Sunday, September 27, 2026
On the CAC’s Turning to the Mystics podcast, Father Richard Rohr reflects on his first encounter with the writings of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) as a young man:
When I entered seminary in the years just before Vatican II, many of my professors were very legalistic. What else could they be when that’s all our religion had given us? But I picked up a very small book about Thérèse of Lisieux, a young, French Carmelite nun, by a Carmelite priest named Pere Liagre. He summarized her teachings so simply and so well! Now remember, I’m nineteen years old and I’m looking for inspiration and guidance. When I closed the book, I thought, “This is not what my professors are saying. This changes everything!” In Thérèse’s time, there was a heresy called Jansenism that led to perfectionism and severe legalism, which did untold damage to the spirituality of the French church. Thérèse came along and broadsides it without even trying to. She was just being guided by love. This young French woman with calm inner authority said, “You know what? The legalism and negativity aren’t true.” Thérèse taught that “Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude.” [1]
It was her underlying spirituality, complemented by Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism, that got me through the seminary. It wasn’t the academic teaching I was being given by the professors, which was still tainted with legalism, and where the unspoken premise was basically, “If you’re perfect, if you do it right, God will love you.” That was the underlying assumption, and it was—and still is—utterly false. I guess I trusted Thérèse because what she wrote felt like common sense to me. Most of my confessors were legalists, and I would just quietly think to myself, “Okay, they’re going to say that, but I know it’s not true.”
It was an important antidote to my own inclination to perfectionism as a “one” on the Enneagram (although I didn’t have the language for it at the time). We “one’s” set a standard of perfection by our own self-centered definition, and so we’re always defeated. We define the rules and then we can’t live up to them. Thérèse is the best counterweight to any theology or spirituality of perfectionism. She was my liberation. I just didn’t believe in it anymore. It simply wasn’t true.
In her autobiography Story of a Soul, Thérèse tells a story of standing at the bottom of the staircase and lifting her little foot, trying to reach heaven. She pictures God as Father standing at the top of the staircase, beckoning “Come on, come on, come on.” Her leg is so tiny, and it can’t even reach the first step—but she keeps trying like a toddler would, and then at a certain point, God runs down the steps and carries her up like a divine elevator. At nineteen, that became my first intimation of a good, serious metaphor for how grace works. All God needs is our desire, then God does all the rest.
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The Beauty of a Little Flower
Monday, September 28, 2026
Jesus set before me the book of nature; I understood how all the flowers [God] has created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy…. If all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with wildflowers. And so it is in the world of souls.
—Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul
On the CAC’s Turning to the Mystics podcast, James Finley describes how Thérèse of Lisieux embraced ordinariness, the beauty of the little flower, as a path to God:
Thérèse was not an ecstatic mystic. It’s almost as if she was so deep in the divinity of the intimacy of ordinariness itself—with such clarity—that it makes her extraordinary. That’s what makes her accessible to us. Because we’re ordinary. How can we find God’s oneness with us in the midst of the ordinariness of ourselves? I think that’s why she touches us so. [1]
Thérèse sees herself in some way as a little flower growing in God’s garden, which is why she’s sometimes called the Little Flower. She says that there is glory in the rose and the orchid and all of that, but imagine a field filled with wildflowers in the springtime—thousands and thousands of flowers, and that God knows the littleness of each one and is personally loving each one into existence. Furthermore, God knows what that little flower is and the intricacy of its design, like the subtle scent of the violet. God eternally knows the violet to be hidden with Christ in God forever, so God is eternally contemplating the little flower in God. God is completely presencing Godself in the little flower.
Now, let’s say there is a mountain and you’re holding a grain of sand in your hand and comparing it to the mountain. The mountain is so immense and the grain of sand is so tiny; but since God cannot be diminished in any way whatsoever, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself in your hand through that little grain of sand, as much as in the mountain. Like the mountain, it is nothing without God. We don’t see this in ego consciousness, but in meditative prayer states we can sense the incomprehensible stature of the simplicity of things. We’re the simple soul, but the stature of our simplicity is divine because we’re God’s beloved.
I think Thérèse lived in this kind of luminosity, this gentle glow. She was not an ecstatic mystic having visions, but it’s like the divinity of the simplicity of herself that she so graciously shares with us invites us into the graciousness of our own simplicity. 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.
