By: Annia Blasi (Wichita TEC)
“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.” - St. Thérèse of Lisieux
My devotion to Thérèse of Lisieux began at seventeen when a friend gave me a copy of her autobiography, The Story Of A Soul, and said, “Just read it, trust me.”
As I poured through the book, I discovered the virtuous saint whom the church magnifies (and worthily so), but in her I was also surprised to encounter a young woman who was sensitive, who struggled to be kind her sisters in the convent, who longed to travel as a missionary yet had to accept that she could not, and someone who daily dealt with the little annoyances of others and the loneliness that sometimes accompanies growing up. All things considered; she was ordinary.
But it wasn’t her ordinary life within the convent that made her so great; it was her extraordinary response to the small and mundane. Thérèse treated every moment as an opportunity to love God in a tangible way, by offering up all difficult moments - from small inconveniences like getting splashed by dirty laundry water - up to the suffering that came with enduring tuberculosis at the end of her life. She faced her daily work and the people encountered within it as part of God’s loving will for her life, with a total acceptance that the small life she lived offered all the grace and opportunity to become a saint she would ever need. By giving herself away in love daily, she spread the love of God farther than her feet could have ever travelled.
Thérèse ’s “Little Way” invites every Christian, and especially every young adult involved with TEC, to notice and see the opportunities that God offers us for love, self-gift, and joy within the confines of our ordinary lives. Not all of us can be missionaries to those across the world, but all of us can wash the dish that someone leaves behind, smile at the person who might bother us a little more than we’d like to admit, and by these little ways, we slowly both encounter the person of Christ within our lives, and better become the hands of Christ that serve, the feet of Christ that pursue with love, and the heart of Christ that pours over.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux believed that the ordinary moments of life aren’t only salvageable, but sanctifiable, and it is within them that we are called to become saints, to grow constantly in our “yes” to God, and to build up the Church one grain of “wheat” at a time. The sainthood of adventurous heights that can be dreamed of – the kind that made St. Joan of Arc go to battle, and Bl. Pier Giorgio give everything that he had to the poor – is the same sainthood that we are called to, although for most of us, it is attainable only in our littleness.
Truly, to the heart that loves, all is grace, and all is well.
Author Annia Blasi is a business/pre-med student at Kansas State University, and has attended and served TEC retreats in the Wichita area. She is passionate about good conversations, campfires, being outside, spontaneous dance parties with friends, and most of all: our beautiful Catholic faith.
