“Everything is a grace, everything is the direct effect of our Father's love - difficulties, contradictions, humiliations, all the soul's miseries, her burdens, her needs - everything, because through them, she learns humility, realizes her weakness. Everything is a grace because everything is God's gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events - to the heart that loves, all is well."
“Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that the Church being a body composed of different members, the most essential, the most noble of all the organs would not be wanting to her; I understood that the Church has a heart and that this heart is burning with love; that it is love alone which makes the members work, that if love were to die away apostles would no longer preach the Gospel, martyrs would refuse to shed their blood. I understood that love comprises all vocations that love is everything, that it embraces all times and all places because it is eternal!”
The Little Way
St Thérèse’s spirituality was rooted in the Gospels which she carried next to her heart. As a result of her autobiography
The Story of a Soul, her hidden and seemingly insignificant life has opened up the Gospel of God’s love and mercy to countless grateful men and women. Nothing was too small or too ordinary to give to God, for him to accomplish extraordinary things in and through her. St Thérèse was deeply nourished by the writings of St John of the Cross and in her short life she wholeheartedly lived his “all or nothing”. Part of her gift to us is that she so embodied his teaching that her spirituality becomes a window into his.
St Thérèse died in 1897, was beatified in 1923, canonised in 1925 and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1997, the Centenary year of her death. Her feast day is 1st October.