The Earthly Mission of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: To Love and Make God Loved
The Vocation to Love
For Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, her earthly mission is summarized in two key phrases: "To love and make the Holy Trinity loved" and "To love Jesus and make Him loved." A vocation that encapsulates the very essence of her spirituality and her action in the world.
Thérèse's Earthly Mission
To Love Jesus and Make Him Loved
Thérèse truly chose for herself the Love of every moment and every action; she desired to prepare the garden of her soul with flowers and perfumes to welcome the King of Heaven, and she felt so enveloped in love that she herself could not understand how she could withhold anything from Love.
Perfection According to Thérèse
For the ascetic, perfection consists in "doing the will of God"; for Thérèse, however, it is "Being what He wants us to be," and she states:
"I want to commit myself to doing the will of God with the greatest abandonment."
Contemplation as Apostolic Action
Thérèse had a contemplative vocation. She did not so much pose the problem of her primacy, but she intuited with absolute radicality that contemplation was in itself apostolic action.
The Astounding Discovery: Lowering Oneself to Nothingness
Transforming Nothingness into Fire
Thérèse made an astounding discovery:
"For Love to be satisfied, it must lower itself to nothingness and transform this nothingness into fire."
For this reason, she wants to lower herself to nothingness, that is, to reduce herself to nothing to make room for Mercy, to let it complete the entire journey.
Acting in Accordance with God's Action
Thus Thérèse experiences and teaches how to act without ever detaching oneself, even for a moment, from the persuasion that God is working through us.
She teaches to act exclusively by cooperating with His action, to act in the persuasion that only He can truly work on hearts and souls, and to act by uniting oneself ever more to the essence of Jesus.
The Spiritual Trial: Love and Darkness
Anguishes and the Temptation of Doubt
Thérèse's "spiritual" mission consisted precisely in this: on the one hand she had to burn in Love, and on the other she had to remain enveloped in darkness.
She herself writes:
"It is impossible for me to confide my anguishes to you entirely; I would be afraid of offending the good God by expressing such thoughts in words. And I who love Him so much! But all this is incoherent."
The temptation by which Thérèse was enveloped became unbearable only when the devil fully revealed his cards and attacked her directly at the heart:
"Last night I was seized by a true anguish and my darkness increased. I do not know what cursed voice was telling me: Are you sure that God loves you?"
Victory Through Abandonment
Thérèse always reacts to temptation with joy, peace, and faith, even when it seems to her that she understands nothing or understands other things that the devil whispers in her ear.
Sometimes the temptation pushes her almost to the threshold of yielding, to the point where she can resist only if she suddenly abandons herself into the arms of God.
In this way she manages to overcome the temptation of doubt, and her strength consists precisely in this total abandonment into the arms of God.
Charity Towards Neighbor
During the period of her trial, Thérèse never forgets her neighbor; indeed, through this love she seems almost to understand the true meaning of "charity."
In this regard, she even goes so far as to give general guidelines: to bear with the faults of others, not to be surprised by their weakness, but above all not to hide charity at the bottom of the heart, but to let it emerge so that it truly enlightens one's neighbor.
True Charity According to Thérèse
There is no true love except that which is born from the very heart of God and flows from Him, so much so that every human love can only transfer and prolong on earth what it has drawn from above.