But as St. Paul says, God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Like children, we are invited to let ourselves be visited in our littleness, our poverty, our weaknesses, to receive a new strength: the strength of trust and faith. Thérèse of Lisieux is a saint who received a special grace to establish us firmly in the trusting attitude of small children. Let’s reflect on her experience and wisdom and see how, through the Holy Spirit, we, too, can grow in the way of trust and love.

A Short Life. St. Thérèse of Lisieux was born on January 2, 1873, and spent her childhood at Alençon and then Lisieux, in northern France. We know that her childhood was marked by considerable suffering. She lost her mother to breast cancer at the age of four, and this left a deep wound in her. Her bereavement was made worse by a series of separations from her sisters, leading finally at the age of ten to a serious sickness. (She was cured after seeing a statue of the Virgin Mary smile at her.)

These losses and trials did not prevent Thérèse from developing great faith and deep love for God. Then, on Christmas night 1886 at the age of fourteen, God healed her of the emotional fragility she had suffered for most of her life. That healing gave her the inner strength to enter the Carmelite convent, as she desired, at the age of fifteen. She died there very young, of tuberculosis, in her twenty-fourth year, on September 30, 1897.

A Heavenly Mission. After Thérèse’s death, as was often the custom among Carmelites, her convent published an obituary notice compiled on the basis of her autobiographical recollections. (She had written these down at the request of her superiors.) Entitled The Story of a Soul, the book was, unexpectedly, a massive success, spreading rapidly around the world and touching many people’s hearts. The extraordinary number of favors received by people who invoked her intercession also contributed to her reputation.

For example, during the First World War (1914–1918), before she was canonized, many people, including soldiers, received special protection as a grace after praying to the “Little Flower.” One of my uncles, a missionary among the Inuit in northern Canada, told me the mission was a total failure, and they were on the point of abandoning it, when the bishop responsible for the mission traveled to Lisieux. He returned home with a little soil from St. Thérèse’s grave, which he scattered on the ground. Numerous conversions then began to occur. Thousands of stories like this one could be told; the Carmelite archives are full of them.

Thus, St. Thérèse rapidly became very popular. Statues of her could be found in such diverse locales as New Zealand, Brazil, and the heart of China. She was canonized on May 17, 1925, by Pope Pius XI before five hundred thousand people, and was still more astonishingly proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1997. In the judgment of the Church, she has become a primary reference point for us for understanding and practicing the gospel message today. Pope Francis has even written an apostolic exhortation on the spirituality of St. Thérèse entitled On Confidence in the Merciful Love of God, published in October 2023 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of her birth.

Her style may not please some people, for it was very much in the manner of the nineteenth century, but her writings contain extraordinary forcefulness and truth. Pope John Paul II said Thérèse helps us rediscover the heart of the gospel: the tenderness of God the Father and the path by which we are called to become, in God’s sight, like little children.

Becoming Little Children. In the Gospels, one finds some very blunt words of Jesus: if you are not converted, if you do not change and become like little children again, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 18:3)! Each of us has an absolute need for an inner transformation that makes us as little as a child. What that means and how to put it into practice are exactly what Thérèse teaches in a simple, luminous way. That is why she was proclaimed a Doctor—that is, a teacher—of the Church.

A passage from Thérèse’s autobiography describes her main spiritual insight, which she calls the “little way.” Aware of having a particularly deep perception of this gospel truth, she desired to pass it on to the sisters she was close to in her Carmelite convent, especially the novices whom her superiors had placed in her care. The sharing of this insight remained very limited during her lifetime, but after her death, her teaching spread in an extraordinary way. Shortly before dying, she said something that has become well-known: “I wish to spend my Heaven in doing good on earth.” She is doing that today and will do so for each of us if we ask her to teach us her little way and make us love our loving God as she learned to love him.

A Genuine Path to Holiness. This path of Thérèse’s is given several names in her manuscripts. She often talks about the “little way.” She also talks about the “way of trust and love” or the “way of simple, loving trust.”

So what is this little way? It is the spiritual journey undertaken by Thérèse, a genuine path to holiness. But it’s a path accessible to everyone, so that nobody can get discouraged, not even the littlest, the poorest, or the most sinful. Everyone can discover a path of life, of conversion, open to him or her. In this, Thérèse anticipated the Second Vatican Council, which stated firmly that holiness is not an exceptional path but a call to all Christians, from which nobody can be excluded. Even the weakest and most wretched of men can answer the call to holiness.

She made the discovery in successive stages. Writing to her superior in 1897, the year of her death, she says, “I have always desired to be a saint.” On one occasion, having already entered Carmel, she shocked one of her confessors by telling him, “I want to be as great a saint as Teresa of Ávila!” He felt that this indicated pride and told her to be content with being a good nun.

But Thérèse always wanted to be a saint, not out of ambition or vainglory, but in order to love God as much as he can be loved. That is completely in accordance with the gospel. She also very much wanted to be useful to the Church, and she felt that the only way she could do that was by aiming for holiness with all her strength.

But alas, I have always realized, when I compared myself to the saints, that there is between them and me the same difference as exists between a mountain whose summit is lost in the heavens, and the obscure grain of sand trodden underfoot by passers-by.

An Impossible Goal. Thérèse very soon realized that what she wanted was impossible for her to achieve. Despite all her goodwill and her ardent desires, she was quickly brought face-to-face with her limitations and had the feeling that her desire for holiness was inaccessible, unrealizable. It should be said that in the times in which she lived, people still tended to identify the idea of sainthood with the kind of exceptional perfection that involved heroic enterprises, extraordinary graces, etc. Thérèse felt an insurmountable distance between that model and what she was in her everyday life. Her words should be taken very seriously. She was faced with a real difficulty and unquestionably went through a real inner crisis.

The temptation in that kind of situation is discouragement: I’ll never get there! How did Thérèse react? She continues,

Instead of getting discouraged, I said to myself: “God could not inspire us with desires that were unrealizable, so despite my littleness I can aspire to holiness.”

Here is a very beautiful aspect of Thérèse’s spiritual personality: her great simplicity, her trust in God. If God has put this desire in me—and I’ve had it for years, that’s why I entered Carmel—then it must be realizable. The desire has always been with me. It can’t be an illusion, because God is just in all his ways.

In our next article, we’ll see how Thérèse solved this crisis.

Fr. Jacques Philippe is a renowned retreat master, spiritual director, and a member of the Community of the Beatitudes in France. His books have sold over one million copies and have been translated into twenty-four languages. The articles this month are adapted from his book The Way of Trust and Love: A Retreat Guided by St. Thérèse of Lisieux (Scepter Publishers, 2010).