Many are familiar with the minor doxology prayer, the Glory Be. In English, it reads,
“Glory Be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”
This prayer is meant to summarize the truths of the Christian life, whose sole purpose is to bring Glory to God. But how can we live to glorify God? Let us look to our older brothers and sisters in Christ for guidance. One great role model for us is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Saint Thérèse was an eighteenth-century Discalced Carmelite Nun who pioneered a method of Christian living called “The Little Way.”
Her parents, Louis and Zelie were both very pious individuals who discerned consecrated religious life. Louis and Zelie had nine children, two boys and seven girls. The parents delighted in their children, but tragically, within a three-year period, they lost both baby boys, a five-year-old girl, and an infant girl. After this trauma, and because of Thérèse’s seeming frailty, her parents were unsure if she would survive when she was born on January 2, 1873.
Miraculously, Thérèse proved to be more resilient than they anticipated. When she was four, however, her mother died suddenly of breast cancer, leaving only her father and older sisters to comfort her. Thérèse was the baby of the family and had grown up with an attitude of “wanting it all.” She was a sensitive child, who was prone to tantrums, stubbornness, and a bad temper. Thérèse persistently tried to join the Carmelite Monastery, but she was not granted entry until she was 15.
Most of what we know about the interior life of Saint Thérèse comes from her autobiography Story of A Soul. In this work, we find that Thérèse desperately wanted to be a great Saint, but when compared to others who had lived lives full of mortification and righteous deeds, she felt as though her life was merely a grain of sand sitting next to a mountain. Thérèse recognized that God desired all of us to be holy, but she was concerned that a magnitude of greatness comparable to these Saints was unachievable. She surrendered, deciding to acknowledge her own littleness and admit that her way to heaven would be by the arms of Jesus. The way of going about this would be to live a prayerful life that paid special attention to the small duties required of her, and to do them with great care and devotion to the Lord. Thérèse, in her writings, stresses the importance of the Blessed Mother saying she wished “to live during this sad exile in the company of Mary, submerged in loving ecstasy in the depths of her maternal Heart.”
Thérèse loved flowers and was content in glorifying God just by being uniquely herself in his magnificent garden, thinking of herself as the “little flower of Jesus.” In her autobiography, she wrote, “What matters in life is not great deeds, but great love.”
Thérèse did not need to perform any particular great deed to feel deserving of God’s love—she simply expressed her own love towards Him by loving her neighbor. One example, out of many, where she displayed this attitude is when a nun repeatedly splashed her with water as they were doing laundry. Although tempted to display her frustration, Thérèse was able to exhibit great patience, controlling her anger and offering up this little annoyance to God as a means of allowing her own personal dissatisfaction to pass.
Therefore, in exploring Thérèse’s life, we can recognize the importance of patience, which allows us to acknowledge our own littleness and weakness. We can learn to accept that, by our own accord, we will always fall short of what God desires of us. But by relying on His grace, we can become holy.
Not all of us are called to enact God’s will with enormous deeds, but we all are called to obey the Lord and lead lives that bring glory to him, even if it is as small as being patient with and loving our neighbor.
Thérèse’s autobiography Story of a Soul is one of the most significant works on Catholic Spirituality to be released. Thérèse was canonized a Saint by Pope Pius XI on n May 17, 1925, and declared a doctor of the Church—meaning she made a significant contribution to the doctrine of the Catholic Church—by Pope John Paul II in 1997. Thérèse is also one of only four female doctors of the church. Her life, though short and seemingly unremarkable, was—and remains— incredibly profound.
Saint Thérèse died of Tuberculosis on September 30, 1897, at the age of 24. Her last days were agonizing–she slowly asphyxiated in a manner similar to Our Lord on the cross. But even in this enormous pain she did not despair or give up love. Her last words were “My God, I love You!”
“Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.” – Saint Thérèse of Lisieux