A Catholic friend of mine once said of St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s little way: “Being little is great – if you can manage it.” I could tell by the despondency behind his eyes that he didn’t think he could. While I have found much consolation from reading St. Thérèse’s writings, I have also experienced a similar despondency. St. Thérèse spoke of an elevator, Jesus’s arms, that would raise her to sanctity, since she could not climb the steep staircase of perfection on her own. She need only act with complete abandonment and boundless confidence, and Jesus would raise her to the heights of holiness. But those very words seemed to me like another steep staircase. The Lord knows, my confidence and abandonment are often anything but boundless and complete. I knew I needed to persistently make small acts of love and confidence, but would I be persistent enough? Or would I keep falling off the little way and continue in a discouraged mediocrity?
One day I was weighing this conundrum in my mind – I remember clearly that I was biking home from Mass – and suddenly Jesus’s words on the cross came to mind: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” I realized in a moment that Jesus had already made the perfect act of confidence and self-abandonment for me. Yes, I am incapable of perfect confidence in God’s love, but Jesus’s heart is all confidence in the Father, and he can live out his confidence within me. I can rely on his confidence in the Father rather than my own. Perhaps for another searching heart, this will not be answer enough, and God will lead him into a deeper understanding. But for me it was enough. If Jesus has made his own my temptations against trust, heard in the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then I can make my own his act of trust, voiced in his other cry, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
St. Thérèse wrote in her autobiography that holiness is “a disposition of the heart that makes us humble and little in the arms of God, aware of our weakness, and confident – in the most audacious way – in his Fatherly goodness.” In other words, holiness is resting like a small child in God’s fatherly arms. But she also recognized that her own efforts to become holy were nothing. So she cried out to God, “I beg you . . . be yourself my Holiness!” From where, then, did she receive her confidence in God’s goodness – her holiness – except from God himself? From whom did she receive her childlike spirit, if not from Christ himself?
In relation to us, Jesus is the King of kings, but in relation to his Father, he is a trusting child. In his divine nature, the Son is equal to the Father in every way, yet he eternally receives his very Being from the Father. His human life expresses this reality: “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. . . For the Father loves the Son, and shows him all that he himself is doing . . . I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.” (John 5:19-30) At the start of Jesus’s ministry, the Father proclaimed to bystanders what Jesus must have known every moment of his life – that he is the beloved Son, in whom the Father is well pleased. At the tomb of Lazarus he prays, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me . . . you always hear me.” (John 11:41-42) When he taught his disciples over and over to see God as a loving father who provides for their needs, he was speaking from experience. From within this confidence, he could remain very lowly in the eyes of the world. He knelt to wash his apostles’ feet; he allowed himself to be taken by force when the Father could have sent legions of angels to prevent his arrest; he opened his arms to mockery and shame on the cross; and when he may well have cursed providence, he asked God to forgive, and he entered into death like a child falling into its father’s arms. He is the one from whom St. Thérèse learned to be bold, confident, humble, and trusting.
Lack of trust in God’s Fatherhood could be called the primal sin. Do we think Jesus expects us to overcome that sin by our own efforts? It is impossible. But Jesus has already made the perfect act of confident self-surrender to the Father, and he sends the Holy Spirit, the spirit of adoption, into our hearts so that we may be reborn as children of God and may cry, “Abba! Father!” The little way, with its emphasis on sacrificing our will to God in the smallest of circumstances, is a path of docility to the Holy Spirit, the spirit of sonship. There are many instances in her autobiography of St. Thérèse asking for the graces she needed in a given moment: for the right words to say to someone, for strength when she was struggling against a temptation, for guidance as she penned her story. Eager to submit her will to God’s, she knew she could not do so on her own. So she asked to be moved by the Holy Spirit’s guidance. In doing so, she was remade in the image of Christ, whose human nature is constantly, perfectly directed by the Holy Spirit.
There are many things we can do to cooperate with the working of the Holy Spirit and to grow in confidence. Here are a few. For one, we can regularly spend time with the Gospels. If we have not read through a whole Gospel in a while, we should do so. We can dwell on the same scenes that inspired St. Thérèse, such as the parables of the prodigal son and of the lost sheep, and the stories of the Samaritan woman at the well and of Mary Magdalen. Secondly, we can make it a petition every time we receive Communion (or make a spiritual communion) to share Jesus’s confidence in God’s fatherly providence. Thirdly, we can listen for the dearest desires in our spiritual life (desires that we might be embarrassed to share with others, so far above our current state of holiness as they seem) and begin regularly thanking God ahead of time for fulfilling them. For “whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it, and you will,” and “if you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Mark 11:24; Luke 11:13) All the while, we can keep looking at Jesus on the cross and know that we are only participating in his perfect acts of trust, in his holiness.
During this time after Pentecost, when we are called to sanctify the ordinary, let us remember that being little is too big a task for us to do on our own. Let us ask the Holy Spirit, the spirit of adoption and the spirit of Love between the Father and the Son, to conform us to Jesus, so that we can participate in his childlike confidence in the Father and say with him, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
