What if the spiritual path is not about becoming more impressive, knowledgeable or accomplished? What if the way to God is actually about becoming smaller?
Today, 22 September, I begin a novena to St Thérèse of Lisieux, whose feast day falls on 1 October. My intention is simple and very ordinary: I am asking for genuine friendship in real life. Thérèse seems an especially appropriate saint for such a petition.
Known as St Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, the Little Flower lived only 24 years. She performed no spectacular public ministry, founded no religious order and spent most of her adult life inside a Carmelite monastery. Yet this young nun became one of the most beloved saints of modern Christianity. In 1997, Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of the Church.
Her great spiritual discovery became known as the Little Way: a path of trust, spiritual childhood, surrender and doing ordinary things with great love.
At this particular point on my own spiritual journey, I am beginning to understand why I needed to meet her again.
Jump to the Little Way Tarot Spread
Who Was St Thérèse of Lisieux?
Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin was born in Alençon, France, on 2 January 1873, the youngest surviving daughter of Louis and Zélie Martin. Her mother died when Thérèse was only four, and the family subsequently moved to Lisieux, where her religious vocation developed.
Thérèse wanted to enter the Carmelite monastery at Lisieux while still exceptionally young. After persistent attempts to gain permission, she finally entered Carmel in 1888 at the age of 15. She made her religious profession in 1890 and became Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face.
Within the monastery, she lived an outwardly unremarkable life of prayer, community duties and service. Behind that simplicity, however, something extraordinary was developing. Thérèse gradually came to understand holiness not primarily as heroic spiritual achievement, but as complete confidence in God’s mercy.
Her writings, later gathered and published as Story of a Soul, carried this Little Way throughout the world. Thérèse died from tuberculosis on 30 September 1897 and was canonised in 1925.
What Is the Little Way of St Thérèse?
Thérèse looked at the great saints and recognised the enormous distance between their apparent spiritual achievements and her own littleness. Rather than despairing, however, she began looking for another way.
She compared the traditional path of perfection to climbing a steep staircase. She felt too little to climb it, so she began searching for something that could carry her instead. Living at a time when lifts were still a relatively exciting innovation, she found the perfect image: she wanted an elevator to Jesus. That elevator would be the arms of Jesus Himself.
The Little Way therefore begins with an admission that runs against much of our instinct for spiritual self-improvement: I cannot make myself holy by my own strength.
This does not mean doing nothing. Thérèse was intensely committed to prayer, sacrifice and loving action. The difference lies in where she placed her confidence. Rather than attempting to manufacture her own perfection, she trusted God to accomplish in her what she could not accomplish alone.
Our littleness is not necessarily an obstacle to grace. It may be precisely where grace finds us.
Why St Thérèse Found Me at the Right Time
For many years, my spiritual path became increasingly complicated. I studied Tarot, astrology, Qabalah, ceremonial magic, planetary magic, angelology, theurgy and Western esotericism. I accumulated correspondences, rituals, books and systems.
Much of that knowledge remains fascinating to me, and some of it remains useful. But recently I have found myself asking a different question: What is all this actually for?
Listening to Richard Rohr discuss the two halves of life and the construction of the persona helped me recognise something uncomfortable. For a significant part of my adult life, I was trying to construct an identity capable of standing on its own. Eventually, that project became spiritual too.
If I could learn enough, understand enough and assemble the right spiritual framework, perhaps I could somehow build myself into the person I was supposed to become.
Since 2020, that construction has increasingly fallen apart. I used to see that primarily as failure. Now I am beginning to wonder whether some structures have to collapse before we discover what can actually support us.
Perhaps grace sometimes arrives with a demolition permit.
Returning to What Truly Matters
Lately I have found myself returning to remarkably simple things: Jesus, Mary, the Rosary, Scripture, prayer, candles, the sacraments and, above all, relationship with God. Then along comes Thérèse with her Little Way. Of course she does.
Her spirituality challenges the assumption that greater spiritual sophistication necessarily brings us closer to God. Complexity can be useful, especially when we are studying traditions with rich histories and symbolic languages. But complexity can also become another hiding place for the ego.
The Little Way asks simpler and sometimes much harder questions. Can I trust God when I cannot see what happens next? Can I receive rather than constantly strive? Can I love the person in front of me? Can I faithfully perform the small duty that belongs to this particular day?
For someone who has spent decades fascinated by elaborate spiritual systems, there is something quietly revolutionary about this.
Knowledge, Pride and the Little Way
This morning, before beginning my novena, I had been reading Agrippa. If you have ever opened Three Books of Occult Philosophy, you’ll know that Agrippa can make almost anything complicated.
I was studying his table for the number ten when a question arose: Am I learning this because it serves God and other people, or because being someone who knows obscure things has become part of my identity?
There is nothing inherently wrong with intellectual study. The intellect is a gift. But knowledge can become another staircase we attempt to climb: one more correspondence, one more initiation, one more occult text, one more system mastered.
Thérèse offers an uncomfortable corrective to this kind of spiritual ambition. What if I don’t need another staircase? What if I need the elevator?
This does not mean I intend to stop learning. It means I want to keep examining what my learning is in service of. Knowledge can help us seek truth and serve others, but it can also become material from which we construct a spiritual persona designed to impress others.
What St Thérèse Can Teach Tarot Readers
Tarot can become part of the same problem. We can use divination as another attempt to master uncertainty: if I understand enough symbols, calculate enough correspondences or pull enough cards, perhaps I can know what happens next.
But sometimes we aren’t meant to know. Often, we are asked to simply trust.
That doesn’t make Tarot and other forms of divination useless. For me, it changes what the Tarot is for. Rather than continually asking the cards to reveal the future, we can also use them for discernment and examination of conscience.
What am I refusing to see? Where is fear directing my choices? Where am I trying to control something that needs to be entrusted to God? What would love ask of me today?
These questions leave room for grace and free will. They also keep Tarot in its proper place. The cards cannot replace prayer, Scripture or Christian discernment. Nor must they become an authority standing between us and God.
Instead, they can hold up a mirror and help us recognise what we need to bring into prayer and alignment with Divine Will.
The Little Flower and Her Roses
It is impossible to talk about St Thérèse without mentioning roses. The rose became closely associated with her through her own imagery and the testimony surrounding her final months.
The Carmel of Lisieux archives preserve the testimony of her sister Marie of the Sacred Heart concerning Thérèse’s famous image of making a shower of roses fall after her death. The association grew after her death as people reported receiving favours through her intercession.
But the roses are more than pretty signs associated with answered novenas. Flowers already had a spiritual meaning for Thérèse. They represented the little sacrifices and ordinary acts of love she offered to Jesus.
This makes the rose a perfect symbol of the Little Way. A rose does not need to be enormous to be offered to God. Neither does an act of love need to be spectacular to matter.
Perhaps this is also why people continue to find Thérèse so approachable. Her spirituality brings holiness back into the ordinary places where most of us actually live.
Praying a Novena to St Thérèse
A novena is traditionally prayed over nine days for a particular intention. One popular time to begin a St Thérèse novena is 22 September, leading towards her feast on 1 October, although a novena can of course be prayed at any time.
Your petition does not need to be grand. You might ask for healing, reconciliation, guidance, work, friendship, deeper faith or whatever genuinely weighs upon your heart.
The prayer in my own novena booklet includes an important qualification. It asks that the petition be granted if it is in accordance with God’s Holy Will and is not an obstacle to salvation.
That sentence prompted this entire article.
Suddenly the question wasn’t merely whether God would give me what I wanted. It became: Is what I am doing helping me towards God?
That is a question worth asking far beyond nine days of prayer. It applies to our ambitions, relationships and spiritual practices, as well as to the things for which we pray.
A Simple Prayer to St Thérèse
St Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face,
you trusted not in your own strength
but in the merciful love of God.
Teach me your Little Way.
Help me surrender the need
to make myself impressive, powerful
or spiritually accomplished.
Show me the small acts of love
that are mine to perform today.
Help me recognise grace already at work
and trust God with what I cannot control.
Little Flower, pray for me,
that everything I learn, create and offer
may lead me closer to Christ
and help me love others more faithfully.
Amen.
The Little Way Tarot Spread
This seven-card St Thérèse Tarot spread is intended for spiritual discernment. Before shuffling, spend a few moments in prayer and ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate whatever will help you grow in love, humility and trust.
1. What am I making unnecessarily complicated?
Where have additional systems, explanations, worries or strategies obscured something fundamentally simple?
2. Where am I relying upon my own strength?
Where has healthy effort become self-reliance? What are you trying to accomplish alone that requires cooperation with grace?
3. What identity am I being invited to surrender?
We all construct ideas about who we are. This card may reveal a role, reputation, achievement or self-image that has become too important to maintain.
4. Where is grace already at work?
This is the heart of the spread. Before you fix anything, achieve anything or understand everything, where is God already meeting you?
5. What small act of love is being asked of me?
The Little Way is lived through ordinary things. Look for something practical rather than grand.
6. What can I entrust to God?
Some things are yours to do and others are yours to surrender. What are you carrying that was never entirely yours to control?
7. How can I become little today?
This final card represents your invitation into the Little Way. Becoming little does not mean humiliation or making yourself insignificant. It means becoming small enough to be carried.
Becoming Small Enough for Grace
I don’t know where my relationship with Tarot will eventually lead. Nor do I know how much of the enormous esoteric library I have accumulated will remain important to my work. I’m not rushing to decide.
But I have found a question I intend to keep asking: Does this knowledge help me or somebody reading my work become more truthful, loving, free and oriented towards God?
If it does, it has something to contribute. If it exists primarily to make the identity of Lisa-who-knows-esoteric-things more elaborate, perhaps I can afford to put it down.
That may be one of the gifts St Thérèse has already given me before I have even completed the first day of her novena. I don’t need to become less curious or less interested in learning, and I certainly don’t need to pretend that the strange, winding road behind me never happened.
Perhaps knowledge can simply stop being another way of constructing myself and become something I offer instead.
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