Finding strength through confidence in God

St. Thérèse of Lisieux would be the last person to call herself a woman of strength. Yet, that is exactly what she was. Paradoxically, it was through accepting her own personal weakness and placing all her confidence in God’s merciful love that St. Thérèse became a vessel of and a witness to the strength of the God who is Love.

Though gifted with great natural intelligence and capacity for love, as a child, Thérèse suffered from tremendous emotional fragility after the loss of her mother to cancer when Thérèse was only four years old. She describes herself as crying over the littlest things and then crying over the fact that she had cried. In her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, she wrote: “I was really unbearable because of my extreme touchiness.” She was unable to conquer this weakness, try as she might.

This state lasted until Christmas Eve 1886 when the hypersensitive 14-year-old received the grace of her Christmas conversion. In an instant, she experienced an inflow of grace: Thérèse had discovered the strength of soul which she had lost at the age of four and a half, and she was to persevere in it forever. In her book, she writes, “The work I had been unable to do in ten years was done by Jesus in one instant, contenting himself with my good will, which was never lacking.” The young saint experienced this strength as pure grace, a gift she did not achieve by her own hard work, but which she simply received when Jesus was pleased to give it.

Continuing her spiritual maturation, the Carmelite received the strength and the grace to embrace her own weakness, to accept herself as she was, with all her limitations of nature, all her faults, and the ordinariness of her day to day life. She realized her weakness, which she came to call her “littleness,” was not an obstacle to God’s love, but a magnet for it.

God’s mercy was made manifest by His condescending to her “little soul” and filling it with His love. St. Thérèse’s experience mirrors the first of the beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor of spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” St. Thérèse realized the poverty of her littleness was the open door through which the kingdom of God’s merciful love would inundate her soul and life, helping her persevere in the strength she received from the King of Heaven.

This confidence in God’s unconditional love set St. Thérèse on fire with love: Stating she desired to love God more than He had ever been loved before. She realized she was being called to serve God by fulfilling the ordinary duties of her daily life with heroic fidelity, generosity, and charity and by accepting others as they were and loving them generously, just as Jesus had accepted her and loved her as she was.

The young saint was drawn to heroic souls such as St. Joan of Arc and the French missionary martyr, St. Theophane Venard. She describes herself with the desires of an eagle, but in reality, finding herself a little bird unable to fly. “I look upon myself as a weak little bird, with only a light down as covering. I am not an eagle, but I have only an eagle’s EYES AND HEART. In spite of my extreme littleness, I still dare to gaze upon the Divine Sun, the Sun of Love, and my heart feels within it all the aspirations of an Eagle.” In this parable one can see the relationship between the saint’s acceptance of her own personal weakness and her confidence in God’s faithful love.

Heroism, however, was not absent from her actions. During the 1891-1892 flu epidemic, all but three sisters in St. Thérèse’s monastery became bedridden with the illness. St. Thérèse cared for them, arranged for the funerals of those who succumbed to the illness, and showed extraordinary maturity for her 19 years.
 

Fr. Gregory Ross, OCD, made his first profession as a Discalced Carmelite Friar in 1990 and was ordained a priest in 1995. During his years with the Province of St. Thérèse, he has served as student director, associate professor of dogmatic theology at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, and provincial superior. Since 2011, he has served as vocations director. He is currently serving as pastor and rector at the Basilica of the Little Flower in San Antonio.

Finally, the Carmelite saint of Lisieux showed her strength through the heroic suffering she endured during her death from tuberculosis at the age of 24. To her great physical suffering was added the spiritual suffering of a tremendous trial of faith to which she was submitted. But again, St. Thérèse would be the last person to describe herself as heroic in this situation. She credited any strength which she displayed to the grace of God. She said to one of her sisters: “God gives me courage in proportion to my sufferings. I feel at this moment I couldn’t suffer any more, but I’m not afraid, since if they increase, He will increase my courage at the same time.” We see in these words the secret of St. Thérèse’s “Little Way”: acceptance of personal weakness, coupled with a peaceful trust in God’s faithful love, resulting in a courage of soul that truly reveals St. Thérèse as a woman of strength.