Sermon – Little Steps, Great Love: Saint Thérèse of Lisieux – October 1, 2026

Today we commemorate Saint Teresa of Lisieux .

She lived for a short time, but she was a great saint.

In fact, her entire family lived in great holiness. Her parents were saints. All five of her daughters became nuns.

Saint Teresa had to ask the Pope for permission to enter the monastery because she wanted to become a nun when she was only 15 years old.

These nuns enter the monastery never to leave again and live in silence and prayer.

Saint Teresa always had profound thoughts about life. She was very spoiled as a child, but as she grew older, she learned to love Jesus in everything.

She always wanted to be a saint. And this is what she wrote about holiness:

“I understood that to be a saint one must suffer greatly, always strive for perfection, and forget oneself. Then, as in my childhood days, I cried out: God, I choose everything to be a saint. I don’t want to be a half-hearted saint [...] I choose ‘everything’ that You desire.”

She didn't just want to be a saint. She wanted everything God wanted.

He wanted to give his life for Christ as a martyr, to travel the world proclaiming the Gospel, and to teach everyone like the great preachers.

But when he read about the deeds of great saints like the apostles, Saint Paul, and the martyrs of the Church, he felt very small in comparison.

She considered herself incapable of doing what they did. And after much prayer, while she was a nun, she rediscovered her calling in the Church.

While reading the letters of Saint Paul, I discovered a common thread among all the saints: love.

Saints may have accomplished great or small deeds, but they all loved.

And when he saw the Church as a mystical and spiritual body, the body of Christ, he discovered that love was at the center of everything.

He wrote the following:

I realized that it is only love that motivates church members, and that if love were absent, neither the Apostles could continue proclaiming the Gospel nor the martyrs could shed their blood. I understood that love encompasses all calls, that love is everything, that it encompasses all times and places, in short, that love is eternal.

He continued as follows:

My profession is love. I will be love at the heart of the Church, my mother; I will be everything with love; and thus my dream will come true.

And she discovered that she could do small things with great love, and thus become a saint .

For example, when he went to pray, he would never lean back in a chair to offer as a sacrifice to God.

The nuns always said prayers in the church. They wore cloaks to sing hymns and then left their cloaks on the pews. After all the nuns had left the church, Saint Teresa would stay and collect their cloaks.

Once, a vase was broken in the monastery, and he was blamed for it. Although innocent, he confessed to the crime.

Out of his love for God, he learned to always offer small works and to surrender himself to God's arms like a child. With this, a new path to holiness emerged in the Church.

This path is the path of small deeds. This “small path” became one of the centers of his spiritual teaching. The Church declared him a Doctor of the Church because of the depth and universal value of his spiritual teaching.

Although he lived in a monastery his entire life, he is the patron saint of all who worked to spread the Gospel in distant places.

He discovered that the secret to holiness is to love God deeply in everything we do. Therefore, we can all be holy. If we know how to love God in everything we do, we too can become holy.

Holiness is not about doing great things, but about loving God deeply in everything we do.

It is love, not deeds, that brings about holiness.

He died of tuberculosis at the age of 24. Despite his young death in a monastery, his fame as a saint spread throughout the world.

May the example of Saint Teresa teach us to seek holiness in everything we do, even in the smallest events.