In honor of the feast day of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Father Dave welcomes Father Michael-Joseph Paris of St. Thérèse, OCD to break down her autobiography, “Story of a Soul.” Father Michael-Joseph is a Discalced Carmelite priest and co-host of the “Catholic Classics” podcast from Ascension Press. His podcast dives into timeless texts from beloved saints, and season 3 featuring “Story of a Soul” is available now.
Father Michael-Joseph discusses his personal connection to St. Thérèse. “I had a big conversion when I was about 18 or 19 years old, and one of the first spiritual books that anyone ever gave me was ‘Story of a Soul,’” he begins. “On a certain level, I said, ‘Who is this French girl, why would I relate anything to her?’ I had a prejudice coming into it, but as I started reading it, I just connected so well with her…she just hit something so essential in what it means to have a relationship with God, and it spoke to me really deeply.”
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St. Thérèse is nicknamed “the little flower,” and Father Michael-Joseph explains its meaning. He says, “At the beginning of her autobiography, she says, ‘I’m telling a story of a springtime flower that God has transplanted’ from her garden where she grew up to this garden of Carmel,” where she would become a Carmelite nun. “She sees her whole life in this imagery of this flower that Providence has taken care of and has given her everything she needed, even in moments of storminess when it seemed like it was going to break.”
“Her father, when she asked his permission to join Carmel, picked a little flower and gave it to her, and used it as a parable of what God was doing,” he continues. “She kept that flower with her as a relic her whole life. It was one of their most precious mementos.”
Father Michael-Joseph also highlights St. Thérèse’s “little way” of love and charity. “I honestly think that’s the most important thing for us in our time,” he says. “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, it’s doing little things with great love,’ and that is part of it, but that’s not everything. It starts with believing that God is merciful love and all he wants to do is pour himself out into us.”
“The more I see my weakness, the more I can trust that he will make me the saint that I desire to be,” he adds. “I think that ‘little way’ [means knowing] who God is, having confidence in his mercy no matter how I might see myself, and then trying to live my life as a gift of love.”
Father Dave notes, “St. Thérèse also invites us to look at our greatest failure and see how that can be our greatest path to holiness, which to our modern world sounds so antithetical.” Father Michael-Joseph responds, “The American culture is all about success, and if you do fail, you internalize that ‘I must be a failure.’ But if we look at Jesus on the cross, it’s the antidote to that mentality, because that looks like a total failure.”
“[The cross] is the paradigm, that’s the model for us,” he continues. “It doesn’t mean we set out to fail, but things that might look like failure in our lives actually can become like the greatest way we can open ourselves to God’s plan for us.”
