Online novena

Thérèse was a difficult little girl. Motherless at the age of four, she grew up without really maturing into an unsatisfied teenager, lamenting her misfortunes and fears. The desire for God, and with it the yearning for holiness, certainly pulsated within her from early childhood. She loved Jesus and wanted to be a saint. But her fragile affections and daily frustrations made her unable to control her emotions, unable to forget herself. Then came the miracle of Christmas night 1886: she was almost fourteen years old and, in refraining from anger over yet another whim, in swallowing her tears, she understood that conversion is a grace from God, but that it is also necessary to accept it, to grasp it. And that means preferring God’s will—love—to one’s own. “I felt charity enter into my soul, and the need to forget myself and to please others; since then I’ve been happy!” This was made possible by the discovery that she had always been loved, and undeservedly so. In this way, little Thérèse was able to enter the battle of love.

Her act of offering to Merciful Love, written in Carmel almost ten years later, is in a sense the summary of her entire life: “I desire, in a word, to be a saint, but I feel my helplessness and I beg You, O my God! to be Yourself my Sanctity!” In this paradoxical text, almost revolutionary in the spirituality of the late 19^th century, as Thérèse offers herself as a “victim of holocaust” not to a judging God who feasts on the suffering of his creatures, but to “Merciful Love,” she reveals that God’s love precedes us eternally. The Lord is waiting for us to open ourselves to the “waves of infinite tenderness” that he possesses, so that he can give them to us here below, despite our suffering, as the first fruits of the eternal face-to-face encounter for which he made us.