One hundred years down the Little Way

St. Thérèse of Lisieux infused the Christian life with holy simplicity and sincerity, just as cynical modernity threatened to overwhelm it

By Mike Aquilina

Her "Little Way" — both directly, through its adherents, and indirectly, through its influence — has shown itself grand enough to accommodate millions of modern souls.

Now that Pope John Paul II has declared Thérèse a Doctor of the Church, surely millions more will follow. (At World Youth Day in Paris, the Pope said he would confer the title formally on Oct. 19, World Mission Sunday, at the Vatican.)

Who was Thérèse, that she should become the quintessential "modern saint"? She’s often described by what she was not. She was not extraordinarily intelligent. She wasn’t especially sweet-tempered. She received nothing much in the way of extraordinary mystical gifts — no visions, voices or visitations.

In her earthly days, she worked no miracles. She practiced nothing but the modest fasts and mortifications that were customary in her state of life.

Thérèse lived a short life — 24 years — and nine years of that life were passed in the obscurity of a Carmelite cloister. She prayed; and she labored, like all of us, at laundry and housework and other mundane tasks. When she died in 1897 of tuberculosis, she left behind little more than a small bundle of notebooks.

It’s not much of a résumé. Judging only by productivity, one might be tempted to agree with one nun who lived with Thérèse and who summed her up as "good for nothing." Thérèse, too, might agree. Her way to holiness was a way so hidden, so modest — so little — that hardly anyone noticed.

Just as the Western World boasted its "coming of age" — with its great strides in science, technology and industry — Thérèse chose to heed Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel: "Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven" (18:2). She strove to become ever more childlike in her love of God.

In a sense, this made her most unmodern. The modern voice, unlike the child’s, grows ever more biting in its irony and cynicism. Thérèse startles readers with her simplicity, sincerity and love.

Her Little Way might be summed up by three qualities: the life of spiritual childhood, an emphasis on the ordinary circumstances of everyday life, and the primacy of love.

These ran somewhat counter to the spiritual currents of her day. In fact, Thérèse seems to have sketched out her Little Way at least partly in response to her sister Celine, also a Carmelite, who was bent on working out her salvation in a Big Way: heroic mortification, intense study and work, work, work.

Thérèse wrote: "We are living now in an age of inventions, and we no longer have to take the trouble of climbing stairs, for in the homes of the rich, an elevator has replaced these very successfully. I wanted to find an elevator which would raise me to Jesus, for I am too small to climb the rough stairway to perfection."

Spirituality as technology: how very modern. Indeed, cultural critic Barry Ulanov has called Thérèse the modern saint, adding that she is, like James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, "central to our epoch, definitive of it, endlessly exemplary of it." Much contemporary scholarship on Thérèse seeks to identify, specifically, in what ways she was modern.

Theologian William Thompson sketches out several ways in his essay in the book "Experiencing St. Thérèse Today" (Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1990).

Thompson discerns in Thérèse a particularly modern sense of the dignity of the person. She is a tough critic, he writes, of "ecclesial elitism," a champion of holiness for Christians in every state of life.

Yet he distinguishes this "democratization" from secular individualism, which tends to "slide into narcissism." On the contrary, Thérèse’s personalism gives modern Catholics a way to understand and live their common priesthood in very common, everyday circumstances.

And so we have, ever since her notebooks, compiled as "The Story of a Soul," first rolled off the presses in 1898. By the time of her canonization in 1925, her book had been translated into more than 40 languages, selling many millions of copies, with immediate and lasting effect.

Looking back, we can trace her profound influence on most of the spiritual movements of our century.

Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was at first repulsed by the saccharine piety Catholics professed for "Little Thérèse" — portrayed on Day’s first Catholic prayer book as "a young nun with a sweet insipid face, holding a crucifix and a huge bouquet of roses."

When Day first read "The Story of a Soul," she "found it colorless, monotonous, too small in fact for my notice."

Yet, over time, Day would come to see Thérèse’s insignificance as the saint’s most significant quality. In 1960, Day — who spent her life serving the poor — wrote "Thérèse," a book-length study of the saint. Day wrote, she explained, "to overcome the sense of futility in Catholics, men, women and youths, married and single, who feel hopeless and useless, less than the dust, ineffectual, wasted, powerless." Thérèse, like us, was all these things, yet she "was little less than the angels," Day wrote. "And so are we all."

Day’s contemporary, Catherine Doherty, the founder of Madonna House, taught a deep spirituality of simplicity and service.

"To some people God gives great graces. . . . But you may have a hidden life, a life of small things through which you can come to God in a little way, like the Little Flower St. Thérèse did."

As if in confirmation of Thérèse’s Little Way, the causes for canonization of both Day and Doherty have been introduced in recent years.

Another modern, Blessed Josemaría Escrivá Balaguer, founded Opus Dei in Spain in 1928, just three years after Thérèse was canonized. In his seminal work, "The Way," Escrivá echoes Thérèse’s Little Way in chapters titled "Little Things," "Life of Childhood" and "Spiritual Childhood."

The spirituality of Opus Dei can be viewed as an application of Thérèse’s teaching in the secular realm — "in ordinary work and in the fulfillment of the Christian’s ordinary duties." In one point for meditation, Escrivá seems to hold Thérèse up as a measure for the Christian’s exceeding love for Christ: "Be daring: tell Him you are more carried away with love than . . . little Thérèse."

We could multiply examples of her influence and intercession: she is usually credited, for instance, with the monastic vocation of Thomas Merton and the artistic inspiration of the novelist Georges Bernanos. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar also wrote a book-length study of her.

But Thompson traces Thérèse’s influence, beyond the spiritualities, into the very halls of the Second Vatican Council. Thérèse, he writes, "worked through many of the great issues the Church needed to confront in our modern period already in her own experience. She was, as it were, a Vatican II in miniature. . . .

"At Vatican II, the Church was trying to catch up with Thérèse, and it was able to do so partly, perhaps greatly, through her making assimilable to Catholics the issues that council had to confront: a Church more centered on love, on the person’s dignity, on the Gospels, less elitist in its structure and spiritual teaching."

So Thérèse is the definitive modern. Yet she is as much an antidote to modernity as she is its paragon. Her "littleness" stands in contrast to the commonplace spectacles of a gaudy age.

Our century has detonated the atom bomb and manufactured the handheld TV, conceived babies in test tubes and been dazzled by "Jurassic Park." We’re inured to wonders. And we’re bored. The word "boredom" is itself a modern coinage.

We’re bored because we lack Thérèse’s sense of childlike wonder in the presence of God at work, at home, at play or in church — wherever we happen to be. We graze upon sensual and intellectual thrills, one after another, but cannot sustain a love beyond an initial frisson.

Thérèse, however, could love with perfect constancy and perfect joy. This is not to say that she was Sister M. Polyanna of the Good Ship Lollipop. She wasn’t. Thérèse struggled with faith in distinctively modern ways.

She was haunted, for example, by the fear that maybe the scientific materialists were right, after all, and everything around us and within us might be understood in terms of natural phenomena.

Even her prayer life sounds awfully familiar to little folks like you and me. She once described it as a "habitual state of dryness."

Yet this is precisely what makes her our saint, the modern saint. The great Dominican scholar of spirituality Jordan Aumann writes that, "St. Thérèse of Lisieux has rightly been proposed as a model for the countless ‘little souls’ . . . who to all appearances never receive any extraordinary gifts or grace nor experience the lofty heights of mystical union."

It’s amazing that someone so little could bear so many big titles: model for souls, Co-Patron of the Missions, Co-Patroness of France, the Little Flower — and now the Good Doctor. We might add: the Mother of Modern Spirituality.

Ulanov put it well: "Thérèse, this most modern of saints, has shown us here, now, in this time, the way."

Aquilina is editor of Our Sunday Visitor’s New Covenant, a monthly magazine of Catholic spirituality

Further along the Little Way

The Institute of Carmelite Studies in Washington offers the following books on or by St. Thérèse of Lisieux, available by calling 1-800-832-8489.

K The Story of a Soul: Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, $12

K Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (Vol. I), $17

K Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (Vol. II), $17

K The Prayers of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, $10

K The Poetry of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, $13

K St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Her Last Conversations, $12

K St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Her Life, Times & Teaching, $45

Also of note is "Thérèse and Lisieux," available for $60 from William B. Eerdmans Publishing by calling 1-800-253-7521.

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor, 1997; from the 9-28-97 edition

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