The Second Tool: The Little Way of St. Therese

The Little Flower didn't just teach a simple spirituality: she also crushed a major generational heresy.

Watercolor of the Little Flower by Anna-Marie of The Catholic Creative. Buy it here.

In terms of statuary, St. Therese of Lisieux, known by her nickname of the Little Flower, is in the top ten saints of the Catholic Church, together with Our Lady and St. Francis and St. Jude. Born in 1873 and dying in 1879 at the age of twenty-four, she was canonized in 1925 after her spiritual autobiography became an international best-seller. Proclaimed “The Greatest Saint of Modern Times,” she entered into the popular Catholic imagination so that her iconic image graced everything from night lights to shopping bags to airplane wings to tattoos. Yet most people don’t know much about her, and many find the devotion to her vulgar and gauche, the product of a 1930s or 1950s or 1980s enthusiasm—she definitely comes in vogue in generational waves which I have always managed to miss.

Perhaps I’m describing my initial reaction to her a bit too much. As a cradle Catholic, I knew about Therese, but I ran into her hardcore devotees for the first time in college, women who had been her fangirls since childhood. Many of them joined the Little Flowers household at Franciscan (which is still going strong three decades later, according to Instagram). There’s also an alternative to the Girl Scouts named after her, a recent folk song, a novel series for kids, and any number of movies and graphic novels.

But nothing, not even her novena (folk tradition says your request is answered if you receive a rose on the final day) popularizes this saint more than her autobiography.

If you’ve ever cracked this work, you know its soft power. Some years ago, our family decided to read it aloud at the dinner table and I was amazed at how riveted our kids were by it. In her autobiography we have the rare insight into the mind of a saint during childhood. Most saints as children are ciphers: since they only become famous as saints after they die, all we usually have to go on are sporadic and sometimes garbled recollections from those around them, memories that are usually years old and embellished in hindsight. (I only realized this fully when as a Catholic writer, I was asked to write about the childhood of a saint who was NOT St. Therese, and discovered this truism.) While there are funny or striking stories about saints during childhood, nothing compares with the thorough and honest details given by Therese.

In case you’ve never really paid attention to St. Therese, here’s a rough outline of her life and autobiography. (If you think you already know lots about her, you’ll enjoy a deep dive into the Carmelite archives on Therese.) She was the youngest child of saintly French parents, born into what should have been a large family, except that so many of her siblings had died as infants. Her mother died of breast cancer when she was four, so she was raised by her four older sisters, who later all joined a Carmelite convent. (In the first Tool I geeked out about the super-coolness of the Carmelites.) Just FYI, I’ve been told the personality profile sought by the Carmelite order is a woman who’s a joyful extrovert, someone who’s bubbly and effusive, not grim and silent. For whatever paradoxical reason, these types survive and thrive in the intensely cloistered and penitential Carmelite order, which gives you an idea of what the Martin household and the Martin sisters in particular must have been like, despite their solemn faces in photos and icons.

Therese and her family: a spiritual powerhouse, geniuses for detail. Icon available here.

Therese moved heaven, earth, and the Pope to get permission to follow them all into the convent at the age of fifteen (for context, she would have been a freshman in most high schools in America), and succeeded. Reunited in the convent, the Martin girls were popular and sometimes envied and resented for their enthusiasm for Christ and the order. Therese’s older sister was elected prioress and Therese was made mistress of novices at the age of 20. A year after their father died in 1894, her sisters asked Therese to write down memories of her childhood and upbringing as well as her own spirituality, which she did under obedience. The Martin sisters were aware that there was something special about their family life and something special in particular about their baby sister’s relationship with God. When Therese died of tuberculosis two years later in 1897 at the age of 24, her rush to serve God in the cloister seemed justified, and the fact that she left a detailed account of her spiritual method miraculous.

At first the manuscript was circulated among the Carmelite convents, but just as the Carmelites had been generous with sharing their brown scapular, they soon began sharing this little book titled A Story of a Soul with the public. To date, it’s sold over 500 million copies. Therese was canonized in 1925, not even three decades after her death. Her deathbed promise to her sisters, when they asked her to remember them in heaven, was, “I will send you a shower of roses from heaven,” one reason she acquired the nickname “The Little Flower.”

But this little flower was no frail pushover. Therese was intentional about her road to God, just as her parents had been intentional about their Catholic family life. As her sisters suspected, she had a secret way to God: her petit voie: her “little way,” and in the last of her three manuscripts, she details how she discovered it, by believing with childlike trust that it was there. She tells how she thought:

I will seek out a means of getting to Heaven by a little way – a very short and very straight little way that is wholly new. We live in an age of inventions; nowadays the rich need not trouble to climb the stairs, they have elevators instead. Well, I mean to try and find an elevator by which I may be raised unto God, for I am too tiny to climb the steep stairway of perfection. […] Your Arms, then, O Jesus, are the elevator which must raise me up even unto Heaven. To get there I need not grow. On the contrary, I must remain little, I must become still less.

Her sister Pauline was to term this Little Way the “way of spiritual childhood,” which is an apt description of her sister’s spirituality. Feeling that she was not smart enough to read the great books on spirituality, Therese took refuge in the Gospels.

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.

Her little way would consist of small actions and small sacrifices which she knew in the generosity of Christ would be world-transforming: “Everything is so big in religion—to pick up a pin out of love can convert a soul. What a mystery!”

What a better truth and consolation for we laity as we work in our homes and jobs, feeling that the world is decaying around us and we helpless to do anything of substance? Therese, doctor of the Church, has the answer: to continue doing our hidden work with love, offering up even our failures to Christ.

Sweet Little Ones on Etsy has gorgeous framed Therese quotes like this one you can buy here.

Suffering from anxiety, scruples, and depression throughout her life, feeling herself too weak to attempt anything great, Therese took refuge and comfort in the knowledge of God’s fatherly love for her.

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 a lay Catholic, I can think of no better way to follow Christ in family life. There is layer upon layer of richness in Therese’s spirituality and that of her family’s. Check out this book and this book for the full story of the spiritual powerhouse that was their family life. Therese’s mother, St. Zelie Martin, was a career woman who supported the family by working in the fashion industry, knitting the “Queen of Laces,” Alencon lace in an era that worshipped these delicate whispering creations. Her father, St. Louis Martin, gave up his watchmaking trade to support her business. Both parents were geniuses when it came to crafting the minute, unnoticeable detail that creates precision and beauty, and they extended this talent to cultivating their own souls and the souls of their children. Of her father, Therese was to say, “I only had to look at him to know how the saints pray.” White-bearded and gentle, he gave Therese a nearly perfect image of God the Father that would transform her life and French spirituality. Therese took that fixation on the minutia to the supernatural level. In doing so, she destroyed a deadly spiritual network of heresies fixated on detail that kept people from embracing the Catholic faith.

Here’s a remnant of Alencon silk lace, similar to the kind handcrafted by St. Zelie, mother of Therese.

For literally centuries, faithful Catholics in France and elsewhere fought a losing battle against the terrible heresy of Jansenism, a harsh Calvinist oh-so-reasonable assertion that a holy God must condemn us humans as a matter of course, that He had nothing but disgust for our failed humanity. Jansenism was a Puritan virus which, having devastated Germany and England, now colonized the Church, a battle that intensified as the French Revolution and the Enlightenment pornified French society.

In the face of debauched atheism promoted by the Revolution, Jansenism was reasonable response, much as fundamentalist Islam is a reasonable response to the lust and lunacy of decaying Western civilization: it’s the swing of the pendulum to another extreme. It was no wonder that the few Catholics who did not follow the siren song of free love and atheism in France were infected with Jansenism. The heresy was deeply entrenched and deadly to the growth of the True Faith. When souls made miserable by too much freedom limped their way to Christ, they became enmeshed in these neo-Puritan ideals, and the Catholic faith taught in French institutions emphasized sin, terror of the judgment of God, rigorous penance, and an absolute detail-oriented perfection in following Christ that discouraged many from even trying.

For centuries, the Catholic remnant in France was flailing in its chokehold until this young girl from an extraordinary Catholic family, Therese Martin, penned her Story of a Soul. In doing so, she crushed that monster definitively, righting the balance of millions who rediscovered God as a loving Father through that book, and followed St. Therese’s Little Way with gratitude.

That was in the early 1900s, but it wasn’t until the end of the millennium that Therese was declared a Doctor of the Church. Her Little Way of love is not only a way for nuns in convents but for lay people in their homes. Indeed, Therese clearly credits her parents, both working lay people, for her outlook and many of her practices, though the synthesis and articulation of her spirituality is clearly hers. I believe the Little Way, more than anything else, gives us a blueprint and guidelines for how to proceed forward in building culture.  

As our society grows more decadent, we Catholics are in great danger of embracing Jansenism once again. As I said, it represents a temptingly easy response. The Little Way can help us avoid this snare.

The point, as Therese says, is not to inflict great penances on ourselves, but to curb our will. Our great battles are not necessarily between love and hate but between love and selfishness. Therese sought to battle the petty selfishness of our lives with tiny acts of love, slight as flower petals, saying no to self and yes to love, over and over again. But these flower petals, transformed by the generous grace of God, have power, as this image aptly illustrates:

As usual, Baritus Catholic says it best. Buy it here.

The Little Way of St. Therese is a crucial tool for culture recovery. First, it instantiates a loving relationship with God as our Heavenly Father. Satan’s original temptation to Eve implied, “God can’t be trusted to provide for you.,” and so many temptations boil down to doubting God’s love for us. The Little Way has as its foundation this truth that God the Father is a loving and merciful Father Who delights in His children.

Secondly, as I mentioned, the Little Way is entirely possible for families to live out, in particular the youngest ones among us, children. Its principles are easily grasped and taught, just as my own children were entranced and inspired by St. Therese’s stories of her childhood.

Thirdly, the Little Way to me gives hope because it shows the power of family life, lived generation to generation. Zelie and Louis were each raised by devout parents, and they in turn were able to pass on the gift to their daughters, several of whom are likely to become declared saints in the future. And in doing, their family was able to help defeat a heresy and turn around the faith of countless souls.

If you are generous with your Heavenly Father, He will be generous with you, even a hundredfold.

Detail of digital oil painting of Therese from her actual photo. Buy it here.