Session 16: "The Little Way" — Thérèse and the Theology of Smallness

Session 16 — St. Thérèse of Lisieux

"The Little Way" — Thérèse and the Theology of Smallness

Opening Prayer

LEADER: Let us begin by asking the Holy Spirit to be with us tonight.
ALL: Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love.
LEADER: Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created.
ALL: And you shall renew the face of the earth.
LEADER: O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful,
ALL: Grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever rejoice in His consolation, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
LEADER: Tonight we sit with a young French Carmelite who died at twenty-four and taught the Church that sanctity is not the work of the great but of the small who do small things with great love. Ask her to teach us her Little Way.
ALL: St. Thérèse of Lisieux, pray for us. Amen.

Scripture Assignments

Assign each passage to a woman in the group before beginning.

Passage 1: Matthew 18:1-4
Passage 2: Luke 10:21
Passage 3: 1 Corinthians 1:26-29
Passage 4: Isaiah 66:13

Who Was This Woman?

Marie Françoise Thérèse Martin was born on January 2, 1873, in Alençon, France, the ninth and last child of Louis and Zélie Martin. Louis was a watchmaker. Zélie was a maker of fine Alençon lace, a businesswoman of unusual ability who supported the family with her own work. They are now both canonized saints — the first married couple in the Church's history to be canonized together, recognized as one inseparable witness to married holiness. They are also the parents of St. Thérèse, which is the fact for which the world remembers them.

Four of their nine children died in infancy or early childhood. The five who survived were all daughters, and all five entered religious life. Thérèse was the youngest.

Zélie died of breast cancer in August 1877, when Thérèse was four and a half. The loss tore her open. The bright, affectionate child she had been became withdrawn, hypersensitive, prone to long silences and unaccountable tears. Louis moved the family from Alençon to Lisieux in Normandy, into the household of Zélie's brother and his wife. The older sisters, especially Pauline and then Marie, became surrogate mothers to the youngest. Each time one of them entered Carmel, Thérèse experienced it as a second bereavement.

On Christmas night 1886, when she was nearly fourteen, Thérèse experienced what she later called her complete conversion. She had been hypersensitive and easily wounded for years. That night, returning from Midnight Mass, she overheard her father saying something mildly impatient about the childishness of her Christmas customs. The old Thérèse would have wept for an hour. The new Thérèse received the grace, in one instant, to put aside the wound and to go down the stairs cheerfully. She called it her grace of Christmas. It was the threshold. She knew, from that night forward, that she was being called to Carmel.

She wanted to enter Carmel at fifteen. She was told she was too young. She petitioned the bishop. She petitioned the Pope himself — on a pilgrimage to Rome in November 1887, she broke protocol at a papal audience and asked Leo XIII directly. He told her she would enter if it was the will of God. She entered Carmel of Lisieux on April 9, 1888, at fifteen years and three months old.

She lived in Carmel for nine years and five months. Her life there was, by every external measure, uneventful. She did not have visions on the scale of St. Teresa of Ávila. She did not write theological treatises. She did not found anything. She prayed the Divine Office, swept the cloister, worked in the sacristy, served as assistant to the novice mistress, and lived under a prioress (her own sister Pauline, in religion Mother Agnes of Jesus, who served two terms as prioress during Thérèse's years) and a community that was, by ordinary measures, a community of ordinary nuns with the ordinary frictions of cloistered life.

In June 1895, two and a half years before her death, she offered herself as a victim of merciful love — a self-offering to the Lord to be a vessel for His mercy poured out on souls. It is one of the great prayers in the Catholic mystical tradition.

In April 1896, on Holy Thursday night, she coughed up blood for the first time. It was tuberculosis. She knew immediately what it was, and she greeted it as a herald that the Bridegroom was coming. Then she entered the strangest and most important season of her life. From that Easter forward until her death eighteen months later, she experienced what she called her night of faith — a complete withdrawal of the consoling sense of heaven, the lived sweetness of belief, the felt presence of God. She continued to believe. She continued to love. She continued to write. But she did all of it in a darkness in which faith felt like nothing.

She wrote her autobiography, Histoire d'une Âme (Story of a Soul), in three sections, all under obedience to her superiors. She died on September 30, 1897, at twenty-four years old. Her last words, gazing at the crucifix in her hand, were: Mon Dieu, je vous aime! — My God, I love You.

The book was published a year after her death. It went around the world. By the 1920s she was the most famous Catholic saint of the modern age. She was canonized in 1925, declared the greatest saint of modern times by Pope Pius XI, and in 1997 — her centenary — Pope St. John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church, only the third woman so named, after St. Teresa of Ávila and St. Catherine of Siena.

The doctrine she contributed to the Church — the reason she is a Doctor — is what she called la petite voie, the Little Way. That is what we are sitting with tonight.

Teaching Block 1 — Become Small

The Little Way begins with a verse Thérèse read over and over until it became the architecture of her soul:

In that hour, the disciples drew near to Jesus, saying, "Whom do you consider to be greater in the kingdom of heaven?" And Jesus, calling to himself a little child, placed him in their midst. And he said: "Amen I say to you, unless you change and become like little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever will have humbled himself like this little child, such a one is greater in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:1-4 — CPDV

The disciples ask Jesus the wrong question. Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? They want a ranking. They want to know where they place. Jesus answers by reaching for a child, standing the child in the middle of the circle, and saying: unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven at all. Not become like children and be ranked high. Not become like children and be considered humble. Not in at all.

Thérèse took Him at His word. The condition for entering the kingdom is smallness. Not pretended smallness, not affected humility, but the actual disposition of a small child — who does not earn the love of her father, who does not stand on her own merits, who does not protect her dignity, who runs and is picked up, who asks for everything because she cannot reach it, who is delighted by trifles, who is not embarrassed to need help, who falls and gets up and is forgiven and forgets.

The Catholic tradition has always taught that this disposition is the disposition of grace. It is what Latin theology calls parvulus — the soul as the little one of God. Thérèse heard the verse and understood that this was not metaphor for some other virtue. The verse is the doctrine. Become like children is the doorway to the kingdom, and there is no other doorway.

Jesus says it again, more sharply, in His own prayer to the Father:

In the same hour, he exulted in the Holy Spirit, and he said: "I confess to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the prudent, and have revealed them to little ones. It is so, Father, because this way was pleasing before you.
Luke 10:21 — CPDV

I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and have revealed them to babes. The wisdom of God in Christ is hidden — hidden — from the wise. It is revealed to the little ones. Nēpios in Greek — the infant, the one who cannot yet speak well, the one who has not yet learned. The Father's pleasure is in revealing the highest things to those whom the world considers the lowest. This is not God being arbitrary. This is God revealing how His kingdom actually works. The kingdom is upside-down from the standpoint of human achievement, because human achievement is not the currency of the kingdom. Trust is the currency. The trust of a small one. Yes, Father, for such was Your gracious will.

Thérèse read these verses and felt them describe her exactly. She had no great accomplishments. She was not Joan of Arc, though she loved Joan of Arc and longed in adolescence to be a great warrior saint. She was not a missionary, though she loved the missions and was named patroness of the missions after her death precisely because she had longed so much to be one and could not be. She was a small, sick Carmelite in a small house in Normandy, with no platform and no following and no influence. And she became one of the four greatest Doctors of the modern Church because she figured out that what looked like her disqualification was, in fact, her qualification.

The Little Way is not a technique for becoming small. The Little Way is the discovery that you already are. You are not, as a creature of God, a great one. You are a parvulus. The illusion is the bigness — the imagined competence, the imagined adulthood before God, the imagined ability to manage your own salvation. The Little Way is the dropping of the illusion.

Discussion Question 1: Where in your life are you still trying to be big before God — to manage, to perform, to merit, to handle it yourself? And what would it look like, concretely this week, to drop that and be a small child before Him instead?

Teaching Block 2 — Small Things with Great Love

The second half of the Little Way is what Thérèse did with smallness once she had embraced it. She lived an outwardly ordinary Carmelite life. She did not have great works to offer the Lord. She had small ones — and she gave Him those, every one, with everything she had.

The doctrine here is precise. The Little Way teaches that sanctity is not measured by the size of the act but by the love with which it is done. A small act done with great love is greater, before God, than a great act done with little love. This is not Thérèse's invention. It is what St. Paul says directly:

So take care of your vocation, brothers. For not many are wise according to the flesh, not many are powerful, not many are noble. But God has chosen the foolish of the world, so that he may confound the wise. And God has chosen the weak of the world, so that he may confound the strong. And God has chosen the ignoble and contemptible of the world, those who are nothing, so that he may reduce to nothing those who are something. So then, nothing that is of the flesh should glory in his sight.
1 Corinthians 1:26-29 — CPDV

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. The currency of the kingdom is not greatness as the world measures it. The currency is love, and love can fill the smallest act as completely as the greatest. A glass of cold water given in His name has a weight in heaven that no great deed without love can match.

For Thérèse, this meant that the entire Carmelite day — the sweeping, the silence, the prayers said when she was exhausted, the meals eaten when she was nauseated from tuberculosis, the patience with a sister whose habits annoyed her, the smile given to a nun who did not return it — was the material of sanctity. Not the material leading to sanctity. The material of it. There was no other sanctity she needed to find. The Carmelite kitchen and the Carmelite laundry and the Carmelite refectory were already the school.

She tells one famous story in Story of a Soul. There was an old nun in the community who was difficult — querulous, easily wounded, suspicious. Most of the sisters avoided her. Thérèse decided to treat her as though she were the person in the community she loved most. She helped her to the chapel every evening. She adjusted her wimple when it had gone crooked. She listened to her complaints. She smiled at her when there was nothing to smile about. One day the old nun said to her: what is it that draws you to me? Every time you look at me I see you smile. Thérèse said in her account that what was drawing her was the love of Jesus in this sister — that she was loving the Christ who was hidden in this hard-to-love woman. The old nun never knew. The Little Way was hidden.

This is the texture of Thérèse's sanctity. Not visions. Not miracles. Not great preaching. A thousand tiny acts of love, hidden, daily, given to the Lord as her offering. She wrote that she wanted to be love in the heart of the Church. That was her vocation. She had no other.

The Catholic tradition has always taught that this is in fact the universal path. The dramatic vocations — martyrdom, missionary work, founding religious orders, ruling dioceses — are the vocations of the few. The vocation of small things done with great love is the vocation of all of the baptized. It is the form that sanctity takes in the kitchen, the carpool, the cubicle, the sickbed, the nursing home, the family with the difficult teenager, the marriage that has gone quiet. Small things with great love. Nothing else is required. Nothing else has ever been required.

And the Lord meets the soul in this exactly. Isaiah promises:

In the manner of one whom a mother caresses, so will I console you. And you will be consoled in Jerusalem.
Isaiah 66:13 — CPDV

As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you. This is the God of the Little Way. He is not standing at the top of a mountain waiting to see whether the soul can climb. He is the mother bending down to the child, picking her up, comforting her, walking beside her at the pace of small legs. The smallness is not an obstacle. The smallness is the place where the comfort comes.

Discussion Question 2: Name one small act you have done this week — for your husband, your child, a coworker, a stranger, your own soul before God — that no one saw or thanked you for. Now: do you believe Thérèse when she says that act is the material of your sanctity?

Teaching Block 3 — The Steel of the Little Way

We have come this far without naming what most popular images of St. Thérèse miss entirely, and it must be named now before the session closes. The Little Way is not soft. It is not sentimental. It is not the sanctity of greeting cards and rose petals.

Thérèse had a steel spine. She entered Carmel at fifteen by petitioning a Pope. She lived under prioresses who included her own sister and who, for a stretch, treated her with a coldness intended to test her. She was passed over for jobs in the community she would have done well. She received criticism she did not deserve and kept silence. She experienced, in the last eighteen months of her life, what she called her night of faith — a darkness in which the consolations of belief were taken away from her completely, in which heaven no longer felt real, in which she sat at meals with sisters who believed in heaven and felt nothing. She continued to believe. She continued to love. She continued to write. She did all of it inside a darkness that the world's idea of a sweet little saint cannot survive.

Listen to her own words, written near the end. She is describing the night:

In the days when she was well, she said, her thoughts of heaven had been her joy. Now the thought of heaven, which had been her only consolation since childhood, had become a battleground. Voices in the darkness mocked her — you dream of a country which does not exist; advance, advance, but rejoice in the death which will give you, not what you hope for, but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness. She wrote that she had to be careful what she said in conversation, because she feared that if she spoke at length about her trial she would blaspheme. She forced herself to make acts of faith. She wrote out the Creed in her own blood and kept it on her person.

This is not the saint of pious calendars. This is one of the great spiritual sufferers of the modern Church, who walked through eighteen months of interior darkness while smiling at her sisters, while writing letters of encouragement, while dying of tuberculosis without effective pain relief, and who never stopped believing and never stopped loving for one minute of it.

The Catholic tradition calls this the dark night — a phase of purification in advanced souls in which the felt consolations of faith are stripped away precisely so that the soul learns to love God for Himself and not for the sweetness of feeling Him. St. John of the Cross had written about it three centuries earlier. Thérèse walked it without ever using his name for it. She walked it as a small child walks — by trust, by the rejection of analysis, by the determination to love anyway. She offered her darkness for the conversion of unbelievers, of whom she said she now finally understood, because she now sat at their table.

The Little Way is the way of a child, and a child's love can be fierce. Thérèse's love was fierce. She willed to love in the dark when nothing in her felt love at all. She willed to believe when belief gave her no consolation. She willed to hope when hope had become a battle. The smallness is not weakness. The smallness is the soul's posture before God, while the love behind the smallness can break stone.

This is the Little Way as it actually is. Not soft. Not sweet. Small, and unbreakable. The way of a child who has decided to love her Father even in the dark, and who will not be moved.

Discussion Question 3: If your faith were stripped of every consolation — every felt sense of God's presence, every sweetness in prayer, every emotional confirmation that He is near — and you had to keep loving Him in the dark, do you think you could? What would Thérèse say to you if she sat next to you tonight and you asked her that question?

This Week

This week, choose one person in your life who is hard for you to love — the one who annoys you, the one who has wounded you, the one whose voice you tense up when you hear — and adopt them as the field of your Little Way for these seven days. Without telling them, without expecting thanks, without any feeling necessarily attached, decide to do small acts of love toward them. A kind word. A prayer by name in the morning. Patience when you would normally bristle. A genuine smile.

Thérèse adopted an old, querulous nun. Adopt your own. Love the Christ hidden in her. Do it small. Do it daily. Do not tell anyone, not even the women in this room next week.

Pray as you go:

Jesus, I am little, and I love You. Make me love this person with Your love, because I have none of my own. Amen.

Closing Prayer

Gather prayer requests and close out.