Who is “the Little Flower of Christ”?
She is Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, one of the best-known saints of the Catholic Church. She was born in Alençon, France, on 2 January 1873, into a deeply Christian family, the ninth of its children. At fifteen she entered the Carmel of Lisieux, where three of her sisters had gone before her. She was passionately in love with Jesus, and she was tried by tuberculosis.
Saint Thérèse’s life was marked by simplicity, great self-denial and demanding mortifications. Yet she did not bring the world a new teaching: the way of life we are invited to follow in her footsteps matches the teaching of Christ, the very path he told us to walk, so much so that the Church’s pastors called her “the apostle of the spirit of childhood”, which sums up the teaching of the divine Master. She walked the path of holiness in the footsteps of her great mother Saint Teresa of Ávila, and drew on the teaching of her spiritual father Saint John of the Cross, until she became a saint like them.
In telling her life, we rely on what she herself wrote in Story of a Soul, the account of her life she wrote at the request of her superiors and whose last chapters she finished shortly before her death.
Her reading was limited to meditating on the Gospel, which she always carried with her, and to the writings of Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint John of the Cross, whose spirit she tried to absorb. She also liked to read The Imitation of Christ. But above everything she preferred reading Holy Scripture. She said: “When I read certain spiritual treatises in which perfection is shown with a thousand obstacles,
my poor little mind tires very quickly; I close the learned book and take up Holy Scripture. Then everything seems full of light to me; a single word opens up infinite horizons to my soul; perfection seems easy, and I see that it is enough to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself like a child into God’s arms.”
Thérèse’s illness grew worse. The community’s doctor was called, and then a doctor from her family, and they treated her, but in vain: she had pulmonary tuberculosis, and the disease was too far advanced to be treated effectively. Even so, she longed to join a new Carmel in Hanoi, in Indochina (Vietnam). She wrote about it in her memoirs: “Here in the Carmel of Lisieux I enjoy everyone’s affection. I dream of a monastery where I would be unknown, where my heart would suffer the pain of exile. That is why I want to go to Hanoi, to suffer much for my God and to be alone, without consolation and without any earthly joy.” But the steady decline of her health made her realize that she could not be sent there. When winter came, her weakness and illness grew worse,
and her doctor admitted he could do nothing: “I believe this soul was not created to live long on earth.” One day Thérèse heard a sister say: “Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus will die soon, and I wonder what our Mother will find to say about her after her death. She will be at a loss, because this little sister, lovable as she is, has done nothing worth mentioning.”
Her infirmarian also heard this and said to Thérèse: “If you relied on the opinion of creatures, you would be very disappointed today.” Thérèse replied: “I am happy that the good God has given me not to care about the opinion of creatures.” Then she told her a story from her own life that taught her a powerful lesson.
Her constant motto was the word of the Lord Jesus: “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).
She lived spiritual childhood and bore witness to it; that is why she used to say:
“I will always remain before Him a little child of two, so that He will take even more care of me… The little child accepts its smallness and weakness and accepts that it needs help.”
As the tuberculosis took hold, she died on 30 September 1897, at the age of twenty-four. She was canonized in 1925.
Among her best-known sayings:
“It is not enough to love; we must prove our love.”
“After my death I will let fall a shower of roses. I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.”
“Always remember that nothing is small in the eyes of God. Do everything you do with love.”
“What offends God and wounds his Heart is lack of trust… Our heart was made to love Jesus, to love him passionately… We have only the brief moments of our life to love Jesus.”
Prepared by Rita of the Sawt el Rab team
