuns at Lisieux. She noted that one of her most taxing trials during her time at the convent was presented in the form of a fidgety nun, who continuously clanked her rosary beads during contemplative prayer, distracting Thérèse so that she literally sweated in annoyance and frustration beneath her habit. Over time and with conscientious discipline, Thérèse trained herself to listen attentively to the irritating noise, transforming the cacophony into a concert of prayer for Jesus.
Thérèse’s little way sounds ordinary and routine, but every step of it was steeped in love. Ironically, her little way was simple and direct, but it required the utmost fortitude and commitment day in and day out.
Fulfilling the Vocation of Love
When Thérèse succumbed to tuberculosis in September of 1897, she died in obscurity, known by few beyond the walls of the convent. She would have remained that way, undoubtedly forgotten among the many thousands of nuns who had gone before and come after her, had her prioress not released Thérèse’s autobiographical manuscript just days after her death. The book was first read in convents, but it spread across the countryside, and soon the Carmelite convent at Lisieux was inundated with book orders from around France and beyond. Stories of miraculous cures of those in possession of Thérèse’s The Story of a Soul began to surface, until finally her fame rose to the attention of Rome itself.
Thérèse was canonized on May 17, 1925, by Pope Pius XI, only twenty-eight years after her death. Just three years later, a young Albanian nun named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu would take the name Teresa in honor of Thérèse of Lisieux. Today we know that nun as Mother Teresa.
The whole of Mother Teresa’s life and labor bore witness to the value of small acts done faithfully and with love, just as her predecessor and role model had done before her. Likewise, we too can look to Thérèse of Lisieux as a guide on our own faith journeys. Her simple, direct way of seeking and serving God is not complicated or unique. It’s not limited to a chosen few. It doesn’t require a particular set of skills or a certain education. Rather, Thérèse’s little way of serving God in our ordinary, everyday lives is a practice open to each one of us. We simply need to take the first step toward fulfilling this vocation of love.10