It’s curious that in an age of advancement and speed, the invitation we are hearing more and more frequently is to slow down, to think smaller than our hyper-digital, globally interconnected world trains us to. Whether it’s EF Schumacher and the ‘small is beautiful’ economy, or Pope Francis’ encouragement to see love, even civic and political love, as consisting of an overflow of ‘small gestures of mutual care’, it seems clear we are in a time where the ‘bigger-is-better’ approach to life is exhausting us.
It’s also easy to exhaust ourselves spiritually when we have this mindset. Sometimes we might approach the spiritual life—even the universal call to holiness—with an attitude of advancement and development. There are many areas of life where we are called to develop and grow, be it personally, creatively or professionally. But does this approach translate easily into the spiritual life? Does holiness work by the same logic? Is holiness just the spiritual equivalent of a professional development program?
A close reading of St Thérèse of Lisieux suggests not.
In her autobiography, Story of a Soul, one of her most famous lines gives this away. Comparing herself to other saints, she felt intimidated, as if holiness was an impossible mountain to climb. Yet fully understanding that God does not ask impossible things of us, she knew there must be some ‘elevator’ she could take to heaven:
The elevator which must raise me to heaven is Your arms, O Jesus! And for this I had no need to grow up, but rather I had to remain little and become this more and more. O my God, You surpassed all my expectation. I want only to sing to Your mercies.
It’s difficult not to hear the words of John the Baptist echoing in this quote: ‘He must grow greater, I must grow less’ (John 3:30).
Weirdly, the logic of the spiritual life and the logic of holiness is not growth. It’s not about growing but shrinking, and sometimes this can be the hardest thing to learn.
Humility has always been a distinctly ‘Christian’ virtue: no other religious or philosophical tradition has considered humility to be praiseworthy in the same way Jesus did or in the way his followers have through the centuries. Humility has always been the beginning and end of holiness because it’s about becoming smaller in the eyes of the world, not greater. Humility involves being open to a radical kind of dependence: a willingness to fall into the arms of Jesus.
In his book The Grace to Desire It, Dom Pius Mary Noonan OSB breaks down St Benedict’s reflections on humility. In The Rule, St Benedict invites us to see that central to humility is not exercising our own will but conforming ourselves to God’s. Noonan writes:
The lesson we can draw from this is that no number of great works—prayers, fastings, sacrifices of any sort—are of any value whatsoever if they are the expression of self-will. All our sanctification lies not in conceiving and realising great plans that we imagine will be pleasing to God, but in embracing the Divine Will, in doing the will of the Other, the Eternal Other who has brought us into existence and in Whom Alone our life finds meaning and purpose.
Even our attempts to ‘grow’ in the spiritual life can be the fruit of our own will and not necessarily what God wants of us. Discerning what is merely our own will and what is God’s requires deep self-knowledge and deep prayer.
This is why Thérèse also begins her autobiography by reflecting on what perfection consists in: namely, ‘doing His will, in being what He wills us to be.’
History is vast. The world is bigger than we can conceive. There are so many things completely out of our control and so many lives in need of God. We are more aware of this now than we ever have been, thanks to our extreme digital connectivity. What do we do when faced with such immense challenges? What do we do when faced with so many things we don’t understand? We must know, Thérèse wrote, that ‘Our Lord is occupied particularly with each soul as though there were no others like it.’ Each of us has our own place in the garden of the Lord, and to grasp this we must start thinking smaller than we tend to. We must start asking: What does God want of me right now, where I am?
As St Thérèse of Lisieux reminds us—though we keep forgetting—when we fall in love with God, the journey we embark on, in some sense, is one of ‘growing small’, of humbling ourselves enough to learn what it is that God wants of us. Only then do we truly begin to glimpse the greatness of God.
