We live in a world where, more than ever before, we have insight into the lives of everyone around us; television and social media give us a glimpse of the idealistic daily routines of influencers, our busy workplaces or schools expose us to hundreds of different personalities, and our own households and friendship circles keep us constantly interacting with people with a range of interests and routines.
Inevitably, this level of exposure contributes to an overwhelming culture of comparison which plagues our decisions, our actions, and increasingly, our spiritual lives.
We look to the person on either side of us and immediately question our own plan of life. Am I doing enough? Why do they not struggle as much as I do? I don’t do that devotion, is that wrong?
There is an ache within us, a feeling of inadequacy, a burning question of whether sainthood is attainable at all.
While we are exposed to more in today’s age, this level of comparison, and the temptation towards discouragement is not exclusive to our generation.
It was commonly shared by our beloved Doctor of the Church, St Therese of Lisieux, whose feast we celebrated on 1 October.
As expressed in her autobiography Story of a Soul, St Therese struggled to comprehend “why God had preferences, why all souls did not receive an equal measure of grace,” until Our Lord granted her insight into his perfectly designed garden of souls:
“I saw that every flower created by him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose its springtide beauty, and the fields would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues.”
She recognised that in her littleness, the most that she could offer her Lord was a complete surrender to his boundless love. And therein lies the clarity we all long for.
In the same way that the smallest child cannot do anything without the assistance of their parents, we must “become like children” (Mt 18:3); not relying on our own merits, for indeed, without our Lord, we have none, but trusting that our future in Heaven lies in confidently depending on the guidance of our loving Father.
“The elevator which must raise me to Heaven is your arms, O Jesus!”
These words of complete confidence by St Therese – that in every moment that she fell, in every moment that her cross became too heavy, every time she was reminded of her littleness, our Lord’s loving arms will carry her and draw her towards him – are an invitation to everyone to embrace the attainability and simplicity of holiness.
St Therese proposes that abandonment to our Lord’s love, and the acceptance of our littleness will free us from the fear of our inadequacy and the tendency to obsessively calculate the grandeur of our actions as we aspire towards Heaven.
The 24 years of St Therese’s earthly life, both at home and in the Carmel of Lisieux, were seemingly ordinary, yet the extraordinary radiance of her profound love of Our Lord, rooted in the simplicity of her actions, the contemplation of the beauty of creation, and her confidence in the will of God for her life, has become one of the greatest examples for the church, and invites us all, in a similar manner, to joyfully and simply embrace our beautiful role in the Lord’s Living Garden.
The Litany of Humility petitions our Lord for the grace to desire that “others may become holier than I, provided I may become as holy as I should.” This is the way to sainthood!
As a gardener tends to all of his flowers individually, providing them with the unique treatments needed to keep them alive and growing, so Our Lord cares for us.
He chose us by name; he perfectly designed us to complement his divine plan. He tends to us in our moments of need, in the moments where we thirst, in the moments where we are choked by the weeds that the devil plants in our lives.
Our call is to have the undying confidence which St Therese carried. We cannot enter the comfort of eternal life on our own merit, but only by surrendering into the loving arms of Our Lord, which will raise us into Heaven.
