A reflection for the feast of S. Theresiæ a Iesu Infante Virginis, III classis — Sabbato infra Hebdomadam XVIII post Octavam Pentecostes, IV. Septembris (3 October)
I. Liturgical Context
The Mass of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus opens with the voice of the Bridegroom: Veni de Libano, sponsa mea, veni — “Come from Libanus, my spouse, come: thou hast wounded my heart” (Cant. 4:8-9). And then, in the psalm verse, the Church turns at once to the children: Laudate, pueri, Dominum — “Praise the Lord, ye children” (Ps. 112:1). The spouse and the child stand side by side in the Introit, and the whole Mass is the explanation of how one young Carmelite could be both.
Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin was born at Alençon on 2 January 1873 and died in the Carmel of Lisieux on 30 September 1897, at twenty-four, of tuberculosis. She founded nothing, governed nothing, wrote nothing for publication, and left her monastery not once in nine years. Within a generation of her death Benedict XV had declared her virtues heroic, praising in 1921 the “way of spiritual childhood” as the secret of her sanctity; Pius XI beatified her in 1923, canonized her on 17 May 1925, and in 1927 named this enclosed nun, together with St. Francis Xavier, patroness of the missions. The 1962 Missal keeps her feast on the third of October.
Attentive readers of the Missal will notice that the Gospel is one we heard on the feast of St. Joseph Calasanctius not six weeks ago. The Church has set the same child in the midst of the Apostles twice in one season — once for a schoolmaster who received the little ones, and today for a nun who became one. On the earlier feast the accent fell on receiving; today it falls on the first command of the pericope, the one that comes before every other: nisi conversi fueritis — unless you be converted.
The Epistle, unusually, is taken from the last chapter of Isaiah, and it was not chosen at random. It is the very text by which Thérèse herself discovered her vocation.
II. Epistle — Isaias 66:12-14
“For thus saith the Lord: Behold I will bring upon her as it were a river of peace, and as an overflowing torrent the glory of the Gentiles, which you shall suck; you shall be carried at the breasts, and upon the knees they shall caress you. As one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you, and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like an herb, and the hand of the Lord shall be known to his servants.”
The prophecy belongs to the closing vision of Isaias, in which Sion, after her humiliation, gives birth suddenly and without pains to a whole people (66:7-8). Jerusalem is the mother, and the returning exiles are her nursing children. But in the thirteenth verse the image shifts in a way easy to miss: Quomodo si cui mater blandiatur, ita ego consolabor vos — “as one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you.” It is no longer only the city who nurses. It is the Lord Himself, speaking of His own tenderness in the language of a mother.
The primary claim of this reading is that God’s consolation comes to the soul as nourishment and as carrying — something received, not achieved. The child at the breast does nothing but receive; the child upon the knees does nothing but rest. The river of peace flows down upon Jerusalem; it is not a stream she climbs.
St. Jerome, in the last book of his commentary on Isaias, reads the prophecy of the Church, into whom the glory of the nations was to stream like a flood, and whose children are fed at her breasts. The Fathers did not find this maternal language awkward, because St. Paul and St. Peter had already used it: “I gave you milk to drink, not meat” (1 Cor. 3:2); “as newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile” (1 Pet. 2:2).
St. Augustine takes the image to its root. In the seventh book of the Confessions, describing how his pride had kept him from Christ, he says that the eternal Wisdom, by Whom all things were made, became flesh precisely so that He might become milk for our infancy (Conf. VII.18). The proud man wants solid food at once, wants to reach God by the strength of his own intellect, and starves. The humble man consents to be fed. Clement of Alexandria, writing two centuries earlier in his Paedagogus, had said much the same in his own way: the milk with which the Father nourishes His little ones is the Word Himself (Paed. I.6).
This is the text that Thérèse found. She recounts in the last of her manuscripts that she had long felt the distance between herself and the great saints, as between a mountain and a grain of sand trodden underfoot. Living in an age of inventions, she wished for an “elevator” — some means of rising to God when she was too little to climb the rough stairway of perfection. She searched the Scriptures, and found first the word of Wisdom, “whosoever is a little one, let him come to me” (Prov. 9:4), and then this passage of Isaias: as a mother caresses her child, so will I comfort you; you shall be carried at the breast and caressed upon the knees. Her conclusion was the whole of her doctrine in a sentence: L’ascenseur qui doit m’élever jusqu’au Ciel, ce sont vos bras, ô Jésus! — “The elevator which must lift me up to Heaven is Thine arms, O Jesus.” And therefore, she adds, I have no need to grow up; on the contrary, I must remain little, and become ever more so.
III. Gospel — Matthew 18:1-4
“At that hour the disciples came to Jesus, saying: Who thinkest thou is the greater in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus calling unto him a little child, set him in the midst of them, and said: Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, he is the greater in the kingdom of heaven.”
The Apostles ask about rank. The Lord answers about entry. They want to know who will be highest in the kingdom; He tells them that, as they stand, they will not be in it at all. The answer is severe, and its severity lies in one word: conversi. The Greek strapheite and the Latin conversi both mean to turn around, to reverse direction.
The primary claim of this reading is that the conversion Christ demands is a reversal of the will’s direction — from the ambition to rise toward the willingness to be small and dependent. It is not an improvement of the Apostles’ ambition, a nobler form of striving. It is a turning around.
St. Jerome, commenting on the verse, notes that the disciples had been disputing about primacy, and that the Lord therefore calls them back — to turn away from the quarrel that had already begun in their hearts, and to return to the simplicity from which it had led them. St. John Chrysostom, in his fifty-eighth homily on St. Matthew, describes what the child set in the midst actually possesses: he is free from envy and vainglory, he does not covet the first place, he does not nurse an injury, and when his mother corrects him he runs to her still. That last trait is the one Thérèse would make her own. The child’s security does not depend on his never being at fault; it depends on his mother.
But the most profound commentary on the passage comes from St. Leo the Great, in one of his sermons for the Epiphany (Sermo 37). Reflecting on the Magi adoring a Child, Leo observes that Christ loves childhood, which He Himself first took up in soul and in body; that He loves it as the teacher of humility, the rule of innocence, and the pattern of meekness. In other words, the Lord does not set a child in the midst as a mere illustration. He sets before the Apostles the very state He chose for Himself when He entered the world. The Eternal Word began His human life at a mother’s breast and on a mother’s knees — exactly the posture of Isaias’ prophecy — and to become little is to be conformed to Him.
St. Thomas gives the theological reason why this smallness is not weakness. Humility, he teaches, is the virtue by which a man, seeing truly what he is before God, restrains himself from reaching beyond his measure; and because pride is the first obstacle to grace, humility is the first disposition for receiving it (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 161). And hope, which looks to God as the one who will give us what we cannot obtain by ourselves, rests not on our own strength but on the divine help (II-II, q. 17). Thérèse’s word for this was confiance — confidence — and it is nothing other than the theological virtue of hope lived without reserve.
IV. Synthesis — Exitus et Reditus
St. Thomas’s great ordering of theology follows the movement of all things out from God (exitus) and their return to Him (reditus). Today’s two readings divide that movement between them, and the saint of the day shows how it is meant to be lived.
The Epistle is the exitus: God going out toward His creature. The river of peace descends; the torrent overflows; the mother bends down. Augustine’s commentary shows how far that descent went — the Wisdom of God became milk — and Leo’s shows its form: the Word assumed infancy.
The Gospel is the reditus: the creature’s return. And here is the decisive point. The return is not accomplished by a counter-ascent of human effort, a stairway climbed to meet the God who came down. The return is a conversion, a turning back into the very state God assumed in coming to us. We go back to the Father by becoming what the Son became when He came to us: a little child.
This is precisely what Thérèse understood with her “elevator.” The arms that descended in the exitus are the same arms that lift in the reditus. The soul does not supply the motive power of its own return; it consents to be carried. The Communion antiphon of today’s Mass seals the thought with an image from the Canticle of Moses: Circumduxit eam, et docuit… sicut aquila expandit alas suas, et assumpsit eam, atque portavit in humeris suis — “He led her about and taught her… as the eagle spreads her wings, He took her up and carried her upon His shoulders. The Lord alone was her leader” (cf. Deut. 32:10-12). The river of Isaias, the child of the Gospel, and the eagle of Deuteronomy all say one thing: the saint is the one who has let herself be carried.
None of this licenses passivity. Thérèse’s life was one of relentless small fidelities, of charity toward sisters she found disagreeable, of a long and dark trial of faith in her final eighteen months, and of a death in great physical suffering whose last words were Mon Dieu, je vous aime. But all that effort was the effort of a child holding out her arms, not of a climber hauling herself up a rope. The difference is not in the quantity of labor but in where one’s confidence rests.
V. Devotional Application
Examine. Where am I still trying to climb? Look for the place where you measure your spiritual life by your own performance — the counted prayers, the resolutions kept or broken, the comparison with others who seem holier — and where your failures produce not contrition but discouragement. Discouragement is very often wounded pride. The child who falls runs to his mother; the proud man sulks because he did not keep his balance.
Do. Choose one small, hidden act of charity today toward a person who tries your patience, and offer it without telling anyone. Thérèse’s Little Way was not made of extraordinary deeds but of ordinary ones done with great love. When you fail at it, as you will, make an act of confidence instead of an act of self-reproach: “My God, I am little; carry me.”
Pray. Ask, through St. Thérèse, for the grace of confiance — not a feeling of security, but the settled habit of hope that rests on God rather than on oneself.
Devote. The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, lingering on the Nativity, where Isaias’ prophecy is fulfilled to the letter: the Lord of glory carried at the breast and caressed upon the knees of His Mother.
VI. Collect
Domine, qui dixisti: Nisi efficiamini sicut parvuli, non intrabitis in regnum cælorum: da nobis, quæsumus; ita sanctæ Teresiæ Virginis in humilitate et simplicitate cordis vestigia sectari, ut præmia consequamur æterna: Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum. Amen.
“O Lord, who hast said: Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven: grant us, we beseech Thee, so to follow the footsteps of holy Teresa the Virgin in humility and simplicity of heart, that we may attain the everlasting rewards: Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.”
The Collect is unusual in that it is addressed to the Son and opens by quoting His own words back to Him — the child’s prayer that holds the parent to a promise.
VII. Aspiration
Quomodo si cui mater blandiatur, ita ego consolabor vos. “As one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you.”
Or, in the saint’s own spirit: My Jesus, Thine arms are my elevator. Keep me little.
VIII. For Further Study
The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the Little Way in its traditional setting: how spiritual childhood relates to the classic stages of the interior life, and why it is not a shortcut around mortification but a way through it.
The Theology and Doctrine path treats the two virtues this Mass rests upon — humility (II-II, q. 161) and hope (II-II, q. 17) — and the question of how confidence in God differs from presumption.
The Lives of the Saints path offers the companion life of St. Thérèse, with particular attention to the trial of faith of her last months and the extraordinary speed of her cultus under Benedict XV and Pius XI.
The Sacred Liturgy path may profitably compare this Mass with that of St. Joseph Calasanctius (27 August), where the same Gospel is read in a different key.
Sancta Theresia a Iesu Infante, ora pro nobis.
IX. Source Transparency
Scripture is quoted in the Douay-Rheims version, with the Vulgate Latin of the Missal. Patristic references are given as faithful paraphrase with their location: St. Jerome, Commentarii in Isaiam XVIII and Commentarii in Matthaeum III; St. Augustine, Confessiones VII.18; Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus I.6; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum 58; St. Leo the Great, Sermo 37. St. Thomas is cited to the question of the Summa Theologiae. St. Thérèse’s words are from her autobiographical Manuscript C (1897), translated here; the facts of her beatification, canonization, and patronage rest on the acts of Benedict XV and Pius XI. The tradition that she found the Isaias text in a notebook of Old Testament passages copied by her sister Céline is well attested in the Carmelite sources but is not essential to the reflection.