The Littleness of St. Thérèse of Lisieux

And the long shadow she cast across oceans and generations in my family

This article was first published on March 15, 2025, at https://catholicmom.com.

During Women's History Month, Catholic Mom writers are celebrating the women who have inspired their faith journeys — whether canonized saints, saints in progress, or beloved women from Scripture. Through personal reflections and heartfelt stories, they share how these holy women have touched their lives, offering wisdom, strength, and a deeper connection to God. Join us as we honor the spiritual legacy of these remarkable women and the lasting impact they continue to have on our hearts and souls.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux has become one of my favorite saints in recent years for a couple of reasons. First, I greatly admire her thoughts and writings about the Book of Nature. She consistently used the natural world as a way of growing in faith and deepening her relationship with God. She saw the love and tenderness with which God had created even the smallest daisy and recognized that he had created her with that same great affection. Just as He tended to and provided for even the humblest flower or the most ordinary brown bird, so, too, did the Lord care for and provide for her. For Thérèse, the Book of Nature really was like an ongoing love letter, written to her personally by the hand of Christ.

But the second reason why I am fond of the Little Flower, as she is more frequently known, is more personal. I feel close to her because she was close to some of my family, even though I never met them.

I discovered this connection after my mom received a shipment of old family memories following the death of her brother. Dear old Uncle Ed, as we affectionately called him, had been the self-appointed family historian for most of his life, saving the old letters, photos, paintings, even the furniture, if he could, of the generations that had gone before him. He meticulously poured over all these old memories, sharing stories of these people who my generation had never met and only knew through old-fashioned, tiny portrait paintings that hung on the living room wall.

Uncle Ed had requested that many of the family items be shipped from the family home in New Zealand to my mom in the US after his death, and I helped her unpack some of the boxes. At the back of one box, to my surprise, I discovered a simple picture of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, glued onto a piece of wood. When I first took the picture out, I assumed it was a rather cheap poster that someone had slapped onto some plywood.

Noticing it was a bit dirty and dusty, I grabbed a wet cloth and started wiping the picture. To my horror, I discovered it was not a cheap poster after all, but an old painting! After hastily blowing on the (now smeared) paint to dry, I took a closer look at it. The painting was so carefully done that I could see why I thought it was a poster at first. Turning it over, I saw Uncle Ed’s spidery handwriting scrawled across the back. He had written all about the history of this particular piece.

“Auntie Anne and Uncle Jim gave this picture to Mum and Dad as a wedding present,” I read. “They could not afford to go to the wedding, so they asked Mum and Dad to call on them in Kumara, coming back from their honeymoon at Lake Raniere Lodge, to give them this present.”

Wow. I thought about that for a moment. My great uncle and aunt had not been able to attend a family wedding, even though it would not have been very far away. After all, New Zealand is a pretty small country, and they all lived on the same island. If they couldn’t be there in person, then the gift would have to be something special, to mark the occasion properly.

They must have thought about it, wondering what the best item would be to give to the newly married couple. What would be a blessing to their new household? What could be good enough to last through the decades of married life, giving hope and maybe lending some inspiration?

They didn’t choose some china or a new teapot. Instead, they had decided on this very painting that I was holding, a painting of a young woman who never married and didn’t live very long, but who cast a very long shadow, nevertheless. This saint, who called herself just a “little flower,” proclaimed the one thing that every marriage needs to remember: “Nothing is small in the eyes of God. Do all that you do with love” (from The Story of a Soul).

Uncle Ed continued to write about the wedding. It took place at Sacred Heart Church in Shantytown and was officiated by Fr. Peter O’Megan. Uncle Ed named the best man and, in his words, the “blushing bridesmaid” as well. He finished by noting that the bride was given away by her brother, as their father had already passed away in 1922.

And just like that, I was connected to my ancestors. I was holding a piece from their home, on an entirely different continent, more than 80 years after their wedding. I knew enough about the life of Saint Thérèse to understand why she would have appealed to my great uncle and aunt all those years ago. Like her, they would have lived a simple country life, counting their blessings, looking to God for guidance and support, seeking to be faithful and humble.

That painting now has pride of place in my office at the parish. It hangs over my bookshelf and Saint Thérèse smiles down at me as I go about my daily work. Sometimes I look up at her, and I think about my family members who treasured her intercession and bought this painting, and the others who hung it in their house before it finally made its way across the waves to its new home.

Now, years after they have all passed on, I imagine how happy they were to meet in person. I bet Saint Thérèse laughed when she saw them in heaven and said something like “Oh, it’s you two! I’ve known you for years!” It reminds me of the simple life of faith my “greats” lived, and the littleness that Saint Thérèse sought, and gives me the guidance to try to do all the small things with love.

And what about you? What small things do you do “with great love?”