Eating the bread of sorrow: St. Therese of Lisieux

Well, how would we respond if we were told that someone we knew was a great expert on being a friend, or a spouse, or a parent? We might, of course, speak of someone older and or wiser than ourselves as being a great friend, husband, wife, father, mother, and we might ask such a person for advice on how to be a better friend, spouse or parent ourselves, but the language of expertise sounds a bit odd here –too professional, too abstract, too general. That’s not to say, of course, that professional expertise – say, from marriage guidance counsellors, or psychotherapists isn’t valuable, and sometimes necessary when we run into difficulties with the most important relationships in our lives – but good therapists and counsellors, like those people we might turn to for less formal help, don’t simply provide programmes to follow without taking into account who I am, or who my friend, or spouse or child is. They know that one size doesn’t fit all, and that they cannot tell me how to live my marriage, my friendships, my parenthood. What they can do, of course is help me to understand who I am, so that it is the real me that interacts with my friend, or my spouse, or my child. And I think that is what we look for in the saints; hoping that their life stories will illuminate something of our own stories, tell us something about ourselves, so that we can interact more genuinely in the most important relationship of all – our relationship with God.

Another way of saying this, perhaps, is that the saints reveal to us not so much how we should pray, but why we should.  That’s certainly true of the saint we’re going to be looking at today. St Therese of Lisieux speaks very little about “techniques” of prayer, and in fact, if we are looking for an expert “performer” of some of the devotions that are perhaps most dear to many of us, she is not the most obvious candidate, to say the least. She finds it difficult, she tells us, to get through a single rosary without distraction, and frequently falls asleep during Holy Hour. What’s more, most of us don’t have the opportunity to nurture a “prayer life” in the particular way that was open to Therese as a 19^th century enclosed religious sister. The nuns of the Lisieux Carmel got up at 4.45 in summer, 5.45 in winter, retired for the night at 11, prayed the divine office five times every day, went to daily Mass before breakfast, and were expected to spend nearly three hours a day kneeling next to their sisters in silent prayer. They spent the rest of their baking altar breads, embroidering vestments, making their own habits and sandals and cultivating the garden that enabled the convent to be more or less self-sufficient in food, in an almost total silence, including at mealtimes, interrupted only for a highly formalized hour of recreation.    Even if we wanted it, such a timetable just isn’t on offer for many if any of us, so it’s hard to see Therese as a model for our prayer if by this we mean doing exactly what she did. In fact, as we will see later, Therese herself was horrified at the idea that people might look to her to provide them with a formula or a method for prayer. And at first sight, this is disappointing: probably most of us at some time or another have wished that someone would do just that. We know we want to pray but we worry that we have no idea how to go about it and long for someone to tell us.

But in fact, Therese’s refusal to give us a formula or a method is not about leaving us floundering: it’s about giving us freedom to be ourselves in our prayer, as I suggested a good therapist or counsellor gives us freedom to be ourselves in our relationships with others,  In this, she is echoing the handbook she would have used as  novice mistress to help her in guiding the young sisters under her care, which states: “perfection does not depend on the mode of our prayer” as though there is a mode of prayer that “works” for everyone. And when it came to describing how she herself had been led in prayer, Therese writes “I don’t have the courage to search out beautiful prayers in books. There are so many of them it really gives me a headache… I say very simply to God what I wish to tell Him, without composing beautiful sentences, and He always understands me…for simple souls there must be no complicated ways…I am one of their number”. 

Therese as a teacher of prayer, in short, reminds me quite a lot of that song from My Fair Lady – don’t talk of love, show me. Reflecting on the life of Therese will show us, above all her motivation for prayer, show us why her relationship to God matters so much to her, and this can be really helpful, I think, in uncovering our own motivations, our own desire to draw closer to the Lord. This, I think, is the most important way in which she can be for us a guide in our prayer.

So I hope to do a few things this evening. First, and with apologies to any of you – which I suspect may well be many of you – to whom this is all terribly familiar, I’m going to offer a sketch of her life and, to some extent, of her times. This is partly in order to show Therese as a credible witness: she may not talk very much, at any rate in the most obvious way, about how to pray, but her autobiography, written reluctantly under obedience, and the various other writings by and about her that have survived, certainly paint a picture of someone who does pray, a picture that is both inspiring and encouraging.  But it’s also because all of us, including Therese, must live and pray at a particular time and place, in a culture with its own particular opportunities and challenges. There are some surprising contrasts and similarities between Therese’s context and ours, and seeing something of how she responded to her context in prayer might help us reflect on how we might do the same. 

After this, I want to focus on two connected features of Therese’s – for want of a better word – spirituality that are important but, I believe, rather frequently misunderstood and, perhaps sometimes dismissed in consequence as being useless or even damaging.    The first is her attitude to suffering; the second her so-called Little Way, or her little way of spiritual childhood. Finally, I want to say just a few words about how I think Therese encourages us, above all, to be honest in our prayer, to be ourselves as we are, rather than as we fear God wants us to be, and as, perhaps, we fear we never shall be.

So, the life and the times of St Therese.

Therese is among the first saints of whom we have photographs, both as a fashionably dressed, well-to-do provincial French teenager, and, thanks to her sister Celine, in the cloister. If  you visit Lisieux you will be shown Therese’s school exercise books, her home-made toys, the shoes she wore to walk into Carmel, a lock of her hair that was cut off in the clothing ceremony itself.

And if you go to Therese’s birthplace an hour or so away in Alencon, you will see watercolours painted by her sister, and a wooden cross, carved with poignant imprecision by her watchmaker father in the early stages of dementia.   There is an immediacy here that we just don’t have in the case of earlier saints.  However genuine our sense of kinship and affinity them is, we are also insistently reminded of the distance between us and them. With Therese, by contrast, we are in a much more familiar milieu.

Therese Martin is born fourteen years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and six years after Karl Marx completes Das Kapital, and dies – in the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee -  two years before Sigmund Freud publishes his work on the Interpretation of Dreams.  It is an era, then, in which various commonplace presuppositions about human nature and society are being shaken to their very foundations in complex and troubling and sometimes contradictory ways. The immense technological and scientific progress of the 19^th century seems often to enthrone the human at the expense of the divine: Glory to man in the highest, for man [implicitly not God] is the master of things – as English poet Algernon Swinburne puts it in the late 1860s. At the same time,  however developments in the very natural and human sciences that constitute such impressive evidence of  human achievement at this period simultaneously threaten to bereave humanity of its essential dignity: no longer a creature uniquely in the divine image, God’s viceroy over creation, the human being is portrayed in popularisations of the works of Darwin, Freud and Marx, for instance, as the prey of blind, merciless forces, economic, psychological and evolutionary, far from the master of things, unable even to gain self-mastery. Again, to quote another English poet, Matthew Arnold gazing out from Dover Beach across the English channel towards Therese’s France, the world “which seems to lie before us like the land of dreams” is in fact a “darkling plain” supporting “neither joy nor love nor light nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain…swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight/where ignorant armies clash by night” As we will see, this darkling plain looms large in  Therese’s imagination, too, as perhaps it sometimes does in ours. She shows us that true prayer is not an escape from this sometimes terrifying landscape, nor even just a means of surviving in it, but, above all, a way of playing our small part in bringing the love of God into an apparently inhospitable environment.

The intellectual turmoil of the 19^th century is paralleled in Therese’s France by socio-political upheaval. The Franco-Prussian war, which sees nine German soldiers billeted on the Martin family home in Alencon ends just two years before Therese’s birth. The Third French Republic that emerges in its wake swiftly begins enacting increasingly punitive legislation aimed at curbing the influence on French society of the clergy and religious.

Therese, for instance, is enrolled as a pupil in a school administered by Benedictine nuns in Lisieux just months before the giving of religious instruction on school premises is banned. In 1894, Therese’s community is tasked with making the banners the wider Carmelite family will use in the centenary celebrations for their sisters, the Martyrs of Compiegne, who went to the guillotine on the Eve of the Feast of Our Lady of Mt Carmel in July 1794. This is not a matter of remote historical interest for the 19^th century Carmelites of Lisieux: every sister in Therese’s community in 1894 would have had, under her straw mattress a so-called Persecution Case, a small bag containing secular clothes in case it became necessary to flee the convent, as had already happened by this point to the friars in the Dominican house of Studies in Flavigny, Burgundy, and the monks of Solesmes.  If we have any notion, then, of Therese’s milieu being one in which Catholic practice is a matter of bland social conformity, of drab bourgeois respectability in which religious were conventionally put on a pedestal, we probably need to think again.  And, once more, therefore, her example may help us to reflect on how we should live and pray in a world that often seems bewildering hostile to our faith.

So how does Therese herself stand out against this backdrop?

Famously, or notoriously, during her last illness, one of her companions in the Lisieux Carmel wondered what on earth Mother Prioress would find to say about Sr Marie Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face in the obituary customarily circulated to other monasteries of the Order in France on a sister’s demise:

“this little sister, likeable as she is, has certainly done nothing worth the trouble of being recounted”

And, indeed, outwardly striking events in her short life are few and far between.

Born in 1873 in Alencon, in the Calvados departement of Normandy, Therese was the youngest of the nine children of Zelie Guerin, maker of the fine artisan lace that was a local speciality and Louis Martin, jeweller and watchmaker.   Five of the nine survived infancy, all girls, all destined for religious life, all but one in the Lisieux Carmel. Both her parents, canonised by Pope Francis in 2015, had considered religious life before they met – the austere contemplative Carthusians in Louis’ case, while Zelie had been attracted to the life of the daughters of charity of St Vincent de Paul – and, as is well known, they had to be dissuaded by a tactful confessor from living as though celibate religious within the married state. Once reassured on this point, Zelie came to see motherhood in explicitly vocational terms, writing, days before Therese’s own birth, and aware that this was likely her last pregnancy,  that she was “born to have children”.

She was not however destined to see any of her daughters reach adulthood, dying of breast cancer when Therese was 4. In the last years of her own life, Therese records memories surrounding her mother’s death with poignant immediacy: “all the details of my mother’s illness,” she says, are “still present to my heart”; she recalls being sent with her next eldest sister Celine as a “poor little exile” to a neighbour to spare the little girls the sight of their mother’s suffering, and being disconcerted by the difference in routine between the two households; she remembers one of the older girls being given a beautiful apricot which she refuses to eat because she wants to save it for her mother:  maman, however, is by this point “too ill to eat the fruits of this world” any longer; she sees the place where she knelt at her mother’s deathbed as Zelie received the Sacrament of the Sick and hears her father, the great dignified King of France and Navarre as she nicknamed him, sobbing helplessly.

It is surely hard to overstate the traumatic effect of all of this in itself on such a young child, but, as many biographers and commentators have pointed out, this maternal bereavement was repeated for Therese, not once but twice. The first occasion was just five years later when her second oldest sister, Pauline, whom she had adopted as a surrogate mother on the day of Zelie’s funeral, left the family home, by now relocated to Lisieux so that the widowed Louis would be able to draw on the support of Zelie’s relatives in the upbringing of his daughters, to become a novice in the local Carmelite monastery.  Devastatingly, Therese became aware of Pauline’s plans by chance, overhearing a conversation between her two oldest sisters about their vocation discernment, and she describes the anguish this causes her quite directly: “I didn’t exactly know what Carmel was, but I realised that Pauline was leaving me; Pauline was going into a convent without waiting for me” – she had previously humoured Therese’s ambitions to become an anchoress by promising her that they would set up a joint hermitage when Therese was big enough – I was going to lose my mother all over again. Life, when you saw it as it really was, just meant continual suffering, continual separation”.

Therese is adamant that her own attraction to Carmelite life which begins around this point, was never a mere copy-cat phase: not the dream of a child led astray, as she puts it, but the certitude of a divine call. She wanted to enter Carmel for Jesus, she insists, not for Pauline, and there is no reason to doubt Therese’s sincerity or indeed her retrospective self-knowledge on this point. But it is striking that her call to Carmel is thus founded in what must have been fairly intense suffering,  suffering indeed which seems to have been literally too much for her to bear. It appears that it was Pauline’s departure for the monastery that precipitates the mysterious sickness that baffled doctors and left the family in despair as Therese lay immobile and prey to terrifying hallucinations, and from which she recovered only when she sees Our Lady smile at her. The precise nature of this experience has been much debated, and Therese herself was deeply troubled by well-meaning enquiries into it, not least by the nuns she met in parlour visits to see Pauline, now Sr Marie Agnes of Jesus. Their well-meaning curiosity, or, as Simon Tugwell, OP, somewhat more acerbically puts it “silly prying” precipitated an agony of scruples on Therese’s part as to whether she had lied or exaggerated in describing what had happened. This perhaps part of what she was in mind when, in the course her sister’s canonization process, Mere Agnes writes “elle detestait les petites devotions des bonnes femmes”.  In any case, Therese’s equilibrium was further jolted when, at the age of 13, she had to say goodbye to a second sister bound for Carmel, Marie, her oldest sister, the substitute for her substitute mother Pauline, who had prepared her for her First Holy Communion. Therese sees herself at this point in her life as paralysed by excessive sensitivity, craving praise and affirmation from Celine, and disproportionately devastated if she caused the least upset to those she loved, even inadvertently.  Quite directly she connects this desperate insecurity with the original wound to her psyche caused by the loss of her mother. When, on Christmas Night 1886, she receives grace to put away this particular childish thing, so that, rather than weeping dramatically over her father’s impatience with the ceremony of unwrapping presents after Midnight Mass, she dries her tears and acts as though nothing had happened, she remarks “Baby Therese had recovered the strength of mind which she’d lost at 4 and a half, [ie, at Zelie’s death] and recovered it for good”.

Therese regards this apparently trivial incident as the pivotal point in her vocation. She had, as we have seen, already been attracted to Carmelite life for several years by this point but had anxiously wondered how she would ever be sufficiently free of her disabling anxiety and neediness to embrace such a psychologically demanding life, in itself an impressively mature question. But it is also around this time that one of the most important dimensions of this vocation is made clear to her, and that is how central the prayer of intercession is to be to her life in Carmel.

At this point, all of France was being rocked by a sensational murder trial, in which one Henri Pranzini was charged with the brutal killing of a high class prostitute in Paris, along with her maidservant and a twelve year old girl, possibly the servant’s daughter.  He was duly found guilty and sentenced to death. Therese prayed ardently for Pranzini’s conversion, and he repented at the 11^th hour as he mounted the steps of the guillotine. Therese regards this as confirmation of her vocation, and  begins in earnest her concerted campaign to enter Carmel at 14, even taking her cause to Rome and eyeballing the aged Leo XIII with her request at a general audience until she is hauled away by a Swiss Guard. The rest of the story is, indeed, briefly told. The Pope gives a somewhat non-committal answer, but, after more lobbying back home in Normandy,  she does enter Carmel, following her two oldest sisters and eventually to be joined by Celine also; she experiences the loss of her father, after his distressing years of increasing mental incapacity, her pain doubtless multiplied by gossip to the effect that it is the loss of his daughters to the monastery that has brought about his humiliating sufferings; she lives the life of an enclosed contemplative, acting as novice mistress; negotiating community politics, writing, under obedience, the story of her soul and finally dying of TB in at the age of 24, after an agonising year and a half of suffering, physical and spiritual.  Her last words are said to have been, “My God, I love you”.

One of the inescapable questions about Therese – especially given the circumstances at the end of her life – is her attitude to suffering. It is also among the most apparently problematic – and genuinely complex. Initial exposure to some of her writings does suggest – indeed more than suggest, sometimes she explicitly states this – an attraction to suffering, a seeing of suffering as in some sense desirable and beautiful. Here, for instance, she is, as a Carmelite postulant, writing to Celine from the monastery whilst her older sister is still living at home, acting as principle care-giver to their increasingly incapacitated father, and waiting to be able fully to respond to her own sense of vocation to Carmel. Therese is just about to receive the habit, and she had hoped that Louis would be there to give her his blessing, but now it seems he will be too frail to attend the ceremony:

“It is true that Jesus had already enriched me with many jewels, but no doubt there was one of incomparable beauty still missing, the priceless diamond he has given me today. Papa will not be here tomorrow! Celine, I confess that I have cried bitterly…I am still crying so that I can hardly hold my pen.

You know how intensely I longed to see our dearest Father again, but now I feel that is God’s will that he should not be at my feast”.

Therese’s interpretation of the divine will here is not, it has to be said, especially original, and perhaps not to all of us utterly convincing.  Fundamentally, she takes the acute disappointment as an occasion for a hard lesson in the virtue of detachment from earthly objects of affection for the sake of single-minded attachment to the heavenly bridegroom to whom she is about to be espoused. So a rather perverse glamorisation of suffering is overlaid with a thin veneer of conventional and, to say the least, not universally attractive piety.. And, indeed, given the earlier chapters in her biography, it is tempting to read this as simply pathological: surely this must stem from unresolved, complicated grief.   How could God possibly want, as Therese goes on to say that she senses he does, this motherless teenager to feel comprehensively orphaned, bereft of father as well as mother, on this of all days?  If this was all that was to be said about Therese’s take on suffering, I think it’s fairly obvious that she should not be regarded as a trustworthy guide for prayer or perhaps for anything else.  We might – we should – pity her, but not strive to emulate her. But I think there is more to be said.

In the first place, Therese is, precisely here at the outset of her religious life, and that her response to suffering will mature over the course of her 9 years in Carmel: simply because her life was so short it is quite easy, I think, to underestimate how much Therese’s thought developed.   This does not constitute her last word on suffering. She herself speaks, highly significantly, of a progress from the love of suffering with which she enters Carmel to a love of God’s will in the months before her death.   And, in fact, that progress began very quickly after her entering the monastery. In an environment where many of the sisters practiced quite extreme forms of physical penance, Therese tries to conform by wearing a spiked iron chain under her habit, but soon gives up, telling the readers of her autobiography quite simply “it was not for me”.

That said, Therese does have something to teach us about suffering, I think which is still challenging as well as consoling.

For the last 18 months of her life, whilst struggling with both the symptoms of her incurable illness and well meaning attempts to mitigate her suffering on the part of both convent infirmarian and medical professionals which on the contrary frequently exacerbated it, Therese also succumbed – though, as we shall see, that is perhaps not quite, or only partially, the right word to use – to profound desolation. In her own words, God “permitted my soul to be swamped by the thickest darkness, so that the thought of heaven which had been so sweet to me became nothing but a subject of battle and torment. This trial was not just to last for a few days, a few weeks, it was to last until the time appointed by the good God. That time has not yet come”. She goes on, highly significantly:

When I want to rest my heart fatigued by the darkness which surrounds it by the memory of the luminous country after which I aspire, my torment redoubles; it seems to me that the darkness, borrowing the voice of sinners, says mockingly to me “You are dreaming about the light, about a fatherland embalmed in the sweetest perfumes; you are dreaming about the eternal possession of the Creator of all these marvels; you believe that one day you will walk out of this fog which surrounds you! Advance, advance, rejoice in death which will give you not what you hope for, but a night still more profound, the night of nothingness”.

It is of course well known that the notion of darkness as a place of encounter with God is a theme particularly at home in a Carmelite habitat, perhaps above all associated with the saint we shall be spending time with next week, St John of the Cross.   But  to issue something of a spoiler alert, it seems possible to discern something in Therese’s attitude to her experience,  which is certainly complementary with, rather than contradictory of, John’s talk of the dark night of sense and spirit. It is not so much a matter of purification and penance, as of self-identification  with the “sinners” and “materialists” whose denial of heaven she has always previously regarded as being, ultimately, in bad faith, a dramatic and insincere pose: “I thought”, she said, of those who loudly declared themselves to be “free-thinking” atheists “they spoke contrary to their real thoughts in denying heaven”.

Now, however, she has come, not merely to accept their position as one of integrity, however detestable. What she is confronted with here is not something to bring apologetic evidence against, or even to deploy the resources of prayer against, de haut en bas, but, rather, as something she knows from within without any sense of superiority.  And, strikingly – this is why there is a certain imprecision in speaking of Therese succumbing to the darkness – this is, precisely, a willed answer to prayer:

'Lord, your child has understood your divine light; she asks pardon for her brothers, she consents to eat, for as long as you wish it, the bread of sorrow, and she will not rise from this table, which is filled with bitterness, where poor sinners eat, until the day you have appointed. Father, can she not say in their name, in the name of her brothers, have pity on us Lord, for we are poor sinners?'

It is finally this plunge into the terrifying darkness in which she finds the conclusions of nihilistic “materialism” so alienatingly plausible, in the context of agonising physical suffering that, I think, rescues Therese from the charge of glamourising suffering.  And Therese’s vision of table fellowship shared between the Carmelite nun and those who would have self-identified as enemies of the Catholic Church and all that Church’s obscurantist, anti-enlightenment, counter-Revolutionary works in the brave new world of Third Republic France, is a confirmation of this. It is also, I think, a challenge to us. Do we want to sit down at table with the descendants of those “materialists” of Therese’s day and call out, in the name of our brothers and sisters, have pity on us, Lord, for we are sinners?

But for now, I should like to say a little about another prominent feature of Therese’s image, which I think is in fact quite closely connected with this one: the status of her so-called little way. It is probably worth saying at the outset we need to be aware that something has  probably been lost in translation here: people who know French better than me tell me that “petite” does not have the connotations of trivial sentimentality that can cling to its English equivalent, and, indeed, that, especially in Normandy, it is common to this day to hear labourers on building sites addressing each other as “petit ami”, which is doubtless a culture shock to many of us.

One way into thinking of the relationship between Therese’s teaching on suffering and on the Little Way is via the notion of victimhood and sacrifice, but here too we need to tread carefully. The phrase “victim soul” was, and was to remain, rather a common one in late 19^th and early 20^th century French spirituality. But , there is a profoundly significant difference of emphasis, to which Therese alludes explicitly, between her understanding of the concept and that of many of her contemporaries.

 In 1895, Therese would have heard read in the convent refectory, the obituary of a Carmelite from the Loire valley, whose superior had apparently no difficulty in finding things to say about her, and who offered herself as a victim to divine justice not just once, according to her prioress, but “very often”. Thus, the circular letter informs us, Sr Anne-Marie de Lucon deprived herself of fruit for a year to obtain the conversion of a family member, and refrained from eating butter “although she liked it very much…for the rest of her life” in order to “convert a poor sinner who had been recommended to her”.  But, above all, what is presented for the edification of her fellow Carmelites is her behaviour on her deathbed. This is depicted with unflinching honesty, but it seems that the effect of this on at least one of her sisters in Normandy was, from the perspective of the author, somewhat counterproductive. Sr Anne-Marie, we are told cried out repeatedly: “I bear the rigours of divine justice, divine justice, divine justice…O Jesus, come, come quickly, I can no longer…I accept the inner torment…the uncertainty…” and then, most tellingly, “I do not have enough merit; I must acquire it”.

Days after the letter from the Loire arrived in Lisieux, on the feast of the Holy Trinity, 1895, Therese reports:
I was thinking about the souls who offer themselves as victims to God’s justice in order to turn away the punishment reserved to sinners, drawing them upon themselves. This offering seemed great and very generous to me, but I was far from feeling attracted to making it. From the depths of my heart, I cried out “Oh my God” Will your justice alone find souls willing to immolate themselves as victims? Does not your merciful love need them too? On every side this love is unknown, rejected, those hearts upon whom you would lavish it turn to creatures…instead of throwing themselves into your arms and accepting your infinite love. It seems to me that if you were to find souls offering themselves as victims of holocaust to your love, you would be happy not to hold back the waves of infinite tenderness within you”.

Therese’s self-offering, then, is not to be a substitutionary one, but, so to speak, an instrumental one. She does not seek to take the place of a sinner confronted by God’s wrath –“generous” as she claims to find the instincts of a Sr Anne-Marie in this regard; some of us might find other words: pathologically presumptuous perhaps. Rather, she wishes to be a kind of living pipeline between the God who urgently desires to pour out his love, and the thirsty world of sin and suffering that equally urgently needs to receive it and in which she is herself utterly implicated, aware that she cannot, any more than those for whom she intercedes, generate this saving love autonomously.

As fully conscious as the dying Sr Anne-Marie of her insufficient merit, then, for Therese this is not a cause for despair but for rejoicing since it means that she must rely on the only truly reliable thing there is, which is, simply and precisely, the love of God.  “In the evening of my life” she states, in the written record of her private prayer of oblation to divine love, “I will appear before God with empty hands”. Therese shared this prayer, incidentally, with one of her blood-sisters in the community, and is appalled when her sister suggests that it should become part of the public devotions of the monastery : once again, she is not setting out to tell people how to pray.

There are numerous variations on this theme in Therese’s writing, throughout her life, but one of the most striking, not least because I suspect it may be, in misquoted form, the origin of a highly ironic distortion of the doctrine of the little way comes, again, from one of her early letters from the Carmel to Celine.

“My dearest Sister, she writes, do not let your weakness make you unhappy. When we feel no courage or strength for the practice of virtue, it is really a grace: it is time to lay the axe to the root of the tree relying on Jesus alone. If we fall, an act of love will set all right, and Jesus smiles.

And then: "you know well that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them.” 

It is this last sentence, I think, that is often mentally amended to suggest that what Therese commends as the raw material of sanctity is doing “little things” perfectly, but, so far as I am aware, she never says this and I think it is in fact a rather serious misinterpretation of her doctrine to make it central to her message. She is adamant that little things matter, and that we should do all in our power, therefore, to do them as well as possible. Her novices, for example,  are allowed to be under no illusions about the importance Therese attaches to the tiniest details of the Rule, and they are also kept constantly on the alert for the sometimes counter-intuitive demands of daily charity, by her example as much as by her words. Thus, for instance, one December evening when the community are sitting together at recreation, Therese deliberately holds back when the layman employed as gardener brings the Christmas tree to the door of the enclosure asking for help to fetch it inside. The sister who gets up in her place is not only given a relatively rare and refreshing opportunity for informal interaction with the world outside the cloister, but also built up by the opportunity to serve the community in a way that would not have happened had Therese leapt to her feet at once. Small gestures like this one are indeed the currency of the treasure in heaven Therese aspired to for herself and her novices. But this does not mean that it is their impeccable performance that earns us something which would be denied us if our achievement was more slapdash, any more than more obviously impressive acts of virtue buy our way into salvation. Therese is not preaching a gospel of mediocrity in which virtuous but trivial actions are evaluated according to the minute perfection with which they are accomplished. That would scarcely be an improvement on the gospel of  spiritual elitism according to which only those capable of heroic strength need apply for heaven.

Rather, as Therese stresses again and again, it is Christ who brings us to heaven, regardless of what is, or is not, on our spiritual CVs, as is for her proved conclusively by the case of her “first child”, the murderer Pranzini.: if he reminds us of any of the inhabitants of heaven, it is surely Dismas, the penitent thief to whom the Lord promised that he would be with him today in paradise.  That is why Therese is adamant that a lift is a better metaphor for the Christian life than a staircase, since it is less a matter of our climbing upwards in our own strength than of allowing ourselves – which may well be more costly to our pride and amour-propre – to be carried; why she insists that despite the perfection of his humanity Jesus has two great defects – he is short-sighted when it comes to noticing flaws in our character and he can’t do maths, thus being incapable of computing the tally of our sins and rewarding or punishing us accordingly. 

The kind of fussiness in other words, which has sometimes been associated with the Little Way, perhaps especially in the context of women’s religious life, is in fact the polar opposite of Therese’s emphasis. To be briefly autobiographical, my own process of vocation discernment began with an attraction to both the Carmelite and the Dominican charisms, and I accordingly spent time enjoying the hospitality of both Orders as an enquirer. I soon noticed that, whereas on the whole Dominicans seemed pleased if I expressed admiration of St Catherine of Siena or St Thomas Aquinas, Carmelites, especially older Carmelites, were a good deal more ambivalent if I mentioned that I had something of a devotion to St Therese. Eventually, an elderly sister told me of the way in which “the Little Flower” had been used, metaphorically, as a stick to beat her with in the novitiate, since her slightly dyspraxic failure to tidy up the convent sewing room immaculately had been interpreted as a deficiency in holiness, on, precisely, the grounds that sanctity consists in doing little things perfectly. Not only is there irony in this when we recall the catty remarks made by older sisters in the Lisieux Carmel about Therese’s own shortcomings when it came to housework: you can see this cloister has been swept by a child. More profoundly, it makes nonsense of Therese’s own stated position in her oblation to divine love: “I feel my helplessness, and I ask you, God, to be my holiness”. This in turn of course absolves her from the pride of which she was accused by her confessor when, early in her life in Carmel, she spoke of her ambition to be a great saint.

There’s one final thing that I think Therese shows us about prayer, and the nature of the holiness to which it leads.  Therese was called, by Pius XI, the Pope who canonized her, the greatest saint of modern times, and she is certainly among the most popular. But not everyone is convinced, and for many who do not find her attractive, part of the problem, I think, is her somewhat twee and saccharine reputation. I’ve already mentioned how the language of “littleness” doesn’t necessarily translate that well from 19^th century French into 21^st century English, and some doubtless do find her – sometimes literally – flowery prose off-putting in general. But in fact, one of the aspects of Therese’s personality that is most striking is how little patience she has with anything that does not face up to the sometimes harsh and frightening realities of life – and death:  her vehement opposition to sugar-coated piety. When during the last months of her life, one of her sisters, in a well-meaning attempt to offer consolation to a dying woman, told her that at the moment of her death she would be bound to see angels coming to meet her resplendent with light and beauty, Therese’s response is robust: “these images do me no good. I can nourish myself on nothing but the truth. That is why I’ve never wanted any visions”. Around the same time, when asked to say a few edifying words to the doctor who was attending her, Therese responded “that is not my little way. Let Dr de Corniere think what he wants. I love only simplicity. I have a horror of pretence”.

Perhaps most strikingly of all, in her final illness, Therese, reflecting on her own experience, advises her superior in future to remove all potentially poisonous medicines from the reach of those in severe pain, in order that they might not seek an end to their sufferings by overdosing, and tells her nurse that she is astonished that more incurably sick atheists do not take their own lives. But she is not merely talking about other people here.  She can empathize, because she too has found herself in the same place: on at least one occasion she had asked to have all dangerous drugs removed from her own bedside table lest she find her pain impossible to bear and take matters into her own hands.

All of this is significant, not only because it suggests that we can turn to Therese in confidence as a sympathetic intercessor , a fellow sufferer who understands, when we, or those we love, are suffering; important though that is. It is also an encouragement to honesty in our own dealings with God, in prayer. There is nothing we cannot share with the God who has seen the greatest saint of modern times so fragile, so burdened, so close to despair, nothing of our own sadness, weakness, even shame that we cannot talk about, quite simply, with him.  With Therese, we can say:

I feel my helplessness, and I ask you, God, to be my holiness.

And perhaps there couldn’t be a better prayer than that.