The Childlike Path to Christian Maturity

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - September 28, 2007

On Monday the Church celebrates one of the most lovable, and paradoxical, of saints: a doctor of the Church who did not receive even a high school education; the co-patroness of the missions who never left her strict Carmel cloister; a "little flower" who grew posthumously to become one of the Church's most treasured blossoms.

St. Therese Martin was born in Alençon, France, in 1873 and died of tuberculosis only 24 years later in the city of Lisieux, whose name she has made forever famous. Her life was unspectacular by worldly standards, but in terms of what really matters, she may prove to be one of the most consequential persons of all time.

The ninth and youngest child of Louis et Zélie Martin, she grew up in a home that, like the Holy Family of Nazareth, was centered on the child Jesus. From her parents and elder sisters, she learned how to encounter Jesus in prayer, in the Church, in the Gospels, in the sacraments, in the life of grace, and in the disguise of others. She grew up enveloped in the love of God and the love of her family.

Soon after the death of her mother when she was four, Therese had an experience that marked her whole life. One of the older Martin girls brought her younger sisters a basket filled with dresses, toys, and many other goodies and told the younger sisters to choose one of the various items. Therese paused, reflected, stretched out her arms and said, "I choose all!"

She later called the episode, "a summary of my whole life." She described that, later, when the ideal of Christian perfection was set before her, she realized that to become a saint she could not pick and choose among the things that the Lord was asking of her. If she were to deny herself, pick up her Cross and follow the Lord, that meant she could not select among the sacrifices he was proposing. Like in her childhood, she was moved to exclaim, "My God, I choose all! I don't want to be a saint by halves, I'm not afraid to suffer for you, I fear only one thing: to keep my own will; so take it, for I choose all that you will!"

For her the path to holiness is simple: it's to choose freely to say yes to everything God wants to give, including and especially the Cross. Holiness does not consist fundamentally in doing great things for God, but in allowing God to do great things in us.

This is the essence of St. Therese's "way of spiritual childhood," which John Paul II called a sure path to holiness, happiness and heaven when he named Therese a doctor of the Church ten years ago this October.

For Therese, spiritual childhood involves three simple things.

First is the joyful recognition that through baptism one is a beloved child of God the Father. "See what love the Father has bestowed upon us in letting us be called children of God," St. John writes, "and yet that is what we are!" (1 Jn 3).

Second is the awareness that since we are God's little children, we should have no pretensions to perfection on our own. God the Father looks at us like loving mothers or fathers look at their four year olds: he knows that sometimes we're going to break stuff, to make mistakes, to fail no matter how hard we try. When we do the equivalent of breaking a vase in our moral life, St. Therese says that we should do just what she used to do at her home in Alençon: run and jump into the arms of her father, shower his face with kisses and love, and then mention the broken vase. She encourages us as prodigals to run into the outstretched arms of our merciful Father, bathe him with tears of contrite love, and ask for his forgiveness.

Lastly, if we are God's children, then that means that we are really brothers and sisters. The waters of baptism are thicker than blood, and we have a deeper bond with our spiritual siblings than we do with our biological ones. The way of spiritual childhood helps us to love others as our Father loves them, not as strangers, not as enemies, but as we do our own kin. This is the way, like Therese, that we discover how to live out our vocation to be "love in the heart of the Church."

"Unless you convert and become like little children," Jesus says, "you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." For us to follow St. Therese's path of spiritual childhood into the kingdom of heaven, we first to need to convert: to turn away from the false notion that we're sophisticated grown-ups capable of independence from God and others, and toward the reality that without God, we can do nothing. It's the change from a fussy childishness in which only want to do what we like, to a trusting childlikeness that helps us to "choose all" that God wants to give.

We, like St. Therese, cannot become a "saint by halves." We need to go for it, to put out into the deep, to convert and become childlike like her.

May she spend her eternity interceding to bring about this good on earth!

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.