Today (October 1st) is the Feast Day of St. Therese of Lisieux! I owe so much to her witness, and St. Mother Teresa’s after her. I wrote this in honor of them 🙂

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In such a big world we can easily feel lost.  A big world of ideas – you can be whatever you want to be. A big world of globalization – from corporate industry to personal travel. Even a big virtual world that’s ever expanding. We are blessed to live in an age filled with so many possibilities, but we can also feel overwhelmed by them. God raises up saints in every age who discover a way to live the Gospels amidst the circumstances of their time, and in a way that can be instructive to us all. To guide us through this confusion and find the meaning and purpose we desire, the Lord gave us two great saints of modernity, St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897) and of St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997). They illumine a path to greatness available to each of us:  the Little Way of Love.

The industrial revolution brought with it rapid change to life and society. What had formerly been hand made by craftsmen and women became mechanized and mass produced in factories by technicians.  Agrarian and close-knit communities became overshadowed by the growing masses of the city and the factory. The secret ingredient to any well-made thing from baked goods to business – personal creativity and love, was replaced with the higher priority of standardization and efficiency. In the subjugation of creation to science and steel, the supernatural and the personal went increasingly by the wayside. It inspired grand ambitions while at the same time overrunning others. On the one hand the world of opportunity seemed to grow bigger, and on the other the reach of an individual seemed to grow smaller.

In the face of such tensions, the answer of the saints is to embrace them with the supernatural light of Christ. St. Therese was inspired with great ambitions and wished to have a global impact. Though they were spiritual endeavors, she nevertheless had to grapple with the distance between the grandeur of her hopes and the limits of her personal reach. When she turned to Christ in prayer and Scripture as she wrestled with this, she learned several things that we can all benefit from. 

Many people struggle with choosing which occupation to pursue, and research has shown that young people today become paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake.  St. Therese struggled with a desire to be every kind of saint and serve the Church in every possible role. This caused unrest and discontent, but she did not allow herself to become paralyzed. She actively sought help from the Lord and found her answer in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (chapters 12 & 13). St. Paul noted how in the body of Christ there are many parts, but each is of equal value and ordained by God. The only factor of stratification is love. Contrary to the hedonistic value of status and the modern industrial values of efficiency and output, God judges interiorly by the measure of one’s love in their self-gift. From this, Therese was freed from her anxiety and found her singular purpose, exclaiming “I understood that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES.”[1]  She found the secret that love gives every effort its value; the task itself is secondary. Love is the unifying factor of life rather than a particular career path.

 Having discovered her vocation, her next hurdle lay in how to achieve it. Tempted by discouragement when she noted the difference between herself and the saints she wished to be like, she reasoned “God cannot inspire unrealizable desires. I can, then, in spite of my littleness, aspire to holiness.”[2]  St. Therese’s logic always included the realness of the love and faithfulness of the Lord. She decided that she would “seek out a means of going to heaven by a little way, a way that is very straight, very short, and totally new.”[3]  She looked towards human progress as an analogy for spiritual progress. Here, she focused on the relatively new invention of the elevator: “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 of perfection.”[4]  St. Therese looked again to Scripture “for some sign of this elevator” and found it: “’Whoever is a LITTLE ONE, let him come to me’…The elevator which must raise me to heaven is Your arms, O Jesus!”.[5]  And so, Jesus raised the young, cloistered Carmelite woman from Lisieux to the heights of sainthood and world renown. When Pope St. John Paull II declared her a doctor of the Church in October of 1997, God proved that a person considered small in every worldly measure, could achieve greatness through simple trust in the Lord and obedience to His will. When we feel tempted to over-systematize our life or discern our path through external values, St. Therese reminds us to acknowledge our desires for greatness by returning to their true origin and end: the Person of Christ as loved day by day and moment by moment.

St. Mother Teresa (inspired by St. Therese before her), lived this same spirituality but on the global stage. With the 24-hour news cycle and international media reach, it’s easy today to feel overwhelmed by the misery, poverty, and affliction we see experienced throughout the world. Tempted to despair, we ask ourselves “what can one person do?”.  Certainly, many organized social and political structures have attempted to cure these ails, but no panacea has yet been found. Abiding by the Little Way, Mother Teresa cut to the heart of the matter.  Every day she simply responded to Christ’s call to care for the poorest of the poor in India.  In prayer, He told her “I thirst”, and she tried to alleviate His thirst for love and for souls by attending to Him present in the poor.  Seeing her success, many tried to organize it, structure it, reproduce it, or expand it. Nevertheless, Mother Teresa held firm to the true foundation for her effectualness – love of the Lord and the movement of the Holy Spirit within individual souls. Programs don’t help people; people help people. Programs may be an organizing principle, but it all comes down to individuals responding with generosity and compassion toward other individuals’ needs. Moreover, that response of love resides in the little things towards those right in our own lives and communities. Inspired by Mother Teresa, many asked her how they could help, to which she responded to go home and love their families. This seemed so inconsequential! How could Mother Teresa, a global force against poverty, recommend such a mundane thing? In truth, although we may now have the technological and media infrastructure to view the world, real richness comes through a sacrificial gift of ourselves for those we love. We do live in a global community, but we are also essential and irreplaceable members of our family community.  Our greatest impact is found not in numbers – a metric of industrial efficiency or personal vainglory – but in the quality of our love, which is the very center of our human nature made in the image and likeness of God, Who is Love.  Knowing that the world needed God, not her, she didn’t succumb to secular hopes in a law of progress or the organization of a process. Instead, she placed her hope in God and disregarded the results altogether. Her famous words, “God has not called me to be successful, but to be faithful” has been one of the most liberating lines of wisdom in my life.

Both St. Therese and St. Mother Teresa took the Blessed Virgin Mary as the model of Faith and learned from her discipleship the original Little Way of Love. Consider the Wedding Feast at Cana (John 2:1-12). Jesus’ first miracle happened in response to a request by His mother about a need in his extended family: “They have no wine.” Jesus, of all people, actually did have a huge world-wide and history transforming mission. Yet, from His actions we can see the answer to His question “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”  No need is too small. Jesus always cares about the person not the program. Mary’s trust in the merciful heart of Jesus was poignantly conveyed in her simple order to the servants “Do whatever he tells you.” Often our prayers ask Jesus to execute the plan we give Him. Instead, Mary shows us to simply bring the need to the Lord and do the task that He asks of us, even if we don’t see how it will turn out. We can learn from Mary, who was keenly aware of practical needs and realities within the concrete circumstances of life. As she encountered them, she put them before the Lord unobtrusively and attended to them with simplicity and love. She displayed concern but didn’t fret, she was grounded in trust.

Finaly, in our perfectionistic and increasingly artificial world, the culture’s definition of success and quality of life seems beyond the reach of many people. This despair is further multiplied when comparing oneself to what’s seen on media in our consumer culture. However, much of the competitiveness and comparison is due to the limited resources and status requirements in such a value system.  But the re-valuation of life around love and the beauty of self-gift, offers a new way forward, for it relies on an unlimited resource from which everyone can draw and this affords much more variety. When St. Therese struggled with comparison, she again found her answer in prayer:

“Jesus deigned to teach me this mystery. He set before me the book of nature; I understood how all the flowers He has created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the Lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked with little wild flowers. And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus’ garden. He willed to create great souls comparable to Lilies and roses, but He has created smaller ones and these must be content to be daisies or violets destined to give joy to God’s glances when He looks down at his feet. Perfection consists in doing His will, in being what He wills us to be.”[6]

In consequence, rather than seeing points of difference as a matter of comparison, she realized they could be celebrated since each enhanced the beauty of the other by way of variation to the eye of the Beholder.  

On earth we will experience many setbacks, limitations, and even failures. However, we learn from the Little Way that nothing is lost with God.  As the famous Mother Teresa poem closes: “Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you’ve got anyway. You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God; It was never between you and them anyway.”

I’m particularly thankful for St. Therese and St. Mother Teresa. In the fall of my freshman year of college, Mother Teresa passed away.  I could no longer rest easily knowing there was a Mother Teresa out there saving the world, I knew I now had to get on it and start following in her footsteps more intentionally. That same fall, John Paul II named St. Therese a doctor of the Church and gave me the priceless gift of showing me what to strive for if I wanted greatness.

St. Therese and the Little Way continue to ground us amidst the many challenges of our present time. In a world of exposure, she calls us to draw within. In a culture of self-absorption, she shows us the higher beauty of giving of ourselves. Distracted by ambition, recognition, and external affirmation, she emboldens us to dismiss them all and set our gaze on the only glory that matters and that lasts – the enduring legacy of love.

[1] Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux, third edition, trans. John Clarke, O.C.D., (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 1996), 194.

[2] Ibid, 207.

[3] Ibid, 208.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Story of a Soul, 14.

© 2024 Angela M Jendro

*Scriptural texts, unless otherwise noted, are taken from The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)