Therese of Lisieux: The Way of Love

Thérèse of Lisieux: The Way of Love: Weekly Summary

Saturday, October 3, 2026

Sunday

Thérèse of Lisieux is the best counterweight to any theology or spirituality of perfectionism. She was my liberation. —Richard Rohr

Monday

Thérèse is stunning by the radicality of her simplicity, which brings us to the radicality and the divinity of our simplicity and how we are to live by it and to walk in it day by day. —James Finley

Tuesday

Thérèse’s love for God energized her daily life. She lived as a woman in love: joyful, enthusiastic, smiling. —Gina Loehr

Wednesday

Thérèse’s emphasis on childhood and the child Jesus in her teaching doesn’t at all suggest that we’re not to mature into adults but rather see that there are certain childlike qualities that are the essence of spiritual maturity. —James Finley

Thursday

When the whole world seems given over to preparedness for war and the show of force, the message of Therese is quite a different one. —Dorothy Day

Friday

The little way is the spirituality of imperfection; we come to God not by doing it right, but by doing it wrong. It’s not a matter of doing great things. Whenever we act in conscious love, this is the little way. —Richard Rohr

Week Thirty-Nine Practice: Our Holy Faces

James Finley reflects on how we might relate, as Thérèse did, to the holy face of Jesus:

When Thérèse entered the Carmelites, one of the devotional names she chose was Thérèse of the Holy Face, referring to the holy face of Jesus. The face of Jesus represents the presence of Jesus. That’s what Thérèse really was talking about.

Imagine a mother holding her newborn infant. As she holds the child in her arm, she’s taken by how small the child is, weighing hardly anything at all. And as she looks into her infant’s unknowing eyes, she’s experientially moved by how limited her infant is in almost every thinkable way. Her infant can’t feed itself, can’t roll over by itself, can’t dress itself.

As she looks into her infant’s unknowing eyes, her infant doesn’t know who she is. Nor does the infant know who it is because it’s not yet emerged into reflective consciousness.

So we might say the mother realizes the infant is the essence of limit, and yet—here’s the mystical and poetic part—with the imperial strength with which her infant clasps her extended little finger, like a king or queen holding a scepter, the infant in all its limitations carries her heart away.

She knows that if she were to die in the act of saving the life of this infant, she would die in the truth. She realizes unexplainably the limitless nature of the infant in the midst of its limits. [1]

When we love someone very much—father, mother, brother, sister, lover, spouse, whatever—and look at their face, we see the face that everybody sees. But in our love for them, when we see their face, we see their soulful presence, for which we are immensely grateful in our life. It is a soulful presence that we see in the face of the beloved.

Who did Jesus see when he looked at Thérèse’s face—and who does he see when he looks at your face?

Jesus contemplates the divinity of your face. When Jesus walked this earth and looked into the face of each person, he saw that face. Jesus comes to walk this earth so that in his presence, we might see reflected in his eyes, the face that he sees, which is the face of the unborn divinity of ourselves hidden with Christ. [2]