The French Carmelite nun, St. Therese of Lisieux is known and beloved for her Little Way. Accepting her “smallness” before God was not always easy for her, however. In her autobiography, St. Therese writes (sometimes quite amusingly) about her childhood and what a proud and difficult child she could be. According to Therese, her mother found her to be “terribly obstinate.”
She credits her parents with leading her to sanctity. “With tendencies like these, had I not been brought up by such wonderful parents, I am quite sure I would have gone from bad to wors and probably ended up losing my soul.”
Depending on God
It is hard to picture Therese of Lisieux heading down the road to perdition; however, it is clear that discovering that she could not save herself played a crucial part in her spirituality. She came to depend utterly and completely on her relationship with God. This is very clear when she writes about what prayer means to her:
For me, prayer means launching out from the heart toward God; a cry of grateful love from the crest of joy or the trough of despair; It is a vast supernatural force that opens out my heart and binds me close to Jesus.
Praying with the Little Flower
It is this understanding of her intense need and closeness to God that makes the Little Flower such a wonderful companion for us – especially when we find ourselves losing our way. In such moments, we do not need to “reinvent the wheel.” It can be enough to follow along with St. Therese and imitate her smallness, even to the point of saying of uttering the same words to God that she did.
As St. Therese says in one of her prayers: “You would delight in heaping even more graces upon (a soul even weaker than mine), as long as it abandoned itself confidently to Your infinite mercy.”
View the Photo Gallery below to Speak to God with the Little Flower.
