In this reflection, we dive into the mysticism of St. Therese of Lisieux.

October 1 is the feast of St. Therese of Lisieux, a tremendous Gospel-based mystic. Therese lived a rather uneventful life, at least by our standards. Born in 1873, she hardly ever left her hamlet, Lisieux, in France. She moved from her childhood home to the local Carmelite convent, where she died when she was twenty-four, in 1897. Yet she lived an extraordinary inner life, because she really got—and I mean got!—the essence of the gospel. She was an illustration of one of Jesus’s parables come to life. Her autobiography, A Story of a Soul, was published a year after her death. It became a late-nineteenth-century “best-seller.” People all over the world reported how their lives were changed by reading Story of a Soul. Therese also left behind numerous letters to priests, her sisters, and fellow Carmelites. In all these writings, she described her “Little Way” of trust, love, and surrender to God.

Therese teaches us that God alone is our holiness. This means we don’t have to expect perfection from ourselves! In fact, such an expectation is counterproductive and even harmful to the spiritual life. If we want to live like mystics, Therese would advise us to surrender when we feel weak and helpless. She would add that accepting our weakness and failure allows us to take the focus off ourselves and let God’s mercy into our hearts.

Therese came to a profound insight: we cannot change ourselves, but God can and will. All we need to do is surrender in loving trust to God. With this attitude, we can welcome experiences of weakness! We can welcome them because they are more opportunities to open to God in simple trust. We cannot be big in God’s presence. We must be little. We must recognize our own nothingness—not because we are inherently bad, but because this opens us to give ourselves to God. Being little, recognizing we are poor and in need, forces us to go to God and trust in the infinite Divine Mercy.

Therese knew that God loves our littleness, our weakness. Just as a father loves his helpless infant, God loves us. Actually, it’s even better! God is attracted to our powerlessness! Therese calls us to surrender within weakness, to accept our failures as experiences of divine mercy. She assures us that God’s mercy in Christ will lift us up, transform us, and make us whole. She writes, “To reach perfection, I do not need to grow up. On the contrary, I need to stay little, to become more and more little.” Our littleness attracts God! We have to stay little!

We find it so difficult to accept our inability to change ourselves. When it comes to holiness, we want to do it; we want to be in charge of our own personal holiness project. We would prefer grandiose conversion experiences, when in reality grace changes us slowly and imperceptibly. We want to feel we’re doing something, achieving something, getting somewhere. We want to see our progress. When we let life change us instead of imposing our holy imperial egos onto life, we open up to life. We become holy when we consent to reality as it is without trying to change it according to our personal wishes. The little way, then, is a way of self-acceptance that is a simultaneous surrender to God. In this sense, authentic self-acceptance is God-acceptance. God loves us as we are. Our attitude should be no less. Remaining little means accepting our nothingness and expecting everything from God. It means not worrying about anything or getting upset about anything, especially when it comes to our failure to live a holy life. Through this experience of littleness, Therese chops away at our perfectionism, which is our desire to want to be so good that we don’t need anyone or anything, including God. Perfection eases out our need for mercy. In other words, self-sufficiency, or thinking we can do it all on our own, is the enemy of the little way.

Therese encourages us to be children. Her little way, she writes, is “the surrender of the little child who sleeps without fear in its Father’s arms.” Her image of the child is startling in its simplicity and depth. Children fall all the time. They get back up with the help of their parents. Just so, in the spiritual life, we fall all the time. We can get right back up with the help of our heavenly Father, our divine Mother. We have to expect to fall! Equally, we have to expect God will raise us up. Put simply, our job is to let God do it.

Whenever we become preoccupied with doing something right or being perfect, we have veered off course. Perfectionism is about self, not about God. This is not to condemn the perfectionist for yet another fault they need to fix, but simply to help offer a solution, a mystical in particular. Therese says, “Yes, it suffices to humble oneself, to bear with one’s imperfections. That is real sanctity.” Each of us needs a strong dose of patient self-love. Getting upset over our faults only makes the situation worse. If, instead, we can follow Therese at this moment, we will know peace. Suppose we make a mistake and get upset about it. Feelings of stupidity, anger, defeatism, and inadequacy can overwhelm us. We can follow the little way by taking these feelings to be moments of prayer in which we renew our faith in God. Precisely in these feelings, we surrender to God. Therese tells us, “One has only to love Him, without looking at one’s self, without examining one’s faults too much.” We just look at Jesus without wallowing in the self-pity that normally follows on some disappointment or failure.

Here, then, is our practice: self-acceptance and surrender to God. When we mess up, we accept our mess and hand ourselves over to God without any fretting over the mess. “All too often we get agitated instead of relying trustingly on God . . . our hearts are riddled with fears and doubts,” says Jacques Philippe. Through the practice of self-acceptance and surrender, we stay focused on loving God and others. When we experience our weakness, we turn to God and patiently put up with ourselves as we are. God does not expect perfection from us, so neither should we! “What really pleases Jesus is that He sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope that I have in His mercy . . . This is my only treasure . . . why would this treasure not be yours?” The little way of Saint Therese of Lisieux consists of simply and totally trusting in the divine mercy while accepting ourselves as we are. Bearing our weaknesses, we keep our hearts and minds anchored in God. Letting God be our treasure is all that matters. “I see it is sufficient to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself as a child into God’s arms.”