Thérèse and the Small Way
A bedtime story about Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who as a little girl chose the whole basket of dolls' clothes, and who as a grown-up found that she was too small to climb to heaven and decided to be carried instead. Told from her own writing, with a note for grown-ups on what is history. For ages 3 to 8, about ten minutes read aloud. Her feast day is the 1st of October.
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A long time ago, in France, there was a little girl named Thérèse.
She was the youngest of five sisters, and she was small, and she was quick, and she was a great deal more stubborn than she looked. When she wanted something, she wanted all of it. When she was sorry, she was very sorry. When she loved someone, she loved them with her whole heart, and could not hide it.
She lived in a tall house with a garden, and her father called her his little queen. Her sisters read to her and played with her. Her biggest sister, Léonie, was nearly grown up, and one day Léonie did something kind.
She came into the room with a basket.
It was not an ordinary basket. It was full of the very best things: scraps of lace and ribbon, and tiny hats, and dolls' clothes sewn so small that they might have been made for mice.
"Choose," said Léonie. "Each of you may have something from the basket."
There were two small girls in the room. One was Thérèse, and the other was her sister Céline, who was a bit older.
Céline looked into the basket for a long time. Then she picked out a little ball of silk, the colour of a sunrise. "I'll have this," she said, and she was pleased.
Then it was Thérèse's turn. Léonie held out the basket.
Thérèse looked at the lace. She looked at the ribbons. She looked at the tiny hats.
"I choose all!" she said.
And she took the whole basket, and hugged it, and nobody said she could not.
Now, that might sound greedy. But when Thérèse was grown up, and she wrote her life story, she remembered the basket, and she said it was the beginning of something. Because what Thérèse wanted most, all her life, was not ribbons. She wanted everything good. She wanted to love God with all of her heart, and she did not want to do it by halves.
So when she was fifteen, she asked if she could go and live in a convent, where the sisters pray all day. It was called a Carmel, and it stood in the town of Lisieux. She was very young to ask. But she asked, and the answer was yes, and she went in.
And there she met a puzzle.
The puzzle was this. Thérèse wanted to be as good as the great saints. She had read about them: the brave ones, the ones who crossed oceans and did enormous things.
But Thérèse was small. She could not cross an ocean. She was not strong, and she was not clever at big jobs. She was not even good at being patient, not at first. Some days, a sister in the next seat would rattle her beads, click, click, click, all through prayers, and Thérèse would feel her whole self go tight as a knot.
"I want to climb to heaven," she thought. "But it is a great steep staircase, and my legs are too short. I'll never get to the top."
She thought and thought about it.
And then she had an idea. It was the best idea she ever had.
"What if I do not have to climb?" she thought. "A very small child cannot get up a flight of stairs. But a father can pick her up and carry her. What if I let Jesus carry me?"
She wrote it down: the lift which would take her up to heaven, she said, was the arms of Jesus. She did not have to grow bigger. She only had to stay small, and let herself be lifted.
After that, Thérèse stopped trying to do big things. She did small ones, and she did them with all her heart, just as she had chosen all the basket.
When the sister rattled her beads, Thérèse listened and decided it was a kind of music, and she offered it to God as a present. When she was tired, she did not complain. When she met a sister she found difficult, she was especially kind to her, and smiled, and the sister never knew why.
A pin on the floor. A cup of water. A kind word. A smile at someone who is cross. These were not enough to get anyone's name into the history books. But Thérèse believed that love made them shine, and that God could see them. She called this her "little way."
She did not live long. She became ill, and she died when she was only twenty-four, in the same convent, on the 30th of September. People who were with her say that she told them she would go on helping, after she died, and let fall a shower of roses.
Then something happened which she had never expected. Someone read the story of her life, which she had written down in three notebooks. And then someone else did. And then thousands of people, all over the world, who were also small, and also thought they could not climb, read it, and said, "Oh. Is that how it works? I can do that."
Now it is nearly time to sleep.
Did you do anything small today? Perhaps you shared a toy. Perhaps you said thank you. Perhaps you were cross, and then stopped.
Those are not small. Thérèse would tell you so. They are exactly the right size. And if the staircase to heaven looks very steep, you may remember that nobody was ever asked to climb it by themselves.
Goodnight.
A prayer to say together
Saint Thérèse, you were small, and you loved God with your whole heart.
Help me to do small things with great love.
When I am cross, help me to be kind.
When I am tired, help me to rest in God's arms.
Keep us safe tonight, and everyone we love.
Amen.
For grown-ups: what is true in this story
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (Thérèse Martin, 1873 to 1897) was born in Alençon, France, the youngest of five surviving sisters. She entered the Carmel of Lisieux at fifteen, in 1888, and died there of tuberculosis on 30 September 1897, aged twenty-four. She was canonised in 1925 and named a Doctor of the Church in 1997. Her feast day, 1 October, is an obligatory memorial in the General Roman Calendar.
The basket of dolls' clothes, the staircase and the lift all come from her own autobiography, Story of a Soul, assembled from three manuscripts. She tells the basket episode about her childhood ("I choose all!"), and the image of the lift (the arms of Jesus) in her last manuscript. We have retold both in our own words; translations of her phrases vary, so treat the words in our quotation marks as the gist, not a quotation. Her sister Léonie and her sister Céline are real, but the details of the room, the colour of the silk and the children's exact words are our own additions.
The rattling beads retell, in a gentler form, an episode from her writings in which a sister's small noises irritated her and she tried to offer them up. The shower of roses is a saying attributed to her by the sisters who nursed her; the biographies differ on the exact wording, so we have told it as something people who were with her reported. Her phrase "little way" is her own.
The ending, with thousands of readers, is a short summary of how her book spread after her death; the closing questions and the prayer are ours. The prayer is not an approved text.
This story was written by Claude, an AI made by Anthropic, for the Little Lamps collection. It is not an official Church text. Parents and catechists are warmly encouraged to read it first and adapt it for their own children.