The Heart of the Little Way:
The Ardent Love of a Child

O God, Thou art my God; earnestly I seek Thee, My soul thirsts for Thee, my flesh longs for Thee, Like a dry and thirst land, without water point. So do I gaze upon Thee in the sanctuary, To see Thy might and Thy glory. For Thy mercy is better than life, My lips shall praise Thee. So I will bless Thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in Thy name. My soul shall be filled as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise Thee with joyful lips. When I will remember Thee on my bed, and meditate on Thee in the night watches. For Thou has become my succor, and I exult in the shadow of Thy wings. My soul cleaves to Thee, Thy right hand upholds me.(Ps 62:1-9) 

I. Love in the Childhood of Thérèse

In this conference we wish to go to the heart of the Little Way of St. Thérèse and find its innermost essence and dynamism. This is not a difficult search; it is nothing less than the intensely ardent love of a child who has been raised up and transformed into a spousal love for God.

Providence can accomplish this in a thousand different ways. In the case of the Little Flower, God cultivated this love very naturally, planting her in a wonderful family garden. She drank in this love like the morning dew at her mother’s breast, like the warm sunshine of her father’s love, to say nothing of the tender kindness of her loving sisters.

Of all the love within the family, parental love is the best and most natural preparation for understanding the love of God. The love of parents for their children, the love of a mother for her child, is so profound and beautiful that God takes this love as the image through which He reveals His own love:

Israel was a child and I loved him; and I will call my son out of Egypt. ...And I was like a foster father to Ephraim, I carried them in my arms,... I will draw them with cords of Adam [man, that is, human bonds = Incarnation!], with the bands of love. (Hos 11:1b.3a.4a)

Can a woman forget her [suckling] infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? Even if she should forget, still I will not forget you. (Is 49:15)

This image of maternal love is so radical and fundamental that it marks the very vocabulary of the revelation of Divine Love. Two words in the Old Testament express the perfection of Divine Love towards man; each of them expresses the outpouring of the merciful love of God upon us. The first term, chesed unites in a single concept what we understand by grace, love, fidelity, and mercy. It is the foundation of the covenant, which is everlasting, because God is good and faithful, first of all, to Himself and, therefore, to His promises. It is this faithfulness in Divine love and fidelity that makes forgiveness and restoration, in a word, that makes redemption possible. Here we meet the virile side of Divine love, if we may so express it. In the same manner, the Holy Father declares in Dives in Misericordia:

The second word, which in the terminology of the Old Testament serves to define mercy, is rahamim. Rahamaim has a different nuance from that of chesed. While chesed highlights the marks of fidelity to self and of "responsibility for one’s own love" (which are in a certain sense masculine characteristics), rahamim, in its very root, denotes the love of a mother (rehem = mother’s womb). From the deep and original bond–indeed the unity–that links a mother to her child there springs a particular relationship to the child, a particular love. Of this love one can say that it is completely gratuitous, not merited, and that in this aspect it constitutes a necessity: an exigency of the heart. It is, as it were, a "feminine" variation of the masculine fidelity to self expressed by chesed. Against this background, rahamim generates a whole range of feelings, including goodness and tenderness, patience and understanding, that is, readiness to forgive.

The Old Testament attributes to the Lord precisely these characteristics, when it uses the term rahamim in speaking of Him. We read in Isaiah: "Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you" (Is 49:15). This love, faithful and invincible thanks to the mysterious power of motherhood, is expressed in the Old Testament texts in various ways: as salvation from dangers, especially from enemies; also as forgiveness of sins–of individuals and also of the whole of Israel, and finally in readiness to fulfill the (eschatological) promise and hope, in spite of human infidelity, as we read in Hosea: "I will heal their faithlessness, I will love them freely." 

Here, the Holy Father shows us the side of maternal love. This is reciprocated in a wonderful way by the love, admiration, and confidence of the child, for whom the mother and father are the definition of goodness, happiness, and security. In the life of Thérèse of Lisieux, we can verify that as a little child, she was completely surrounded by the affectionate love of both her mother and her father, as well of that of her four older sisters. In her Story of a Soul, she recalls:

All my life it has pleased the Good Lord to surround me with love; my first memories are images of the most tender smiles and caresses. ... But if He placed so much love about me, He also poured much love into my heart, the loving sensitive creature that I was; hence I had a great love for Papa and Mamma, and showed them my tender affection in a thousand ways, for I was very expansive by nature. Only the means that I employed were sometimes rather strange, as is evidenced by this passage from one of Mamma’s letters: "The baby is a imp without comparison; she comes to caress me, wishing me death: ‘Oh! How I wish that you would die, my poor little Mother,’ she scolds, saying, ‘It’s so that you can go to heaven, for you say that one had to die in order to go there.’ In the same way she wishes her father death [too] when she is caught up in her excesses of love."  

You can see, how accurately the Holy Father’s description of rachamim applies to the early family life of the Little Flower and how spontaneously she transferred these human affections over to God.

Thérèse lived in a veritable paradise of love and security, which was at once supernatural due to the profound piety and faith of her parents. She says, "I loved the good Lord greatly and I gave Him my heart quite often, making use of the little prayer that Mamma had taught me: ‘My God, I give you my heart; take it if you please, so that no creature its possession ever seize, but You alone, my good Jesus.’"

The ardor of her love for Christ shines through everywhere, for example, in this spontaneous exclamation towards the end of her autobiography: "Jesus, Jesus, if the desire to love You is delicious, what then shall be the possession, the enjoyment of love?"

II. The ‘Weaning’ of Love through Death and Separation

Tolstoy in his short story, What Men Live By, tells the story of how God commissioned one of his angels to take the life of a recently widowed mother of two young children. For the angel in question, this stroke of divine providence just exceeded his comprehension, and he balked at the command and protested against the impossible plight of the children. Since his protest was motivated by compassion, God did not reject the angel, but as therapeutic punishment, he sent him down to earth in the form of a man to discover what men live by. There he discovered that they could bear all sorts of hardships and travail when they have learned to live by faith, hope, and charity.

Such a stroke of providence descended upon the Martin family. Thérèse’s paradise was visited with suffering at a very early age by Divine Providence, and her mother was called from this world. Thérèse was four years old at the time.

This was the beginning of a trauma in her life that lasted, she says, for nine and a half years, at which point, by the grace of God, she states significantly: at fourteen years of age "I refound my character as a child while fully entering into the seriousness of life." Does God not have to crush the grapes in order to conserve the freshness of their juice, at the same time elevating it to the excellence of wine? Thus, Thérèse tells us that she had more than nine years of suffering, during which her "happy character changed completely, [for] who had been so vivacious and expansive became timid and shy and over-sensitive to the excess." She lost the innocence of her childhood, and then at the end of that period, refound that innocence but now refurbished with a spiritual maturity for life.

The nine years were not exteriorly hard years but interiorly a time in which she had to completely find a new center of gravity for her entire life. Outwardly, her life continued to be surrounded by abundant affection within the family, particularly by her father. She wrote: "I continued to be surrounded outwardly by the most delicate tenderness. The so very tender heart of Papa integrated into the love it already possessed a truly maternal love."

In addition to her father, she had her "new" and loving mother, Pauline, that is, Thérèse’s older sister, whom Thérèse chose to become her new mother. Pauline never failed in her maternal office but once! It was through the influence of Pauline that Thérèse learned to walk in the Presence of God. "Under the influence of Pauline," she writes, "I resolved never to distance my soul from the glance of Jesus, so that it might journey in peace towards the heavenly fatherland!"

And that once that Pauline let her down was precisely to distance her soul from Thérèse. Pauline was like an angel bearing a sword of sorrow for Thérèse, for Pauline, in obedience to the Divine call, "abandoned her little sister" to enter the Carmel of Lisieux. Pauline had forewarned Thérèse by telling her that she wanted to enter the convent. And when she explained to Thérèse what that meant to be a religious in Carmel, Thérèse recognized that that was the very place, the desert, to which our Lord was calling her, too. Only Thérèse did not understand how soon and how long off that would be: how soon her sister would leave her, how long she would have to suffer before she could follow her. She only understood that her sister wouldn’t wait for her, and that she was about to lose her second mother.

Even before the departure of Pauline, she had come to understand, by meditating how the jelly in an old picnic sandwich had run and lost its appetizing color, "that only in heaven will there be joy without clouds"

When Pauline left, Thérèse was crushed and expressed her sorrow:

Ah! how could I express the anguish in my heart?... In an instant I understood what life really is, life which I had hitherto not seen so sadly. Now it appeared to me in its full reality, I saw that it is nothing but a suffering and a continual separation. I wept bitter tears, for I did not yet understand the joy of sacrifice. I was weak, so weak that I consider it a great grace that I was able to support such a trial that seemed to so greatly exceed my strength. [the suddenness of her departure] was like a sword that was thrust into my heart."

This took place when Thérèse was nine years old. After that she passed through about four years of intense darkness, during which, despite all her tears and weaknesses, she remained faithful to grace and love and was transformed finally by her "Christmas grace" shortly before her fourteenth birthday, at which point, as quoted above, she achieved spiritual maturity.

All of this is captured wonderfully in a little story that she narrates in a letter shortly after her acceptance for Carmel. Her father gave her a little newborn lamb as kind of a final gift before her entrance into Carmel. You have to imagine her ravishing delight in the little creature; she and Céline were just full of dreams about the good times they would have with the darling creature. But the very first afternoon the poor little thing died.

Scarcely born, it suffered and died. The little lamb was so gentle, it had such an air of innocence about it..... Papa dug a grave in which they placed the little lamb, which seemed to be sleeping. "I didn’t want it to be covered with earth," Thérèse confesses, "So we first threw some snow on top of it,... and then everything was finished.... You cannot imagine, my dear Godmother, [her sister Marie] how much food for thought that little animal afforded me. Surely, here upon earth, one should not be attached to anything, not even to the most innocent of things, for they will be lost to you the moment you least expect it. Only things eternal can content us."

If she had only gotten this far in her reflections, she might have passed her life in depression. How many souls are broken by their sufferings because they do not recognize the love of God behind them! Thérèse, too, had to go through her bitters trials. She writes:

I had to pass through the crucible of suffering and trial from my infancy in order to be able to be offered to Jesus. Just as spring flowers begin to germinate beneath the snow and flourish at the first rays of the sun, so too did the little flower, whose memoirs I write, have to pass through the winter of trial...

There in that obscure drama, where each heart is alone before its God and Savior, Thérèse struggled with God, with grace like Jacob, until she received a blessing (cf. Gen 32:26). By the grace of God, she "refound her childhood." That is to say, all the ardent intensity, the vivacity, the vibrancy and innocence of her love were completely restored in her heart, only now this love was totally directed towards God with the full force of her indomitable will. This resurrection, this restoration to the innocent and intense love of a child, is the very heart of the Little Way. It is the very heart of the Gospel: "Whoever, therefore, humbles himself as this little child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven!" (Mt 18:4).

The perfect human love that she had found in the hearts of her parents and her sisters, about which she could entertain no human doubt, by the grace of God, she succeeded in transferring this completely to God. From this point on, Thérèse can be said to believe in Love completely and totally. From this point on, she wants to dedicate herself to the "Science of Love," to give all her riches to gain it and esteem them all as nothing. "I understand," she writes, "that there is nothing but love that can make us pleasing to the good Lord, this love is the only good to which I aspire. It has pleased Jesus to show me the only path that leads to this Divine furnace, that is, the abandon of a small infant, which sleeps without fear in its father’s arms."

When she was ten years old–that is, in the middle of her long purification–she had a mystical dream in which she spoke to the Venerable Anne of Jesus, who had introduced the Teresian Reform of Carmel in France in 1604. The effect of which consolidated her in her belief in Divine Love and the Communion of Saints. "O Jesus!" she writes, "The storm was no longer raging, the sky was calm and serene. I believed, I sensed that there was a Heaven, and that this heaven is peopled with souls who cherish me, who regard me as their child."

About a year before her death, the Little Flower would canonize this human maternal dimension of Divine Love in her poem "Only Jesus":

My ardent heart longs to give without ceasing It has a need to prove its tenderness. Ah! who can comprehend my love? Which heart would pay me back in kind? But this kind, in vain I should claim; Jesus, you alone can content my soul Nothing knows how to charm me here below Where true happiness cannot be found My only peace, my only happiness My only love, is You, O Lord! O You, who knew how to create the heart of mothers I find in You the most tender of Fathers! My sole love, Jesus, Eternal Word For me your heart is more than maternal At each instant you follow me, you guard me When I call you, Ah, you never make me wait And if at times, you seem to hide, It’s you who comes to help me find you. My only peace, my only happiness My only love, is You, O Lord!

Her transformation in grace and supernatural charity was so overwhelming that it even left her unsatisfied with the greatest of ideals. She complains, as it were, to Jesus: "To be your spouse, O Jesus, to be a Carmelite, to be through my union with you the mother of souls, should have sufficed for me, but such was not the case." That was when she felt the insatiable longing for all the vocations and glorious deeds of the saints, and even these left her like an unrequited lover. Only when she discovered that her vocation in the Church was to be love itself did she become at once deliriously happy and find great peace.

III. Her Confidence

With the gift of unconditional love which Thérèse received from her parents, she received also the capacity for limitless trust. On one occasion, as a child less than four years old, she asked her mother if she, Thérèse, would go to heaven. "Yes, if you are a good girl," was her mother’s reply. Thérèse responded, "And if I weren’t sweet, I’d go to hell! ...But I know what I would do in that case,... I would fly off with you, who would be in heaven. What could the good God do to catch me? You’d be holding me firmly in your arms." Her mother, who reports this conversation in a letter, adds: "I could see in her eyes that she was positively convinced that the good Lord could do nothing to her, if she were in the arms of her mother!"

As with her love, it was also with her confidence: Thérèse transferred everything in a work of grace over to her relationship with Jesus. While others might complain and question the goodness of a God in heaven, who allows little children to suffer like this, Thérèse was willing to cast herself blindly into His loving arms.

This was true even when she was at fault, for the motive of her trust was not her own goodness but the goodness of her parents and of God. She was quite content to embrace her nothingness and weakness because she found herself infinitely more precious in their eyes. It was as if for her, her parents not only loved her but were love incarnate. She could not envision them outside this love. It was for this reason that her least faults caused her such grief–for her sin, as it were, was against love–,and that is why she experienced such a compelling need to confess her faults and to cast herself into her parents’ arms. Not because she had broken some law carved in stone, but because she had failed to live a true union of love. How well she understood that the forgiving word of pardon could not be denied her due to the greatness of their love. If justice were paramount, it would have been another story, but true love only wants to give and, when needs be, to forgive.

Fr. Bellière had some difficulty in understanding this disposition when it was elevated to the divine. He was her correspondent and soul mate, (not so much in greatness but in desire). And so his timidity held him back in his relationship with God and in their friendship. Thérèse explained, therefore, in a little parable how he should conduct himself with all the "abandon and the love of a child who knows that it is loved by its father":

How Jesus loves those souls, even the imperfect, who trust in Him. Let us suppose that a father had two roguish and disobedient sons. When the hour had come to punish them, he saw that one trembled and fled from him in terror, knowing in the depths of his heart as he did, that he merited punishment. His brother, on the other hand, cast himself into the arms of his father, telling him that he was sorry for having caused him such pain; he told his father that he loved him and that to prove it he wanted to be good in the future. Now if this child were to ask his father to punish him with a kiss, I do not believe that the heart of a happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he recognized.

Still, he is not unaware that more than once his son shall fall again into the same faults, but he is disposed to pardon always, if the son will always take him [thus] by the heart.

I don’t have anything to tell you, my dear little brother, about the first child. You yourself need to know if his father can love him as much and treat him with the same kind indulgence as the other. 

In a subsequent letter she explains this Divine logic more fully:

For those who love Him [Jesus] and who come to Him after each indelicacy to beg his pardon, casting themselves into His arms, Jesus trembles with joy. He says to his Angels, what the father of the prodigal son said to his servants, ‘Clothe him with the best garment, put a ring on his finger,... let us rejoice’. Ah, my brother, the goodness and merciful love of Jesus are so poorly known! It is true that in order to rejoice over these treasures, it is necessary to humble oneself, to recognize one’s nothingness, which is, granted, something many souls do not want to do, but my dear little brother, it is not like this that you are acting. Therefore the path of simple and loving confidence is well made for you!  

In her last written words, words to Fr. Bellière, she exclaims: "I cannot fear a God Who has made Himself so small for me! ... for He is entirely love and mercy![ car Il n’est qu’amour et miséricorde!]"

Similarly, neither suffering nor darkness could reduce Thérèse’s belief in Christ’s love for her. Nothing could cause her confidence to diminish. Writing again to Fr. Bellière, she exclaims: "Far from complaining, I rejoice that the good Lord permits me to suffer even more for His love. Oh, how sweet it is to abandon oneself into His arms having neither fears nor any wishes!"

When the novitiate of Sr. Mary of the Trinity was going badly and there was reason to fear that she would have to be dismissed, Thérèse asked her: "Do you still have confidence that you will succeed?" She responded, "Yes, I am so convinced that the good Lord will give me this grace that nothing can make me doubt it." "Keep up your confidence," was Thérèse’s reply, "for it is impossible that God will not answer you. He always measures His gifts in proportion to our trust. However, I admit that, if I had seen you weakening in hope, I, too, should have doubted it, for, humanly speaking, there is no hope"

This was not only the standard she used in dealing with her novices, but it was the standard of her own measured comportment with God. She did not expect perfection by dint of her own efforts, but only by hoping in the mercy of God who loved her. She exclaims:

O if only all the weak and imperfect souls could feel what the least of souls feels, your little Thérèse, not one would despair of arriving at the summit of the mountain of love, for Jesus does not demand great actions, but only abandon and gratitude. ... ‘Offer to God the sacrifice of praise and acts of thanksgiving.’ See, this is all that Jesus claims of us; he has no need of our works, but only of our love. ... [Still] he was not afraid to beg a bit of water from the Samaritan woman. He thirsts... It is for the love of his poor creature that the Creator of the universe cries out!  

Thérèse understood that God had loved her first, and that if she placed all her hope and trust in this love, that she, too, would be transformed into the likeness of this love.

This is an extremely important point, missed by so many souls. The Little Way, theologically speaking, does not begin with pure and perfect charity or with any kind of greatness. Rather, it begins with hope and the experience of love which teaches us to trust. Thérèse is very explicit in this regard. She writes to her sister, Sr. Marie du Sacré-Coeur. "It is confidence and nothing but confidence that should lead us to love. Does not fear lead to justice? Since we see the way, let us run together. Yes, I sense that Jesus wants to give us the same graces, He wants to gratuitously give us His Heaven!"

She knew that she was misunderstood in this point: some were thinking that her success was due to an abundance of consolations, others attributing it to a will of iron. But no, she attributes it to the radical and total gift which she had made of herself to the God who had loved her first. Like St. Paul, she could declare: "Hope does not disappoint, because the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. For why did Christ, at the set time, die for the wicked, when as yet we were weak? For scarcely in behalf of a just man does one die,... But God recommends his charity towards us, because, when as yet we were sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom 5:5-9). "In Him we have assurance and confident access through faith in Him" (Eph 3:12). Once anchored in this faith, in her invincible belief in divine love, nothing could move Thérèse from this conviction nor cause her to act according to any other standard. She explained to her sister, Mother Agnes:

Thérèse didn’t even want consolations, so great was her faith in God’s love and her desire to give a perfect answer to His love in order to please Jesus: consolations are for us; to love in the obscurity of faith is the consolation we offer Jesus.

She explained to her sister that her desires for martyrdom were nothing at all; they did not give her limitless confidence. Rather, they were like so many riches that could possibly have rendered her unjust, if she had banked upon them. Her desires were a consolation which Jesus gives at times to weak souls. It was not these things at all that pleased God so much in her soul. On the contrary, she explains: "What pleases Him is to see me love my littleness and my poverty, it is the blind hope that I have in His mercy. Behold, my only treasure. Why shouldn’t this treasure also be yours?"  

Thérèse understood the great secret of the spiritual life, namely that our lowliness, our weakness, and spiritual impotence are not a handicap in our intercourse with Go. Quite the contrary, she says, "It is my very weakness that gives me the audacity to offer myself as a victim to your love, O Jesus. ...the Law of fear has been succeeded by the law of love. Love chose me, feeble and imperfect creature, for the holocaust. This choice, is it not worthy of love? Surely, for love can only be completely satisfied when it has to reach down, when it reaches down to nothingness and transforms this ‘nothing’ into [the divine] fire [of love]." This great intuition about the nature of divine love begets great hope. This hope disposes the soul for great love and strengthens the soul in times of suffering.

Thérèse was never on the look out for any extraordinary consolations that would strengthen her in suffering; she aspired to the sheer strength of love, like that which sustained Jesus on the Cross and Mary at the foot of the Cross. Those, she says, who desire "to feel the joy and have an attraction for suffering" are really just seeking their own consolation, for "when one [truly] loves something, the pain disappears," that is, it is no longer perceived due to the focusing power of love.

What is needed is this kind of love which burns to give itself to Jesus.

To be His victim of love, the weaker one is, without desires or virtues, the more one is disposed for the consuming and transforming operations of this love. The desire alone to be a victim [of this love] suffices, but it is necessary to consent to remain poor and without strength. And it is precisely here where the difficulty lies, ‘for the truly poor in spirit, where can he be found. One has to search far off’ says the psalmist. He does not say that it has to be sought among great souls, but rather ‘far off’, that is to say, in lowliness, in nothingness. Ah! let us remain far off from all that shine, let us love our littleness, let us love to feel nothing, for then we shall be poor in spirit, and Jesus will come looking for us; ‘far off’ though we be, He will transform us into flames of love! 

This is Thérèse’s Little Way, the way of limitless hope and love that comes as a response of a small and weak soul responding to the love of God, like a child responding to its mother’s love, like a mirror responding to the shining sun. Only with this kind of love, without any feigning or fiction, could Thérèse be happy; only in doing His will did she find any peace and joy. She wanted to love in order "to give pleasure to Jesus." This is why she could say in complete earnestness, "My consolation is to have none upon earth." How well she understood our Lord’s words reported by St. Paul in the Acts of the Apostles: "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (20:35).

To become a saint on this path is easy, as soon as the world means nothing to a soul, that is, as soon as a soul is willing to be truly poor in spirit. Rather than frighten her, Thérèse rejoiced in this poverty, in which she offered the gift of her littleness to her Divine Spouse. She rejoiced also in the certain knowledge that as His spouse all Jesus’ possessions belonged to her.

IV. Prayer 

O Jesus! How I would like to tell all the little souls just how ineffable your condescension is. I sense, that if it were possible, that if You could find a soul weaker and smaller than mine You would shower it with even greater favors, if it would abandon itself in complete confidence to Your infinite mercy.

But why should I desire to communicate Your secrets of love, O Jesus? Is it not You alone who have taught them to me, and could You not also reveal them to others? Indeed, I know that You can and I adjure You to do so. I implore You to look down graciously upon a great number of little souls... I implore You to choose a legion of little victims worthy of Your Love. [Amen.]