Humility, repentance and trust in God’s mercy
By Fr. Michael Psaromatis
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia
“The splendour of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent.” Thérèse of Lisieux wrote those words in The Story of a Soul. She went on to say, “If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.” Being raised as an Orthodox Christian, I found myself returning to that little violet. Her words about bearing another person’s faults stayed with me too. Both have found their way into my pastoral care (Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, Manuscript A, folios 2 verso–3 recto, English wording varies between translations).
Thérèse was a French Catholic nun, known as the Little Flower, who lived long after the churches of East and West had parted. We know the saints of the ancient West as our own. Benedict of Nursia, a monk of sixth-century Italy, belongs to our calendar. Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc and Thérèse lived within the Roman Catholic communion after the separation of East and West. They are not canonised saints of the Orthodox Church. Father Lev Gillet, an Orthodox priest who lived among Christians of the West, once imagined Saint Seraphim of Sarov greeting her as he greeted those who came to him: “my joy” (Lev Gillet [A Monk of the Eastern Church], Orthodox Spirituality, 2nd ed., St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978, pp. X–xi, quoted by Fr Michael Plekon).
As an Orthodox priest I read Thérèse, looking at the words and acts of love that speak to the Orthodox phronema, the way the Church teaches us to think and live. Her trust in Christ, her repentance and her struggle to love the women beside her have helped me see familiar teachings more clearly. I want to share what has stayed with me, especially where her words have helped me speak of God’s mercy to people frightened by their own weakness.
She was born in 1873, the youngest daughter of Louis and Zélie Martin. Louis made watches and Zélie made lace. There was prayer in their home, but also the bustle of raising five daughters. When Zélie died, Thérèse was four. She later remembered how easily she cried after her mother’s passing. The family moved to Lisieux, where Louis took his youngest daughter walking, visited churches with her and sometimes asked her to give alms to people around them. They also went fishing. She knew what it was to be loved by her father, and she knew how much it frightened her to lose someone she loved.
Her sister Pauline became almost a second mother. When Pauline entered the Carmelite convent in Lisieux, Thérèse felt another person slipping away from her. At ten she became seriously ill. Her sisters prayed beside her bed, near a statue of the Virgin Mary, and she later said that she saw the Virgin smile. As she grew older, she suffered from scruples. She once felt guilty for wearing a pale blue ribbon in her hair and thought she had to confess it. She wanted to please God, yet even a small pleasure could leave her afraid she had offended Him.
She would hear about divine justice from those near her, but her home had also shown her tenderness. Louis was patient with her. Her sisters knew her distress and tried to help. She had grown up with confession, Communion and prayer to the Mother of God.
At Christmas in 1886, when she was thirteen, Louis returned tired from Midnight Mass and saw her shoes by the fireplace, where Christmas gifts were placed in them according to the family custom. He remarked that he was glad this would be the last year of that childhood custom. Thérèse overheard him. Céline, her older sister, expected her to dissolve into tears and urged her not to come downstairs yet. Instead, Thérèse went down and opened the gifts cheerfully, letting her father enjoy the moment. She later called that Christmas her conversion. She believed the infant Christ had given her strength to act with love while she was still hurt by her father’s remark.
The next spring, at fourteen, she asked Louis for permission to enter Carmel, the Carmelite convent in Lisieux where Pauline was already a nun. They spoke in the garden. He picked a little white flower and showed her how carefully God had brought it into being. She kept it pressed in her copy of The Imitation of Christ. Years later Thérèse called the account of her life the story of a little white flower. Louis was willing to let her go, though she was his youngest child and her departure would cost him. Her age was the difficulty. The Church authorities thought her far too young.
I think of the little white flower her father gave her when I read what she later wrote about the rose, the lily and the violet. She recognised that each flower had its own beauty, and that the little violet did not need to become a rose. Growing up in the Orthodox Church, I was taught to value prayer and acts of love that might pass unnoticed. Her image of the different flowers gave me a way to speak of that within pastoral care, especially when someone measures their small offering against a life that looks more impressive. Saint Paul speaks of different gifts given by the Spirit, each with a place in the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:4–7, 18). The different flowers remind me that we can receive our own small calling with gratitude and rejoice in another person’s gift.
That summer, while she and Céline were still living at home, she read about Henri Pranzini, a man condemned to death for murder. Reports said he showed no repentance. Thérèse prayed for him and asked Céline to pray as well. She hoped for some sign that he had turned to Christ, though she said she would trust in mercy without seeing one. After his execution a newspaper reported that Pranzini had kissed a crucifix. She called him her first child, the first person she believed her prayer had helped bring to God.
Saint Isaac the Syrian, the seventh-century ascetic beloved in the Orthodox Church, wrote of a merciful heart moved even for those who have done harm. I think of his words when I read about Thérèse praying for a condemned murderer.
Her determination to enter Carmel took her as far as Rome. In November 1887, before she had entered the convent, she appealed directly to Pope Leo XIII. He told her to follow the decision of the Church authorities responsible for her admission, and the attendants finally led her away as she continued to plead. She left in tears. Permission came later. During the months of waiting she checked her self-will, held back retorts and looked for small services she could do unnoticed. She called these her mortifications. She knew the stories of great ascetics with their fasts and labours. Her own struggle was with her own will. Our monks have long called this cutting off self-will. In April 1888, at fifteen, she entered the convent in Lisieux. She would be known as Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, recalling both the child of Bethlehem and the suffering face of Christ.
Her father’s health deteriorated, and in 1889 he was admitted to the Bon Sauveur hospital in Caen. Her sisters cared for him through the years of his illness. Thérèse could neither return to the home he had made for her nor do much to ease what he was suffering.
In 1891 a Franciscan priest, Father Alexis Prou, came to the convent to lead a retreat and hear confessions. Thérèse was hesitant to speak to him. She wondered whether her troubles would seem small beside the sins a priest might expect to hear. But he understood the weight they carried for her. He reassured her that her involuntary imperfections did not wound God as she feared. She later wrote that he had sent her “full sail upon the waves of confidence and love” (Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript A, folio 80 verso).
He helped her ask for herself the mercy she had sought for Pranzini. Thérèse wrote that she had long believed God to be more tender than a mother. After that confession she could speak of it with greater freedom.
Louis died in July 1894. Céline, who had helped care for him, entered Carmel later that year. By then Thérèse was guiding women newly arrived in the community. She also wrote short plays for the sisters to perform at their celebrations. Two were about Joan of Arc, and Thérèse herself played Joan.
She still wanted to be holy, and the lives of great saints could make her feel very small. By late 1894 she was finding encouragement in Scripture, reading the invitation to the little ones in Proverbs and Isaiah’s image of a mother comforting her child. She pictured Christ lifting her as someone might carry a child up a staircase too steep to climb alone. “Your arms, Jesus, are the elevator … I must stay little and become more so,” she wrote (Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript C, folio 3 recto). Christ’s call to become like little children comes to mind, with its invitation to humility and trust in the Father (Matthew 18:3–4). She called it her little way, trusting Him to receive the small acts of love she could offer in an ordinary day. Then she went back to the prayers, work and people of the convent.
Saint Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, the twentieth-century Athonite elder, spoke of the soul as a garden. Water the flowers, he taught, and the weeds begin to wither. He urged people distressed by their faults to turn their strength towards Christ, even to throw themselves into His embrace (Saint Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, section on the spiritual struggle). His words come to mind when Thérèse speaks of being lifted in Jesus’ arms. She still went to confession and kept the convent rule. She was learning to look towards Him without letting each little failure fill her whole field of vision. In Orthodox life, trusting God’s mercy goes hand in hand with repentance and our willing cooperation with His grace, through prayer, the sacraments and the daily struggle to love.
In June 1895 she offered herself to what she called God’s Merciful Love. Some of her contemporaries offered themselves to divine justice, willing to suffer for sinners. Her own prayer was that God would fill her with His mercy and make her life an answer to it. She still expected to stand before Him at the end, but she imagined herself there with empty hands. Those hands had worked, prayed and helped the women around her. She knew that whatever love she managed to give had first come from Christ.
In a poem written that year she called charity her only star. At Carmel the people around her were the ones she had to love. Years earlier she had written to Céline, “Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them” (Thérèse, Letter 65 to Céline, 20 October 1888). I hear Saint Paul’s words here, that even giving away all we possess profits us nothing if we have no love (1 Corinthians 13:3). Our fasting, prayers and almsgiving are meant to open the heart to God and to our neighbour.
One of the Carmelite nuns, Thérèse admitted, had “a talent for displeasing me in everything” (Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript C). The nun’s manner and way of speaking grated on her. Thérèse prayed for her, offered her help and tried to greet her warmly. Sometimes she left a conversation before her irritation turned into an unkind word. There, in the pause before the sharp word, I hear our fathers’ teaching on nepsis, watchfulness over the heart. The nun eventually asked why Thérèse always seemed so happy to see her. Thérèse later explained that it was Jesus, hidden in the nun’s soul, who made her happy.
Saint Seraphim of Sarov spent years in the forest in prayer and strict fasting. He told Nicholas Motovilov, a man who sought his counsel, that the aim of Christian life was the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. Prayer and fasting served that aim (Saint Seraphim of Sarov, conversation with Nicholas Motovilov on the aim of Christian life). When people came to him, he greeted them with “Christ is risen, my joy!” Thérèse also tried to let prayer shape the way she treated others. She prayed for the nun whose manner and words she found so trying, helped her and greeted her warmly. Her kindness was a deliberate act of love, even while the irritation remained. I can hear why Father Lev Gillet imagined the two (St Seraphim and Thérèse) meeting.
There was also Sister Saint-Pierre, an elderly nun who needed help walking from the chapel to the dining room. She complained that Thérèse walked too quickly, then complained about the way she held her. Thérèse learnt to slow down, see her properly seated and cut the bread the older woman could not manage for herself. One winter evening she heard music in the distance. She imagined the warm room and the young women enjoying themselves. Then she looked at Sister Saint-Pierre and the dim walls around them. She said she was glad to be there.
She wrote, “True charity consists in bearing all our neighbours’ defects—not being surprised at their weakness, but edified at their smallest virtues” (Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript C, folio 12 recto and following). Those words have been helpful in pastoral care. I remember them when the same fault has worn away our patience with someone. Thérèse could identify exactly what tried her in a sister, and she could still look for a small virtue. During Great Lent we pray with Saint Ephraim that God would let us see our own faults and not judge our brother. I think of Thérèse holding Sister Saint-Pierre’s arm when I hear that prayer. She knew the woman was about to complain again, and she slowed down.
During Holy Week of 1896, Thérèse began coughing blood, a sign of the tuberculosis that would take her life the following year. Around Easter, a deeper trial began. The heaven she had once longed for became obscured, and she was troubled by the thought that death might open on nothing at all. She continued to pray, but the felt consolation she had known was gone. At Pascha we sing of Christ trampling down death by death. She kept praying to the risen Lord while she was assailed by thoughts that the grave held only darkness.
That September she wrote to her sister Marie of wanting to be a missionary, an apostle, even a martyr. Reading Saint Paul on the Church as a body, she found words for what she could offer from Carmel: “In the heart of the Church, my Mother, I will be Love” (Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript B). In the same pages she wrote, “Jesus does not demand great actions from us, but simply surrender and gratitude” (Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript B, folio 1 verso). I think of the Lord’s Prayer, where we ask that the Father’s will be done, and of the thanksgiving at the heart of our Divine Liturgy. We entrust ourselves to Him and answer His grace with the life we have.
She described that answer in small, simple acts: “Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word, always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love” (adapted from Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript B, folios 4 recto–4 verso). The ascetic struggle reaches into these moments. We cut off the sharp reply, give up the need to have our own way and make room for the person before us.
At Christmas 1896 she sent Céline a note written as though the Virgin Mary were speaking to her. Céline was disappointed with herself. “If you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, you will give me a sweet shelter,” Thérèse wrote in the Mother of God’s voice. She went on to reassure her that Jesus would seek her if she wandered (Thérèse, Letter 211 to Céline (Sister Geneviève), 24 December 1896, translated from the original French). I recognise something of our struggle with pride in this. Discovering our weakness can hurt because we wanted to be better than we are. We can bring that painful discovery to Christ, repent and begin again. Humility lets us receive His mercy even while the injury to our self-image still hurts.
Those who could not believe became very near to her. In a memoir written during her final illness, she pictured herself sitting at their table and asking God to have mercy on them. Years earlier she had prayed for Pranzini at the edge of death. Now she prayed for those whose doubt had become familiar to her. The Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément later placed Thérèse alongside Saint Silouan of Mount Athos when writing about prayer for the whole world. He remembered her image of sitting at the sinners’ table (Olivier Clément, “Être chrétien pour être vivant”, in Anachroniques, Desclée de Brouwer, 1990, reproduced on Pages orthodoxes. See also Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript C, folios 5–7).
In the same memoir Thérèse wrote, “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart, a simple look turned towards heaven, a cry of gratitude and love in the midst of trial as well as joy” (Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript C, folio 25 recto). When she could summon no good thought, she slowly said the Our Father and the Hail Mary. Orthodox Christians know the refuge of a short prayer, often the Jesus Prayer, especially when the mind will not settle. The heart can turn towards God when we feel very little. She kept praying even as heaven felt silent. This too is familiar in our spiritual life, where faithfulness in prayer transports us through the loss of support.
Thérèse had also been asked to pray for Maurice Bellière, a French seminarian who hoped to become a missionary in Africa. He first wrote to the convent in 1895, and their own correspondence began the following year. He worried about his faults and whether he would remain faithful to his calling. She answered him while her health was failing and her own sense of heaven had grown dim.
In July 1897 she told him a story. A child has disobeyed his father and runs back into his arms, confessing what he has done. He promises to behave, though the father knows he will stumble again, and asks to be punished with a kiss (Thérèse, Letter 258 to Abbé Maurice Bellière, 18 July 1897, in The Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, trans. John Clarke, OCD, ICS Publications). Thérèse wanted Bellière to see a father who knew his child thoroughly and could still receive him. I think of the father in the Gospel running down the road to meet his prodigal son, the story we hear as Great Lent approaches.
In her last memoir she wrote, “Even if I had on my conscience every sin that could be committed, I would go, my heart broken with repentance, and throw myself into the arms of Jesus.” She continued, “It is not because God, in His tender mercy, has preserved my soul from mortal sin that I rise to Him through confidence and love” (Thérèse, Story of a Soul, Manuscript C, folios 36 verso–37 recto, translated from the original French). She had told her sisters that even if she had committed every possible crime, “I would always have the same confidence” (Thérèse, Last Conversations, 11 July 1897, entry 6). Her heart is broken with repentance, and she still comes towards Him. I hear the prayer of the publican and see the prodigal son returning to his father. In our own life of confession we identify our sins and bring them to Christ, trusting that His mercy can heal what we cannot heal ourselves.
Bellière found it hard to speak to Christ so freely. She understood and told him that it would take time. He could begin by bringing the faults that troubled him into prayer. In that same letter she corrected his belief that the thought of heaven was making her happy. At that time it brought her no joy (Thérèse, Letter 258 to Abbé Maurice Bellière, 18 July 1897). Eight days later, on 26 July, she wrote to him about Louis too, remembering the father who had raised her after Zélie’s death and whose illness had cost the family so much. Her hand trembled, and she had to finish the letter over several sittings (Thérèse, Letter 261 to Abbé Maurice Bellière, 26 July 1897).
Her pain grew worse. She said that she could remain patient only by living one moment at a time, looking at the present instead of what she might still have to endure. “God gives me courage in proportion to my sufferings,” she told her sisters (Thérèse, Last Conversations, 15 August 1897, entry 6). I think of Saint Paul hearing that God’s grace was sufficient for him, that His strength was made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). She had also said, “Yes, I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth” (Thérèse, Last Conversations, 17 July 1897). Her hope recalls for me the continuing love of the saints for those on earth, the love to which we turn when we ask for their prayers. On 25 August, just over five weeks before her death, she sent Bellière one last message. She died on 30 September 1897, aged twenty-four. Her sisters gathered the recollections she had written, and they were published the following year as The Story of a Soul.
Bellière later served as a missionary in Africa. He had never met Thérèse, the woman who had written to him. Her words had travelled with him into the life for which she had prayed.
I return to the last lines she sent Bellière. She was dying, troubled by doubts that had taken away the joy she once felt when thinking of heaven. Yet she continued to turn towards Christ. The child who once feared the smallest fault was telling a man she had never met that he could run to the Father. She put it this way: “I cannot fear a God who made himself so small for me. I love him, for he is nothing but love and mercy” (Thérèse, Letter 266 to Abbé Maurice Bellière, 25 August 1897).
These are the words I incorporate into pastoral care. Sometimes a person is so ashamed of falling again that they can hardly lift their eyes to Christ. I want them to know that they can come to Him, confess what has happened and begin again. I recognise that same hope in Thérèse. Her words bring me back to the mercy we proclaim in the Church, and to the patient work of loving the people God has placed before us.
