[Scripture readings from Saturday Week 26: Gospel Lk 10:17-24]
In today's gospel we heard Jesus exclaim:
I bless you, Father,
Lord of heaven and of earth,
for hiding these things from the learned and the clever
and revealing them to mere children.
Before God, we have no cleverness, no wisdom,
if we have gifts of this kind they are for others,
they are not important when we come before God,
before God we are simply his little children.
This St Thérèse knew, as our opening prayer draws out:
O God, who open your Kingdom
to those who are humble and to little ones,
lead us to follow trustingly in the little way of Saint Thérèse,
Thérèse entered the Carmelite convent at 15,
died at 24 in 1897, was cannonised quickly, in 1925
and was declared the Doctor of the Church in 1997.
She was the 33rd person to be identified in this way,
identified through this as someone whose writings are useful to Christians 'in any age'.
Her writings are the expression of her 'little way'.
This was, and is, radical.
St Thérèse 'simple' approach is to focus on Jesus alone,
and through him on Abba, the Father,
turning away from interest in ourselves and our 'spiritual lives',
trusting in the Father, with Jesus as our model.
In religion she took the name
Thérèse of the Infant Jesus and the Holy Face,
the Holy Face refers to the story of Veronica,
and then more deeply, to Isaiah's Servant:
devoid of beauty, familiar with suffering, humiliated.
Both parts of her name speak to those words from Philippians:
though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself.
Thérèse saw God emptied out in Jesus:
in the child and in his battered body as he died,
she saw love that would stop at nothing.
She saw that God comes to us humbly,
choosing to be needy.
She saw that God comes to us in the human;
comes to us in our own humanity,
in our ordinariness, in our littleness,
and what he wants is our trust.
To quote a living Carmelite, who writes as Ruth Burrows,
Thérèse begs us to understand that all God really wants is blind trust that he will do everything for us.
Like a toddler, all we can do, spiritually speaking,
is lift our little foot to the first step of the stairs and go on trying.
Jesus, like a mother, will come down and carry us up in his arms.”
[Essence of Prayer, p116]