by Ethel Hornbeck

I first encountered Therese of Lisieux at a used book sale. Having grown up in a self-consciously saint-less tradition, I had never heard of this young, 19th-century French Carmelite. I cannot explain my impulse to unearth that worn-out edition of Story of a Soul. I do know that despite significant barriers of language, culture and theology, her brilliant spirit shone forth, and she has remained one of my most cherished and influential spiritual companions ever since.

Therese, at first glance, seems a most unlikely wisdom teacher for 21st-century spiritual seekers. Born into an ultra-traditional Catholic family, she entered a convent at the tender age of 15 and died there just over nine years later. Her essential wisdom, woven throughout poetry, plays, letters, conversations and autobiography, is at once attractive and elusive, more impressionistic tapestry than spiritual map. As I have struggled to find words to describe this, her often repeated refrain of "confidence and love" keeps playing within me like a breath prayer. These two little words encapsulate well, I think, Therese's invitation to live in joyful trust that God is everywhere and Love is everything.

Confidence, for Therese, refers not to self-confidence but to her simple trust in a God present in all things, events, experiences and desires. By her own account, she was a painfully self-absorbed and fairly spoiled child. Her early years were filled with suffering and loss (including the death of her mother and the loss of several surrogate mothers). Yet, despite sorrows and self-preoccupation, Therese possessed an exceptional capacity for God; she saw Majesty in the crashing of the ocean, Love for her personally in stars that spelled her name, a holy invitation to compassion in the sad smile of a beggar. As she grows into adolescence, she senses God at work deep in her own heart; in her famous "Christmas conversion" (at the ripe old age of almost 14) she insists that Jesus changes her instantly, transforming self-absorption into compassion.

Therese's confidence is also nurtured through personal experience of beauty, goodness and love, along with a willingness to trust that experience. Although steeped in a theological climate of sin, judgment and eternal consequences, her capacity to focus on "God's mercy" became a lifeline to which she returned again and again. It was not until three years after entering Carmel that she was, finally, "launched full sail upon the waves of confidence and love" when a spiritual director assured her, simply, that God was pleased with her. "Fear made me recoil," she wrote, "with love...I actually flew."

That radical perception of God's unconditional affirmation and love ignited her passionate desire to both receive and return that love. What emerged was what she called her "little way" of confidence and love. Confidence in God's unconditional love for her empowered her own commitment to live love in each and every moment. "I have no other means of proving my love for You other than strewing flowers, that is not allowing one little sacrifice to escape, not one look, one word, profiting by all the smallest things, and doing them through love." Confidence and love thus become both means and end in Therese's "little way," a way that she passionately believed was open to all.

Therese's desire for love grows to become "greater than the universe," something that she desperately wanted to share, longing to be: an apostle preaching the gospel on all five continents at once; a missionary from the beginning of creation until the consummation of the ages; able to accomplish all the actions of all the saints all at once; trusting that all desires inspired by God were destined to be satisfied. Finally, she reaches her ecstatic conclusion that "Love comprised all vocations, that love was everything, that it embraced all times and places...my vocation is love...I shall be Love. Thus I shall be everything, and thus my dream will be realized."

Therese wrote these words as she lay dying the slow and painful death of tuberculosis, in the grip of a spiritual darkness that enveloped her last months of life. Even in pain and darkness, she trusted. In fact, her confidence and her love seemed to flourish in the midst of the most painful unknowing.

She was convinced that death would open new ways for her to satisfy her desire to be love. Several months before she died, she said, "I feel that my mission is about to begin, my mission to make God loved as I love Him, to teach souls my little way." Indeed, in one short century, Therese emerged from near total obscurity to become one of history's most well-known, -loved, -read and -traveled (her relics having traversed the globe) spiritual figures.

Therese was no towering visionary or charismatic reformer; she left behind neither a spiritual blueprint nor detailed instructions on prayer. She offers us no gardens to water, interior castles to traverse, or mountains to ascend. But her simple story offers an extraordinary vision of an ordinary life lived fully in Love and the invitation to each of us to share in it. She reminds us to look deeply around and within and to trust what we find, no matter how unlikely, with confidence that God is always present, acting, and loving—in dusty old books and dark nights alike. She invites us to a renewed confidence in the transformative power of living love in every moment and circumstance and in our heart's desires, both small (harmony at home) and large (peace on our planet). She leaves us a promise, a path, a plea and a prayer in just two small words: confidence and love.

Ethel is a graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program (SGP), Winter 2001, and a member of the SGP staff.