Perhaps the most important text for understanding the devotion of Therese to the heart of Christ is a letter that she wrote three months before her death to her friend Maurice Bellière. “When I see Mary Magdalene walking up before the many guests, washing with her tears the feet of her adored Master, whom she is touching for the first time, I feel that her heart has understood the abysses of love and mercy of the heart of Jesus, and, sinner though she is, this heart of love was disposed not only to pardon her but to lavish on her the blessings of his divine intimacy, to lift her to the highest summits of contemplation. Ah! dear little Brother, ever since I have been given the grace to understand also the love of the heart of Jesus, I admit that it has expelled all fear from my heart. The remembrance of my faults humbles me, draws me never to depend on my strength which is only weakness, but this remembrance speaks to me of mercy and love even more”. 132Letter 247 to l’Abbé Maurice Bellière, 21 June 1897.
Those moralizers who want to keep a tight rein on God’s mercy and grace might claim that Therese could say this because she was a saint, but a simple person could not say the same. In that way, they excise from the spirituality of Saint Therese its wonderful originality, which reflects the heart of the Gospel. Sadly, in certain Christian circles we often encounter this attempt to fit the Holy Spirit into a certain preconceived pattern in a way that enables them to keep everything under their supervision. Yet this astute Doctor of the Church reduces them to silence and directly contradicts their reductive view in these clear words: “If I had committed all possible crimes, I would always have the same confidence; I feel that this whole multitude of offenses would be like a drop of water thrown into a fiery furnace”. 133Last Conversations. Yellow Notebook, 11 July 1897, 6.
To Sister Marie, who praised her generous love of God, prepared even to embrace martyrdom, Therese responded at length in a letter that is one of the great milestones in the history of spirituality. This page ought to be read a thousand times over for its depth, clarity and beauty. There, Therese helps her sister, “Marie of the Sacred Heart”, to avoid focusing this devotion on suffering, since some had presented reparation primarily in terms of accumulating sacrifices and good works. Therese, for her part, presents confidence as the greatest and best offering, pleasing to the heart of Christ: “My desires of martyrdom are nothing; they are not what give me the unlimited confidence that I feel in my heart. They are, to tell the truth, the spiritual riches that render one unjust, when one rests in them with complacence and one believes that they are something great… what pleases [Jesus] is that he sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope that I have in his mercy… That is my only treasure… If you want to feel joy, to have an attraction for suffering, it is your consolation that you are seeking… Understand that to be his victim of love, the weaker one is, without desires or virtues, the more suited one is for the workings of this consuming and transforming Love… Oh! How I would like to be able to make you understand what I feel!... It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love”. 134Letter 197 to Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, 17 September 1896. This does not mean that Therese did not offer sacrifices, sorrows and troubles as a way of associating herself with the suffering of Christ, but that, in the end, she was concerned not to give these offerings an importance they did not have.
In many of her writings, Therese speaks of her struggle with forms of spirituality overly focused on human effort, on individual merit, on offering sacrifices and carrying out certain acts in order to “win heaven”. For her, “merit does not consist in doing or in giving much, but rather in receiving”. 135Letter 142 to Céline, 6 July 1893. Let us read once again some of these deeply meaningful texts where she emphasizes this and presents it as a simple and rapid means of taking hold of the Lord “by his heart”.
To her sister Léonie she writes, “I assure you that God is much better than you believe. He is content with a glance, a sigh of love… As for me, I find perfection very easy to practise because I have understood it is a matter of taking hold of Jesus by his heart… Look at a little child who has just annoyed his mother… If he comes to her, holding out his little arms, smiling and saying: ‘Kiss me, I will not do it again’, will his mother be able not to press him to her heart tenderly and forget his childish mischief? However, she knows her dear little one will do it again on the next occasion, but this does not matter; if he takes her again by her heart, he will not be punished”. 136Letter 191 to Léonie, 12 July 1896.
So too, in a letter to Father Adolphe Roulland she writes, “[M]y way is all confidence and love. I do not understand souls who fear a friend so tender. At times, when I am reading certain spiritual treatises in which perfection is shown through a thousand obstacles, surrounded by a crowd of illusions, my poor little mind quickly tires; I close the learned book that is breaking my head and drying up my heart, and I take up Holy Scripture. Then all seems luminous to me; a single word uncovers for my soul infinite horizons, perfection seems simple to me. I see that it is sufficient to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself like a child into God’s arms”. 137Letter 226 to Father Roulland, 9 May 1897.
In yet another letter, she relates this to the love shown by a parent: “I do not believe that the heart of [a] father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows. He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he is prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by his heart”. 138Letter 258 to l’Abbé Maurice Bellière, 18 July 1897.