October 1 was the feast day of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. While meditating on the life story of “Little Thérèse” and on what she outstandingly wrote in her immortal autobiography entitled “The Story of a Soul,” I could not stop myself from jotting down or, to say the least, trying to humbly represent the core of her intimate relationship with God. Hers is a spirituality that is actual, because it is simple. Nevertheless, its simplicity opens our souls to the great abyss of God’s merciful heart.
The Gospel-like simplicity of her message, best depicted as “the little way of childhood,” is based on God’s mercy. God keeps being merciful amid our hurt and pain. Fortunately, God is not obsessed with our sinfulness. He is not engaged in a constant and rigorous watch, so as to punish us severely for the faults we commit. On the contrary, God loves each and every one of us unconditionally. He is always there for us. However, our task is essentially to be in touch with our weakness.
If we want to experience God’s mercy we should truly accept our existential miserable weakness. Hence, in Saint Thérèse’s view, what does it mean to be little? The Saint explains that to be little means acknowledging God’s infinite goodness and one’s insufficiency. We depend on God, much on the same lines as a little child continually depends on his father.
Thérèse writes: “It is needful to remain little before God and to remain little is to recognise one’s nothingness, expect all things from the good God just as a little child expects all things from its father; it is not to be troubled by anything, not to try to make a fortune. Even among poor people, a child is given all it needs, as long as it is very little, but as soon as it has grown up, the father does not want to support it any longer and says: ‘Work, now you are able to take care of yourself’. Because I never want to hear these words, I do not want to grow up, feeling that I can never earn my living, that is, eternal life in heaven. So I have stayed little, and have no other occupation than of gathering flowers of love and sacrifice and of offering them to the good God to please Him”.
Moreover, for the Saint of Lisieux, “to be little also means not to attribute to one’s self the virtues that one practices, believing that one can do something, but to acknowledge that the good God has placed these treasures in the hands of His little child so that the child can make use of them as needed, but always as the treasures of the good God. Finally, it means not be to be discouraged by one’s faults because children often fall but they are too little to hurt themselves badly”.
The key attitude which opens this immense harvest of holiness in front of our souls is that of having confidence in God’s infinite mercy.
According to Thérèse, although “we can never have enough confidence in God who is so good, so powerful, so merciful” yet if we can just simply jump into his infinite ocean of mercy we can dare say with her: “I know what it means to count on His mercy”. I am sure that in our personal lives there have been moments when God’s merciful touch was so tangible that it is hardly impossible for us to deny its wondrous saving effects.
Do I really believe in God’s infinite goodness for me and acknowledge that I heavily depend on him? Am I humble enough to trust him always, especially when I sin?
■ Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap