“Fragile as everyone, happy as a few” is the title of Sr. Antonella Piccirilli’s book that she wrote to help us discover an unpublished Thérèse of Lisieux.

It is a happy journey through our wounds, our inner voids, and our psychoses, that meet those of Teresina.

Thus, can the imperfections of our fragilities be the last word on our lives? The answer that Teresina believes in is defined by her as a small path, that she herself traveled, but not alone. It is a way accessible to all, it shows us a gateway towards a full and possible happiness.

We offer a mini-series made of six clips, listening to this extraordinary woman and saint, who, even though did not move from her convent in Lisieux and died young of tuberculosis, at 24 years old in 1897; can surely talk to our human condition even today.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, so close to contemporary man, in particular to his fragilities and his wounds.

Saint Teresa is a saint who lived in the 1800s; it seems quite far. As a matter of fact, when you get to know her a little more, read what she writes, and put aside the poetic language, the 1800s, and the history, you discover so much simplicity and so much fragility. Teresa is a girl who dies at the age of 24. She is a simple, fragile person, with many difficulties. There are many wounds in her personal experience, a very important loss that of her mother, many detachments, illnesses, as well as psychological problems. All this, her being so human, simple and fragile, together with a secure, true sanctity, puts her very, very close: many a times we do not find cracks out of our darkness, we do not know how to open a gateway towards the light, when we are screwed in on ourselves, when our problems overwhelm us and everything seems so difficult. In reality, she is a living testimony to the fact that we can rise from our wounds and that God acts not on the outside, not beyond us, but within our wounds. But we must know how to accept it; we must know how to enter into this vulnerability, into this fragility.

Maybe it was “narrated a bit poorly” and often interpreted through a sentimental and moralistic reading.

When, for example, we consider her writings and all that was created around her figure and around her sanctity, we find some difficulties. Even I, at a younger age, had difficulties reading her writings and then seeing how she was treated and, unfortunately, how she is still today often treated: she is often exaggerated or even diminished, but one does not see the depth of her humanity, the depth and grandness of her message within this fragility. She is not an easy-going saint; she is not a rose-and-flower saint. Even though she says: “I will do some good on this earth; in my heaven, I want to spread flowers,” we do not exactly understand what this “spread flowers” means. To “spread flowers” for her means to give everything and not leave anything for herself. And thus this figure must be brought to the truth, to not be diminished or on the contrary, in some cases, have an exaggerated approach.

Teresina: mental and eating disorders, the difficult relationship with her body

Lately, I happened to meet a youth group, some of whom had a few problems, some psychological, and abuse situations. Well these youth wanted a closer insight into the figure of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Teresa reaches everyone, in particular women, as her experience passed through many difficulties: from the psychological point of view, for example, she had moments of neurosis, there was a time she was ill, she was scared she was going insane, that there was a psychological, psychiatric tare.

And instead, everything was resolved through an experience of great faith and great reliance on God. But this psycho-physical fragility accompanied her all her life. Teresa is not a perfectly integrated person, a perfectly mature person, without difficulties, no. For example, I noticed she has a few phobias; till the end of her life, she has a phobia of the dark, of spiders, which is a sign of a psychological experience not deep enough or that she does not have complete acceptance of her body. Towards the end of her life, when she was devastated by the tuberculosis, she says: “Ever since I was a child, my body has made me uncomfortable; I was embarrassed about it”.

She has a difficult experience with her body as well as with food. She says: “I do not understand why, when we want to talk to some friends, we must invite them for lunch. (…) Why sit and eat? If Jesus, Mary and Joseph would not have eaten, I wouldn’t have done it; I do it out of love for them”. As you see, Teresa’s difficulty is real, and it will accompany her all her life. But in this, there is a secret: she is not a girl who sinks in her wounds; she is not a person who feels sorry for herself; she is not a person who twists in on herself; she is a person who finds a path to a fantastic, beautiful solution that sometimes we forget a little in our lives; we let it fall a little, let go and feel a little ashamed. In Teresa emerges an inner identity: the beauty of not being alone, of being accompanied in our lives by a Presence that lives within us.

Faith. Teresa has a capacity for great resilience and insight.

There is an answer that Teresa gives not only to those youth that I met, but to all the youth and to all the people who approach her: there is great resilience, a great capacity to rely on, to find an inner core.

Teresa guesses this inner presence; she calls it God, Jesus in particular. Jesus is very present in her life; she strongly confides and trusts in God, so deeply that she manages to happily live all her fragilities, thus happy as a few even though fragile as all.

A perfect binomial for the inner experience that she conveys to us.

How was the young Teresa then?

Till the age of 14–15 years, Teresa is a healthy girl who lives within the “shell” of her family. Even though in her family, since the age of 4 years, there has been no mother as she passes away.

Teresa is a big dreamer; she dreams of joy, of happiness, being a Christian, of becoming a saint, but she has to deal with the fact that at 11 years old she does not know how to comb her long blond hair, that she doesn’t tidy her room, and many other small things. This makes me think of many dear adolescents who sit in their slippers in front of the TV or in front of their computer. How did Teresa manage to get out of this self-doubt?

Did she search for a meaning, a goal? Teresa managed to decentralize her presence and remove herself from her horizon. She left the door open for the others.

It is otherness that saved Teresa.

The otherness of the people around her, but also the Other, is that Other who dwells within me, that Other who is Jesus for Teresa. This encounter, because she precisely speaks of an encounter, on Christmas night, this encounter will give her the possibility of coming out of her shell and keeping out of her experience all the fragilities that were drowning her. This decentralization helped her not only to live her life, but to live it to its fullest.

A happy imperfection. The famous small path.

For me, the drama of today’s man and woman begins when we want to be perfect. Thérèse of Lisieux gives us a path to walk within a happy imperfection: in her case, until the end of her life, she was not a perfect woman; she never reached the perfection of her human and feminine identity. But she is a great saint; why? Because she entrusted herself. So when she speaks of the small path, she shows us a small, short, simple way. It was a way of trust and love. As when as a child, Teresa had this experience with her father, just as when a child goes hand in hand with his father and walks looking at the stars. He trusts his father, because if he only had to trust himself, he would look at the ground, or while looking at the stars, he would fall.

And so to be able to walk in the night, looking at the stars, hand in hand with a Father, gives you the possibility to overcome all your imperfections, the stumbling blocks in the path and go straight to see the most beautiful things, the deepest things, and the most challenging things. And that is what we can say about Teresa’s small path through an image.

Teresa lives with her difficulties without worrying about solving them.

Pope Francis dedicated an apostolic exhortation to her in October 2023

He speaks of daily surrender in the paragraphs 23 and 24: “The trust that Teresina encourages is not to be understood only in reference to one’s own sanctification and salvation. It has an integral meaning, embracing the whole of concrete existence and applying it to our whole life, where many times we are overwhelmed by fears, the desire for human security, and the need to have everything under control”.

Trust is not just a small experience of self-improvement; it is a global experience, an all-encompassing experience that also dissolves fear in our everyday lives: that not trusting others, calculating, trying to understand, to understand where our life is going or how that friendship is going and how that disappointment is going to be resolved. The abandonment and trust present in the small path that Thérèse of Lisieux teaches us, helps us to precisely dissolve those worries about the future. Those fears, as Pope Francis says, that take away peace, because sometimes fear of the future takes away the peace of the present.