Day 1: The Little Flower

The first day of the Saint Therese Novena begins with the title by which the Catholic world has known her since her death: the Little Flower of Jesus. The title is hers by her own choosing. In Story of a Soul, Therese describes herself as one of the small wildflowers of the field of the Lord, hidden among the larger and more striking blooms, but loved by the Lord as much as the rose, and necessary to the meadow as much as the lily. Today we begin the novena by approaching her under this title, with confidence in the love of the Lord for the small and the hidden.

Today's invocation

Saint Therese, Little Flower of Jesus, please pick for me a rose from the heavenly gardens and send it to me as a message of love. O little Therese of the Child Jesus, please ask God to grant the favors I now place with confidence in your hands. (Pause to mention the favor.) Saint Therese, help me to always believe as you did, in God's great love for me, that I might imitate your Little Way each day. Amen.

Today's meditation

Therese Martin (her baptismal name was Marie-Françoise-Thérèse) was born on 2 January 1873 in Alençon, in northern France, the youngest of nine children of Louis Martin (a watchmaker) and Zélie Guérin (a lacemaker). Four of her older siblings had died in infancy; only five sisters survived to adulthood. Both her parents were canonized as saints by Pope Francis in 2015, the first married couple to be canonized together in modern times. Her childhood was marked by the death of her mother (when Therese was four), the move of the family to Lisieux, and the gradual entry of her older sisters one by one into the Carmel of Lisieux. Therese herself entered the Lisieux Carmel at the unusual age of fifteen, in April 1888, after personal pleas to Pope Leo XIII during a family pilgrimage to Rome.

She lived for nine years in the Lisieux Carmel, dying of tuberculosis on 30 September 1897 at the age of twenty-four. The Carmel was strict in its observance, demanding in its silence, hard in its winter cold, and in many ways unkind to the young Therese (the prioress Mother Marie de Gonzague was difficult; one of the older nuns persistently antagonized Therese). She bore all of this with characteristic patience. Outside the Carmel walls, she had no public ministry, wrote no theological treatises, performed no public miracles. She was, in the most literal sense, hidden.

Today's intention

Bring to Saint Therese today the principal intention for which you are praying this novena. Be specific. Little Flower of Jesus, I bring you today this matter on which I am asking your intercession.

Reflection

The Catholic faithful have long observed that the Little Flower title carries an extraordinary theological message. The Lord Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, says: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these" (Matthew 6:28-29). Therese chose the lowest position among the flowers (not the rose, not the lily, but the small wildflower) and lived her short Carmelite life as that wildflower. Her sanctity is, in the Catholic understanding, the proof that the Lord's love is not reserved for the great or for the heroic but is given equally to the small and the hidden.

This is why the Catholic devotion to Saint Therese is particularly the devotion of the ordinary Catholic faithful. We are not asked to climb to her heights by extraordinary effort; we are invited to walk her Little Way in our own ordinary lives, with the same trust she had, the same confidence in the love of the Lord. Her novena is the deliberate Catholic act of placing ourselves in this Way.

Closing prayers

Conclude with the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be.

Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, pray for us. Little Flower of Jesus, intercede for us.