A Novena to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
The Little Way
The Little Way
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
Therese Martin died in 1897 at twenty-four, having founded nothing, written only a memoir composed under her superior's obedience, and never traveled beyond one pilgrimage to Rome; she was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1997, exactly a century after her death.
Smallness Is Not Modesty
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
Therese described her own smallness as a starting point rather than a false modesty, arguing in her writings that recognizing one's own littleness was the precondition for being carried rather than for having to climb.
The Lift
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
Therese compared her approach to holiness to the newly installed lifts in grand houses of her time, writing that she intended to be lifted rather than climb the steps of perfection herself, an image drawn from a contemporary technology rather than older spiritual writing.
The Nun Who Annoyed Her
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
Therese's autobiography, Histoire d'une ame, records a deliberate effort to treat a sister whose mannerisms irritated her exactly as she would treat the person she loved best, until the other nun asked what about her Therese found so appealing.
Small Things
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
Therese's material in Histoire d'une ame is drawn largely from ordinary convent routine: laundry, choir, a cold cell, being splashed with dirty water, and the temptation to defend herself against blame for things she had not done.
Her Father
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
Therese's father, Louis Martin, suffered a series of strokes and a decline into dementia, and was committed to the Bon Sauveur asylum at Caen in February 1889, an episode the family experienced as a public humiliation in their small town. He was brought home in 1892 after further strokes left him paralysed, and his daughters cared for him until his death in 1894.
The Night
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
In the final eighteen months of her life, Therese wrote of losing all felt sense of heaven's existence, describing herself as surrounded by a darkness that told her there was nothing beyond death; she asked that this experience not be discussed with the wider community during her lifetime.
Dying Badly
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
Therese's tuberculosis went largely untreated in her final months; her recorded last conversations include her own statement that, without her faith, she would have taken her own life, along with a warning that dangerous medicines should not be left within reach of the seriously ill.
Spending Heaven on Earth
The Novena Prayer
O Little Thérèse of the Child Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. Ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands, that he may be glorified in his saints. Little Flower, obtain for me the grace to believe, as you did, in God's love for me, and help me to walk your little way each day.
Therese wrote, near the end of her life, that she intended to spend her heaven doing good on earth and would let fall a shower of roses, a phrase that has since given her devotion its most recognizable image.
The prayer above is a traditional novena prayer to Saint Thérèse, of unknown authorship and long in circulation, given here as it is commonly printed. Thérèse Martin, 1873–1897, Carmelite of Lisieux, declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997. The lift, the difficult sister, her father’s illness, the trial against faith and the warning about medicines are all her own, from Histoire d’une âme and the last conversations. What follows each day is a fact from her life or her own writing, one per day. No plate is given: see the note in the builder.