Living the Little Way in Ordinary Life, National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica, October 3, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica
Royal Oak Michigan
October 3, 2019

To listen to an audio recording of this talk, please click below: 

The following outline guided tonights talk: 

• Introduction
  • Great to be here.
  • October 3 was the original feast day of St. Therese from 1927-1969. It is still the date for her in the Extraordinary Form. Here at the Shrine it is a plenary indulgence day. And so we continue our celebration of the patron of this parish, the first dedicated to her in the US after her canonization.
  • But to celebrate her well means more than covering a Church with beautiful red roses. It means more than putting up beautiful art work. It means more than even praying to her with confidence. The best way for us to celebrate her feast is to respond to her help to try to emulate her any and every way we can.
  • With many saints, it’s very hard to imitate them in major ways. Few of us can imitate St. Pio of Pietrelcina in receiving the stigmata, in reading souls, in bilocating, in prophesying the future. Or Paul the Hermit or Anthony of the Desert and live past the 100 in caves far from civilization. Or Catherine of Siena, live off the Eucharist, and call popes to conversion.
  • And even though very likely none of us, or few people throughout the centuries, will imitate the one baptized as Therese Martin in terms of becoming cloistered Carmelites at age 15, or in becoming a playwrite, poet, posthumous best-selling author, who has helped more florists sell roses than every other saint in history except Saint Valentine, she is, nevertheless, one of the most imitable of saints who has ever lived. Her little way of confidence and love is the most doable path to holiness that any Doctor of the Church has ever proposed.
  • The best way to honor her, the most fitting means of all to celebrate her feast, is to resolve to follow her on that Little Way.
  • That’s why tonight, as we have the joy of paying tribute to Marge Caram and Jack Salter as 2019 recipients of the prestigious Little Way Award, for the many ways, little and big, in which they have much such a difference in the lives of others, it’s good for all of us to get to know Saint Therese’s Little Way much better, because it’s through living the little way of St. Therese in ordinary life that we will come to an even greater, indeed eternal, celebration in which God honors her, and desires to honor us with her.
• Saint Therese’s discovery of the little way
  • Therese likewise struggled to find the path to holiness in the ways others lived. In a famous image, she saw them to be roses, and herself to be merely a little flower.
  • She wrote in her spiritual autobiography: “Jesus set before me the book of nature. I understand how all the flowers God has created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy. I understand that if all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wild flowers. So it is in the world of souls, Jesus’ garden. He has created smaller ones and those 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.”
  • She wrote in a letter to Fr. Maurice Bellière, her spiritual brother. “My dear little Brother, … there was one thing in your letter than saddened me. It is that you don’t know me as I am in reality. It is true that to find great souls one must come to Carmel. Just as in virgin forests flowers grow that have a fragrance and beauty unknown to the world, so Jesus in His mercy has willed that among these flowers there should grow smaller ones. I can never be grateful enough to Him, for it is thanks to that condescension that I find myself, a poor flower without distinction, on the same level as the roses who are my sisters. O my brother! I beg you to believe me that the good God has given you as your sisters not a great soul, but one who is very little and very imperfect.”
  • She wrote, “I have always noticed, in comparing myself with the saints, the same difference between them and myself as we see between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and an obscure little grain of sand trampled underfoot by passers-by.… It is impossible for me to grow great.… But we live in an age of inventions: today there is no need to go to the trouble of climbing stairs; among rich people, an elevator has replaced the stairs. I also withed to discover an elevator to make me up to Jesus; because I am too little to climb the steep stairway of perfection.”
• This brings us to the first element of her little way: being what God wills
  • Perfection consists, she says, in going God’s will, in being what he wills us to be.
  • Francis de Sales used to advise people, “Soyez vous-mêmes,” be yourself.
  • We’re not called to fit into someone else’s habit or vestments. We’re called to be, and be fully, who God created us to be as the reflection of his image and likeness, knowing that when we do, we give him glory.
  • To use a Biblical image, to some God may give five talents, to others two, to others one. Each is an enormous treasure, 6,000 days wages, close to 17 years worth of work.
  • When St. Therese says that she’s not a great soul, she’s (a) not pretending and (b) doesn’t think it’s a problem. She rejoices in who she is rather than who she isn’t.
  • Her little way is a path of authentic self-acceptance, which goes beyond accepting who you are to wanting to be who you are. It is a way of coming to terms with life not as it might be, but as it is.
  • The little way is, first and foremost, being who God wills us to be. That’s his fundamental will for us. We honor St. Therese by becoming more and more ourselves as God has willed.
• The second element of the way is becoming spiritually childlike.
  • Central to her spirituality was linking two passages about the kingdom of God.
    • The first is Jesus’ reminder, “Unless you convert and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of God.”
    • The second is, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.”
  • Becoming childlike and becoming poor in spirit are basically synonymous. As Therese made spiritual childhood her own, so she made her own Christ’s call to spiritual poverty. She aspired to be nothing more than ‘a poor little child’ who looks to her Father for everything and who obtains everything from Him because of this same poverty. She cultivated this poverty and wants to keep nothing for herself, not even her merits and her good works. She began to see everything as grace, as gift.
  • She wrote, “Sometimes, when I read spiritual treatises in which perfection is shown with a thousand obstacles, surrounded by a crowd of illusions, my poor little mind quickly tires. I close the learned book which is breaking my head and drying up my heart, and I take up Holy Scripture. Then all seems luminous to me; a single word uncovers for my soul infinite horizons; perfection seems simple; I see that it is enough to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself, like a child, into God’s arms. Leaving to great souls, to great minds, the beautiful books I cannot understand, I rejoice to be little because ‘only children, and those who are like them, will be admitted to the heavenly banquet.’”
  • The conversion Jesus wants of us, that St. Therese is praying for us to experience, is to become like little children. This doesn’t mean we need to become childish. The Lord does call us, like Jesus according to his humanity, to “grow in wisdom and understanding” and to “come to full stature in Christ.” Often, however, when we grow up, we lose this sense of childhood. We lose a sense of the Father. We try to live go out our own. The fundamental sin of the Prodigal Son was to treat the Father as if he were dead. For most of us, we know that the Father is not dead. We don’t want to squander his gifts in a life of sin. We often just want to “grow up” and leave home, to do things on our own, to be less dependent on him than we were before and more self-reliant and self-sufficient. Sure, we still love the Father, but less than we used to. We marginalize him. We no longer interact with him, or talk to him, or visit with him. When he offers to do something for us, we can say, “Thanks, Dad, but I’ve got it covered.” To become like little children means to return to our true dependence on the Father and begin to allow him to continue to raise us to become perfected as he himself is perfect.
  • The little way of spiritual childhood for St. Therese retains this sense of childlike dependence. Long before she was able to make explicit the discovery of her “little way,” she considered herself as a child who had an absolute need of being ‘carried’ in God’s own arms in order to make any progress along her path. Her weakness itself ought to incite Jesus to pick her up and carry her.
  • Therese writes, “To remain little before God and to remain little is to recognize one’s nothingness, expect all things from the good God just as a little child expects all things from its father; it is not to be troubled by anything, not to try to be on the lookout for favors. Even among poor people, a child is given all it needs, as long as it is very little, but as soon as it has grown up, the father does not want to support it any longer and says: ‘Work, now you are able to take care of yourself.’ Because I never want to hear these words I do not want to grow up, feeling that I can never earn my living, that is, eternal life in heaven. So I have stayed little, and have no other occupation than of gathering flowers of love and sacrifice and of offering them to the good God to please Him. Again, to stay little means not attributing the virtues we practice to ourselves, under the impression that we are capable of such things, but to recognize that the good God places this treasure of virtue in the hand of His little child for him to use as he needs it; and that it remains God’s treasure.”
  • She wrote in a letter to her Sister Marie, “Let me tell you that my desires for martyrdom are nothing. It is not they that give me the unlimited confidence that I feel in my heart. What pleases God in my little soul is that He sees me loving my littleness and my poverty. It is the blind hope that I have in his mercy. That is my only treasure. Why can it not be yours? … To love Jesus, the more one is weak, without desires and without virtues, the more one is suitable for the operations of God’s consuming and transforming love. It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to love.”
• The third element in her little way is a profound appreciation of God the Father’s goodness, generosity, and merciful love. Church tradition calls it a vivid awareness of our divine filiation.
  • John writes about this in his first letter: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
  • Our whole existence is supposed to be grounded in a loving relationship with God the Father. This is the secret, hidden from the wise and the clever of the world, which was revealed to Therese in all her childlike simplicity.
  • John Paul II wrote in 1997, in a document explaining why he was declaring her a doctor of the Church, that “the most authentic meaning of spiritual childhood” is “the experience of divine filiation, under the movement of the Holy Spirit.”
  • When he visited Lisieux for the first time as Pope in 1980, he said that it was precisely the Holy Spirit that led St. Therese on this “little way” and helped her to walk it with great generosity. Not to be outdone by Pope Pius XI who at her canonization called her “the greatest saint of modern times,” Pope John Paul II in Lisieux said that she is, in fact, “our saint,” a saint for our times, and confessed that that was always the way he looked to her in his own life. He said that grasped the “fundamental mystery,” the “reality of the Gospel,” that we have truly received “a spirit of adoption that makes us cry out ‘Abba, Father!’ The “little way,” he continued, is the way of “holy childhood,” adding that nothing could be more fundamental and universal than the fact that God is our Father and we are his beloved children. “To be a child, to become like a child, means to enter into the heart of the greatest mission to which Christ has called each of us: to recognize one is God’s beloved child and be occupied with the affairs of the Father, just like Jesus was when he was 12 and discovered in the temple.”
  • She was greatly helped in doing this by meditating on Jesus’ sense of divine filiation, being the Father’s beloved Son in whom he was well-pleased, especially as an infant. Relating as a spiritual child to the Child Jesus was one of the characteristic parts of her spirituality. She could never be afraid of a God who became a little baby. Would he want to punish her for all eternity? Would he become enraged with a sense of exacting strict justice? She just couldn’t see it.
  • She once described the experience of the dark night — something that the great spiritual masters have described, many have undergone, and many more worry about —  in simple terms that came from the “sleep” of the Child Jesus. That’s why when she experienced her own sense of abandonment, she never lost trust: “Most people on earth are only willing to serve the King of Glory; if Jesus goes to sleep they stop serving Him or believing in Him. But the Child Jesus loves to go to sleep in safety, without fear of being wakened. Why not serve beside the crib? Since entering Carmel it had become normal for me to find Jesus sleeping.” “As always, Jesus was asleep in my little skiff. Ah! how rarely I find souls prepared to let Him sleep there. Our good Master is so weary through making fresh approaches and advances that He gladly accepts the rest that I offer Him. Doubtless He will not wake up before my great retreat into eternity.”
  • In Therese’s day, this sense of relating to God as a trusting child was rare. The heresy of Jansenism was rampant. It was Catholic Calvinism, relating to God as a cold and distant figure full of laws and rules, how we could never be worthy of any of his graces and therefore should just do our duty and offer ourselves as victims to divine justice so that he doesn’t exact the punishment on us and others that we all deserve. Most people, therefore, lived paralyzed by a fear of God and of his judgment. This fear stifled their ability to live as children of God. This totally affects the whole way they relate to him and how they relate to his mercy. She battles against this in her little way.
  • She has us focus, rather, on God the Father’s loving mercy. Therese would cry out in her spiritual autobiography about how important it was for us to recognize how much God wishes us to accept his merciful love. Like the Sacred Heart: “On every side God’s love is unknown, rejected; those hearts upon whom you lavish [love] turn to creatures seekinghappiness from them with their miserable affection; they do this instead of throwing themselves into your arms and of accepting your infinite love…. Among his own disciples, Jesus finds few hearts who surrender to him without reservation, who understand the real tenderness of his infinite love.”
  • Talking about the mercy of God, she encouraged everyone to follow her lead and grasp God by the “heart.” She said: “Consider a small child who has displeased his mother, by flying into a rage or perhaps disobeying her; if he sulks in a corner and screams in fear of punishment, his mother will certainly not forgive his fault; but if he comes to her with his little arms outstretched, smiling and saying: ‘Kiss me, I won’t do it again,’ surely his mother will immediately press him tenderly to her heart, forgetting all that he has done… Of course she knows quite well that her dear little boy will do it again at the first opportunity, but that does not matter; if he takes her by the heart, he will never be punished.”
  • She drew a conclusion: “I have long believed that the Lord is more tender than a mother. I know that a mother is always ready to forgive trivial, involuntary misbehavior on the part of her child. Children are always giving trouble, falling down, getting themselves dirty, breaking things, but all this does not shake their parents love for them.” Nor do our faults shake God’s love for us.
  • Compared with God’s mercy, our misery is nothing
    • In a poem, Vivre d’Amour, she writes: “To live by love, that’s to banish all fear, all remembrance of past faults. I will no longer take note of my sins because it in instant love burned them all. Divine Flame, o Furnace most sweet. I have taken up my place within you. It’s in your flames that I sing: “I live on love!”
    • In a poem to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she writes: “Oh, I well know that all our justices have no value before your eyes. In order to gain anything from my sacrifices, I want to throw them on your Divine Heart.”
  • She was able to have this child-like confidence in God’s love because she had a deep understanding of the mystery and meaning of the Incarnation. She once wrote that she could not understand how anyone could be afraid of a God who became a child. God became small precisely so that we shouldn’t be intimidated by him, so that we wouldn’t be afraid.
  • The way of spiritual childhood is a way of meeting, learning and imitating the child Jesus, who teaches us in a very concrete way to relate to God.“Jesus condescends to show me,” she wrote, “the only way that leads to this divine furnace (of divine love). It is the surrender of a small child who sleeps without fear in its father’s arms.
  • John Paul II summarized in 1997 that the “disarming simplicity of the ‘little way’” returns us to the “essentials,” and “leads [us] to the secret of all life: the divine Love that surrounds and penetrates every human venture.” He comments: “In a time like ours, so frequently marked by an ephemeral and hedonistic culture, this new Doctor of the Church proves to be remarkably effective in enlightening the mind and heart of those who hunger and thirst for truth and love”
• The fourth characteristic is how we relate to that loving Father. We do so with loving trust and confident love.
  • The great discovery of her vocation is one of the most beautiful passages in hagiography, when she saw what her true vocation within her Carmelite vocation and within her baptismal vocation really was.
  • “Love,” she wrote, “gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church had a body composed of different members, the most necessary and most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and so I understood that the Church had a heart and that this heart was burning with love. I understood that it was love alone that made the Church’s members act, that if love were ever extinguished, apostles would not proclaim the Gospel and martyrs would refuse to shed their blood. I understood that love includes all vocation…. Then in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: ‘O Jesus, my Love … at last I have found my vocation; my vocation is Love!’”
  • John Paul II said in Paris during World Youth Day, August 24, 1997, that St. Therese was “entirely captivated by the love of God. She lived the radical offering of herself in response to that love.” A few days later, back in Rome, he said she “had a marvellous understanding of the overwhelming message of God’s love, received as a gift and lived with the humble trust and simplicity of children who in Jesus Christ totally entrust themselves to the Father. And she has become its authoritative teacher for the present and future of the Church.”
  • To love is the vocation of all of us, no matter what our state of life, from a Carmelite cloistered nun, to a priest, to married spouses, to widows and widowers, to young people.
  • She would say, “It is not happiness that attracts me… but Love alone! To love, to be loved and to return to earth to make Love loved.”
  • In order to be love in the heart of the Church, we must first recognize that the Father himself loves us, as Jesus says during the Last Supper. That Jesus himself is in the incarnation of that love. “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you. … Remain in my love. … Love one another as I have loved you.”
• The little way is a way of becoming lowly.
  • She wrote,“Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.”
  • As we have talked about, St. Thérèse realized that she felt no attraction to the exalted heights of great souls. In fact, on a retreat in October 1892, she felt the Lord point her to a downward
    • She said, “Jesus’ very descent, this emptying of the soul, is simply a spontaneous gesture of love, an automatic movement to catch him as he falls, so that he lights gently on the ground without being hurt. “‘Make haste, and come down’ was what Our Lord said to Zacchaeus. Jesus tells us to come down! But where must we come down? Celine, you know better than I… ‘the birds of the air have their nests, but I have not where to lay My head’. That is where we must come down, if we are to serve as a dwelling for Jesus; we must be so poor that we have not where to lay our heads… Jesus wants us to receive Him in our hearts; by now, doubtless, they are empty of creatures; but alas! I feel that mine is not wholly empty of me, which is why Jesus tells me to come down. And I too want to hide my face, I want my Beloved alone to be able to see it … that in my heart at least He may lay down His dear head and feel that there He is recognized and understood.”
    • A novice once sighed: “When I think of everything I still have to acquire!” She replied, “You mean, to lose! Jesus takes it upon himself to fill your soul in the measure that you rid it of its imperfections. I see that you have taken the wrong road; you will never arrive at the end of your journey. You are wanting to climb a great mountain and the good God is trying to make you descend it; he is waiting for you at the bottom in the fertile valley of humility.”
  • She wasn’t discouraged by not feeing a call to the greatness of many of the great spiritual writers and martyrs: “Instead of being discouraged, I concluded that God would not inspire desires which could not be realised, and that I may aspire to sanctity in spite of my littleness. For me to become great is impossible. I must bear with myself and my many imperfections; but I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way– very short and very straight, a little way that is wholly new.”
  • This humility was essential to growth in holiness. “Sanctity,” she wrote, “does not consist in performing such and such acts; it means being ready at heart to become small and humble in the arms of God, acknowledging our own weaknesses and trusting in his fatherly goodness to the point of audacity.”
  • This humility affected her prayer:
    • Therese teaches simplicity, talking to God and Jesus in direct, personal and heartfelt ways. She did not like long prayers. She fell asleep during community prayer. She disliked the rosary. She prayed from her heart as a child speaks honestly and trustingly to a parent they love. God calls us to respond to Divine Love in a childlike relationship of love, trust and bold confidence to “Abba” (‘Dad’).
    • “For me, prayer is a movement of the heart; it is a simple glance toward Heaven; it is a cry of gratitude and love in times of trial as well as in times of joy; finally, it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.… I have not the courage to look through books for beautiful prayers. … I do like a child who does not know how to read; I say very simply to God what I want to say, and He always understands me.”
  • At the same time, this humility wasn’t false:“If a little flower could speak, it seems to me that it would tell us quite simply all that God has done for it, without hiding any of its gifts. It would not, under the pretext of humility, say that it was not pretty, or that it had not a sweet scent, that the sun had withered its petals, or the storm bruised its stem, if it knew that such were not the case.”
• The little way is one that converts the ordinary things of each day into situations of childlike confidence and loving trust, of blooming in God’s garden just as he made us.
  • “In my little way,” she wrote, “there are only very ordinary things; it is essential that little souls should be able to do everything I do.”
  • It involves everything: “I want to sanctify my heartbeats, my thoughts, my simplest actions, uniting them to his infinite merits.”
  • St Therese translated “the little way” in terms of a commitment to the tasks and to the people we meet in our everyday lives. She took her assignments in the convent of Lisieux as ways of manifesting her love for God and for others. She worked as a sacristan by taking care of the altar and the chapel; she served in the refectory and in the laundry room; she wrote plays for the entertainment of the community. Above all, she tried to show a love for all the nuns in the community. She played no favorites; she gave of herself even to the difficult members. Her life sounds so routine and ordinary, but it was steeped in a loving commitment that knew no breakdown. It is called a “little way” precisely by being simple, direct, yet calling for amazing fortitude and commitment.
  • Martha of Jesus gave witness during the beatification process of how her assistant novice mistress lived the contradictions of each day: “Thérèse deliberately sought out the company of those nuns whose temperaments she found hardest to bear. What merit was there in acting charitably toward people whom one loved naturally? Thérèse went out of her way to spend time with, and therefore to love, the people she found repellent. It was an effective means of achieving interior poverty, a way to remove a place to rest her head.”
  • One of the reasons why Catholics and other Christians have been attracted to St. Therese over the last 122 years is because her “little way” seems to put holiness of life within the reach of ordinary people, to help them live out their days with confidence in God’s love for them, to realize that each day is a gift in which their life can make a difference by the way they choose to live it, to put hope in a future in which God will be all and love will consume their spirit. She helps us to put love for God and others into the most ordinary actions of the way.
  • She wrote, “It begins with putting our whole trust in Him who alone can sanctify our work, who can indeed sanctify us without works, since He may even bring forth children of Abraham from the very stones. It is necessary for us, when we have done all we can, to confess that we are unprofitable servants, whilst hoping that God in His grace will give us all that we need. That is the way of childhood.”
  • Bishop Patrick Ahearn commented that “her ‘little way’ teaches us to do the ordinary things of life with extraordinary love. A smile, a note of encouragement, a phone call, suffering in silence, always having a positive word, a simple unnoticed task to brighten the life of another, and so many other simple deeds, done with love – these are the examples of her spirituality. The smallest action, done with love, is more important than great deeds done for personal glory, gratification or simply out of obedience. Therese teaches us that Jesus is everywhere and is the power for love and goodness operating within us. Such is the power and presence of grace. Therese’s life was hidden. To many even in the convent, she seemed like such an average, ordinary person. Her greatness showed in the constancy of her love for others in the most simple ways.
  • John Paul II affirmed this in 1997: “The way she took to reach this ideal of life is not that of the great undertakings reserved for the few, but on the contrary, a way within everyone’s reach, the ‘little way,’ a path of trust and total self-abandonment to the Lord’s grace. It is not a prosaic way, as if it were less demanding. It is in fact a demanding reality, as the Gospel always is. But it is a way in which one is imbued with a sense of trusting abandonment to divine mercy, which makes even the most rigorous spiritual commitment light.”
• The little way is one that she is praying for us to adopt.
  • After telling one of her two adopted priest brothers, “my way is all confidence and love,” she continued, “I hope that one day Jesus will make you walk by the same way as me.”
  • She wants us all to walk that way.
  • Therese never put defined things or put them in formulas, but lived them. She realized that God had not called her to glory or fame, but a life of love lived in silence where she could “love Jesus as he had never been loved before,” and that she sought to share that love with the world, forming a “vast army of little souls” that could be loved by God, love him and love others.
  • She wants to enlist us in that army.
  • She’s praying for us precisely to do so: She said on her deathbed: “I feel that my mission is about to begin, my mission of making God loved as I love him, of giving my little way to souls. If God answers my desires, my heaven will be spent on earth until the end of the world. Yes, I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.”
  • She’s praying for us now. She’s praying for all the parishioners of the National Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica who have a special calling and responsibility to reflect the virtues of their patroness. She’s praying for Marge Caram and Jack Salter as they become more publicly associated with her Little Way. She’s praying for all of us, reminding us that we might become who God wills us to be, to become like little children who trust in his fatherly love, who are so transformed by that love that we approach him with loving trust and seek to spread his love through sanctifying the most ordinary things of every day, doing ordinary things with extraordinary love. She’s reminding us that the littlest in the Kingdom of God are truly the greatest and desiring us to choose the little way so that we may, in ordinary life, become truly great with her.
• Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Family, pray for us!