No, I Won’t Get Discouraged ~ St. Therese, The Way of Trust & Love

Tomorrow, Oct. 3rd, is the Feast of St. Therese, the Little Flower! What a wonderful and inspiring saint!

by Fr. Jacques Philippe, The Way of Trust and Love

We saw little Thérèse facing this difficulty: she desired to become holy, but holiness lay beyond her capacity. Her reaction was to think: I cannot get there; I am tempted by discouragement. But no, I won’t get discouraged, because God does not ask for what is impossible.

Recall another event from Thérèse’s life. When she made her First Holy Communion at the age of eleven, she made three resolutions that I think are very good ones for us too.

First: “I will struggle against my pride.” (We shall see a little later what that means in practice when we talk about humility.)

Second: “I will entrust myself to the Blessed Virgin Mary every day by saying the Memorare.” That’s also a very good thing to do!

Third, perhaps most important: “I will never get discouraged!”

 So she wasn’t discouraged, mainly because she was filled with confidence, sensing that her desires came from God, who is fair and could never inspire us with unrealizable ambitions.

A path toward holiness was, therefore, certainly possible, but she needed to find it. The solution that might occur to us—“to grow up, to become great”—was discounted by Thérèse.

“It is impossible for me to grow up, I must put up with myself as I am, with all my imperfections. I cannot change myself,” she recognized. “I have to accept myself as I am, with all my faults.”

We cannot change ourselves. We can make little efforts, but only God can really change us.

On this topic, we need to understand something else: we can’t change other people either! Sometimes we wear ourselves out trying to improve others. It is better to accept them as they are. And then a small miracle happens: when we accept them as they are, they begin to change little by little.

That is the secret of living together, whether for families, married couples, or communities. So the answer was not for Thérèse to grow up and become great, because she couldn’t.

There had to be another way. Where? She began her search, encouraged by the Gospel, which told her, “Everyone who seeks, finds!”

But I want to find how to get to Heaven by a little way that is quite straight, quite short: a completely new little way. Thérèse was not prepared to accept any old answer to her problem. What she wanted was, first of all, a way that was “quite straight.”

She could not be made to do a thousand complicated things; she needed straightforward things that would go directly to the goal.

A way that was “quite short”: she didn’t want to waste time; she wanted to get quickly to the goal, holiness. Note, though, that achieving holiness takes a great deal of patience.

Inviting one of those whom he was directing to develop patience, St. Seraphim of Sarov said, “Holiness is not a pear that is eaten in a day.”

But still we should aspire to find the quickest possible way to it, along which we can travel without wasting time or energy: one that goes directly to the point. A little way that is “completely new.” That is her most surprising expression.

She has her nerve, this twenty-year-old who wants to find a new way to holiness after nearly two thousand years of Christianity! A new path to Heaven … that really is bold!

 How did the Church take to that? Had the theologians who pronounced in favor of Thérèse being made a Doctor of the Church actually read this passage?

The way Thérèse proposes is new on several counts.

In the first place, quite simply, she rediscovered the Gospel in its freshness and originality: the Gospel is always new. It is always good news, a new light. We get shut up inside our habits, routines, mistrustfulness, mediocre aims, and lukewarmness; in the face of all of that, the Gospel is always a new word.

Several of the psalms begin with these words: “Sing to the Lord a new song.” That is surprising, because we repeat the same psalms, say these same words again and again. But sung with love, the song really is always new, because love makes everything new all the time. Love never tires.

The Holy Spirit can renew the love in our hearts every morning, as well as our faith and trust.

The path discovered by Thérèse is a return to the novelty of the Gospel in contrast with our narrow-mindedness, our human limitations, our permanent blocks and hard-heartedness. The Gospel is always new: it always opens up new vistas, new and unforeseeable paths.

We will never cease discovering the newness of the Gospel, because we will never cease discovering the ever-new richness of God’s love and mercy.

There is a second sense in which this way is new, namely, by comparison with the mentalities confronting Thérèse even in the Carmelite convent.

The piety of the nuns whose life she shared had many good elements, but there were also persistent traces of Jansenism, a difficulty in perceiving the goodness of God, a great emphasis on his justice, the severity of his demands, and, as I said earlier, a tendency to confuse holiness with certain extraordinary manifestations, which did of course sometimes occur in the lives of some saints (miracles, ecstasies, rigorous penances, heroic undertakings), but which are not the essence of holiness.

This encouraged a tendency to exclude from holiness those we might call “ordinary people”—poor and little ones in particular. Thérèse had the grace to restore the correct view of what holiness is, not the idea of it that people have sometimes made up, but what God really proposes to us in the Gospel, something accessible to everyone.

As St. Paul says in the letter to the Ephesians, in Christ we all have free access to the Father.

Finally, her way is new in a third sense: for her personally it represented a new phase in her life, a change of perspective, a sort of inner revolution that was immensely liberating.

Thérèse had suffered for a long time from the fear that her inner poverty and imperfections were displeasing to God and separated her from him. She had carried a heavy load of worry about this, especially during her first years in Carmel, which were marked by great inner dryness and a keen sense of her limitations.

At a certain moment when going to confession to a Capuchin father, she came to understand that it was just the opposite: her “defects did not displease God” and her littleness attracted God’s love, just as a father is moved by the weakness of his children and loves them still more as soon as he sees their good will and sincere love.

Join me as I read to you this lovely article by Joseph Breig, husband and father, who wrote his thoughts about the great influence the rosary has had on his life and his family….”When I get to heaven – as I trust I shall – something very embarrassing is bound to happen. As sure as shooting; somebody who has known me rather too well for comfort on this earth is going to come up to me and say, in a loud voice enough for everybody to hear, ‘How in the world did you get in here?’”

We are called to be great Apostles of Love in our ordinary, daily life. We are Christ’s Hands and Feet as we wipe noses, feed hungry little ones and change diapers with an attitude of service and love. When we are cheerful to those we rub shoulders with each day, when we kindly open our door to those who enter into our home, we are taking part in Christ’s Apostolic Work. “Jesus was an Apostle in the stable of Bethlehem, in the shop of St. Joseph, in His anguish in Gethsemane and on Calvary no less than when He was going through Palestine, teaching the multitudes or disputing with the doctors of the law.” – Divine Intimacy, Painting by Morgan Weistling http://amzn.to/2p0dxg8 (afflink)

A beautiful way to deepen your Advent experience…for yourself and your family. The Catholic Mother’s Traditional Advent Journal available here. Printable available here.

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