Jean Khoury

Summary: Among the most deceptively simple expressions in the writings of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus is the phrase “to please God.” This article argues that this formula, far from being a pious commonplace, constitutes one of the most radical formulations of her entire spiritual doctrine. It reveals a profound spiritual dispossession by which the soul renounces not only external goods, but the very possession of its own acts, virtues, and holiness. The article traces the structure of this dispossession, its roots in Thérèse’s contemplation of the mystery of the Child Jesus as an hermeneutical key to the spiritual life, and its theological grounding in the Gospel principle that what is received is received according to the modality of the one who receives it. The conclusion proposes practical implications for spiritual formation today.

Introduction

One does not immediately sense the weight of what Thérèse of the Child Jesus means when she says she seeks, in her daily religious life, simply “to please God” (faire plaisir au Bon Dieu). The expression seems too light, too childlike, almost too easy to carry the burden of a spiritual doctrine. And yet, if one pauses and listens carefully, something remarkable emerges: this apparently naïve formula contains what may be the most radical statement of evangelical poverty in the entire Theresian corpus.

It is not the poverty of the material destitute. It is not even the poverty of humility before the sovereign greatness of God. It is the poverty of a soul that refuses to possess its own love, that lets every act, every sacrifice, every virtue pass through the fingers like sand, returning nothing to the self, retaining nothing for the self, not even the spiritual satisfaction of having loved.

This article proposes to explore the depth of this expression. We will first examine its structure and what it implies about the spiritual ego. We will then turn to the mystery of the Child Jesus as the contemplative key from which Thérèse draws this vision. We will consider the theological law underlying it, namely that God is received according to the modality of the one who receives Him. And finally we will draw several practical conclusions for the spiritual life today.

I. The Structure of “Pleasing the Good God”

1. The Displacement of the Centre of Gravity

When Thérèse speaks of “pleasing God,” she is describing more than a pious intention. She is identifying a complete displacement of the soul’s centre of gravity: from the self towards God. In the classical logic of spiritual progress, even the most generous soul can harbour a subtle proprietary instinct with regard to its own acts. One does the will of God, but one also watches oneself doing it. One accumulates merits and subtly takes possession of them. One becomes virtuous and not without some interior contemplation of one’s own virtue.

Thérèse seems to do exactly the opposite. The act is accomplished, it is offered to God, and then, it disappears. She does not retain it. She does not turn back to contemplate it as her own spiritual capital. The act reaches its end in the joy of God and then has no further existence for the soul that performed it. This is what gives her acts their quality of radical ephemerality. As she herself will say, when she will die, she will arrive before God with empty hands.

This is not, it must be said at once, a denial of supernatural merit, which the Church has constantly affirmed. But psychologically and spiritually Thérèse refuses to act in view of merit. Her gaze at the moment of acting is fixed not on reward but on God Himself, or more precisely, on His joy. She states in her Manuscripts: “I want to work for your love alone.” The logic is not that of a servant counting wages, but that of a lover who forgets herself completely in the joy of the beloved.

2. The Ephemeral Act and the Spiritual Ego

What is at stake here is the spiritual ego, that subtle dimension of selfhood that persists even in generous acts. The spiritual ego quite readily accepts doing great things for God, provided it can afterwards contemplate them as its own. It can be humble about external accomplishments and yet quietly possessive about interior virtues. It can practise poverty materially and yet accumulate spiritual capital with great ardour.

What Thérèse abandons is precisely this appropriation. She does not even want to possess her holiness. This is why, in the poem The Unpetaled Rose (see below, Addendum I), she strips the rose of its petals for the Child Jesus, so that His little feet may not be wounded by the harsh earth (image of how humans treat Jesus here on earth). The act is not retained. It is consumed in the joy of the one she loves. Its fulfilment coincides with its disappearance.

The parallel with the Gospel is exact: “Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Mt 6:3). The act is so completely handed over to God that it almost ceases to belong to the one who performed it. This is not carelessness; it is the most radical purity of intention: love that looks only to the joy of the beloved, and not at all to what it can retain from having loved.

3. The Paradox of Lightness and Depth

There is an extraordinary lightness in this vision. “Pleasing” is not an ascetical programme. It is not a strategy of sanctification. It is not a spiritual accounting. It is the spontaneous attitude of a heart that loves. When a child offers a flower to its mother, it does not think of accumulating rights over her. It simply wants to please her. Once the flower is given, the act is finished. It reaches its end in the smile of the beloved person, and there is nothing to keep.

And yet this lightness is, paradoxically, more demanding, not less. For the religious ego can take pride in being humble. It can take pride in being poor. It can even take pride in being small. But how can one take pride before a child? How can one display one’s merits before a child? How can one assert one’s spiritual importance before a child? All of this becomes almost absurd. The lightness of “pleasing” does not relax the demands of the spiritual life; it radicalises them from within. In font of a child, the value of the act after it is made is “lost”.

II. The Mystery of the Child Jesus as Hermeneutical Key

1. Not Merely a Devotion but a Theological Form of Existence

It would be a mistake to read the mystery “of the Child Jesus” in Thérèse as a sentimental devotion, a Victorian piety of the crèche, or a purely personal affective inclination. In her spiritual doctrine, the Child Jesus functions as a true hermeneutical key, an organising principle that reconfigures the entire psychology of the relationship to God.

In the Christian tradition, all the figures of Christ already exist: the judging Christ, the kingly Christ, the suffering Christ, the glorious Christ, the Christ of the Passion, the Risen Lord. What is specific to Thérèse is the structuring centrality she grants to the Child Jesus as the global interpretative key of the spiritual life. From Bethlehem she reads everything, including the Cross and the Resurrection.

This has a concrete and far-reaching effect: it introduces into the soul’s relationship with God an affective immediacy, a poverty of relationship, a disarming simplicity that cuts at the root of all religious calculation.

2. To Become Small Before the Child Jesus

There is a crucial distinction that must be made. To become small before God is one thing. To become small before the Child Jesus is something altogether more radical.

To become small before the all-powerful God can still be understood within the classical framework of creaturely humility: God is the infinite Being, the Creator, the Almighty; I recognise my nothingness before His immensity. This is already a fundamental truth. But before a child, smallness is no longer imposed by the ontological disproportion between creature and Creator. It is freely chosen within the register of love.

The difference is decisive. Before the all-powerful God, I am small because He is immense. Before the Child Jesus, I make myself small even though He has already made Himself small. The Incarnation has overturned the usual relationship. God has become vulnerable, dependent, the one who must be carried and surrounded with tenderness. In the order of faith, we know that the Child Jesus is the eternal Word. But in the order of love, something new appears: the soul can now love God by taking care of Him. It is this inversion that The Unpetaled Rose enacts. Thérèse does not strip herself of her petals because she is crushed by divine majesty. She strips herself so that the little feet of Jesus may not be harmed (see the poem below).

3. The Play of the Child and the Freedom from Possession

The mystery of childhood also introduces a radically different relationship to time. The child does not live in accumulation. It does not build a moral or spiritual patrimony. It lives in the present instant of relationship. It plays. It gives. It receives. Then it moves on. Its happiness lies in the relationship itself, not in what it can capitalise from that relationship.

Thérèse, in contemplating the Child Jesus, does not merely imitate childhood as a spiritual posture. She enters into what we might call the very play of the Child Jesus; not “play” in a superficial sense, but in the profound sense of a freedom with regard to possession, utility, and productivity. The spiritual adult easily calculates: how much progress, how many sacrifices, how much merit, how many years of fidelity. The child loves.

It is here that Thérèse’s phrase about God — that He “is weak in calculation” — takes on its full theological weight. It is not a pious saying. It is the echo of Jesus’s own Gospels, which present the Father as perpetually overflowing the logic of strict merit and proportionate retribution: the Father of the prodigal son does not calculate; the owner of the vineyard does not measure wages by hours worked; the woman who finds her lost coin does not proportion her joy to the duration of the search.

4. The Genetic Dimension: Present from the Beginning

A point of theological importance must be noted. The formula “to please God” (faire plaisir au Bon Dieu) is not a late achievement in Thérèse’s spiritual life. It is not the fruit, at least primarily, of the great passive purifications of 1889–1892. It is present from the beginning of her religious life, almost from the first moment. The later purifications, i.e. the nights that reduced her to being a grain of sand, a drop of dew, a ball in the hands of Jesus, did not create this fundamental orientation. They radicalised it, purified it, brought it to its final transparency.

This genetic observation is theologically significant. It suggests that what is at work in Thérèse is not the result of a long ascetical conquest, a spiritual achievement gradually earned. It appears rather as an initial gift, a foundational grace, that runs through all the stages of her interior development like a discreet but constant thread. The purifications rendered it increasingly pure; but they found it already there, already structuring the soul’s relationship to God.

III. The God of Thérèse: The Theology of Reception

1. “You Will Have the God You Want”

Thérèse was deeply conscious that her way of knowing and loving God was not a merely personal preference but a spiritually decisive choice, one with consequences. The clearest evidence of this is a remark she made to a novice who could not accept that God was fundamentally good and merciful. The novice insisted on a God of severe justice; she was certain she would pass through purgatory; she could not receive what Thérèse was trying to convey. Thérèse’s response was simple and devastating: you will have the God you want.

This is not a relativism about God. It is a statement of a profound spiritual law, one that the Gospel articulates with great clarity: “Take care how you listen” (Lk 8:18). The Greek text places emphasis on the mode of listening, not merely the content heard. The same logic runs through the parable of the sower: the seed is identical; the soil determines the form of its fruitfulness. What is received is received according to the modality of the one who receives it.

2. The Thomistic Grounding

This law has a solid theological grounding. The Thomistic tradition recognises that grace operates according to the dispositio recipiens: it is not grace that is limited, but its reception that is modulated by the interior structure of the receiving subject. Grace is objective, always full and superabundant in itself; but our experiential access to God is configured by our manner of receiving Him, of expecting Him, of interpreting Him.

This is why the transformation of the spiritual life is never merely doctrinal. One can know the truth about divine mercy and yet not receive it as such, because the interior configuration of the soul habitually interprets even mercy through a grid of suspicion, fear, or mercantile calculation. In such a soul, even divine goodness is received as a form of pressure.

3. “As I Know Him and Love Him”

It is in this light that Thérèse’s missionary ambition must be read. She does not merely wish to speak about God. She wishes to make the good God known and loved “as she knows Him and loves Him.” The word as is of immense significance. It designates not a doctrine but a modality of relationship, a concrete spiritual form, an affective and theological configuration. To transmit it is not to transmit information about God but to facilitate a transformation of the interior structure by which God is received.

The God of Thérèse — and here the expression recovers all its meaning — is not another God in Himself. But He is received according to a hermeneutic of childhood, gratuity, and mercy. And this hermeneutic is so structurally determinative that it produces a spiritual experience that is virtually irreducible to the experience of a soul that approaches God through fear, distance, or strict justice. One and the same God, received according to two incompatible modalities of access, produces what are almost two distinct spiritual worlds.

This is what makes Thérèse’s formula, “to please God,” so theologically serious. She does not merely describe a devotion. She proposes a conversion of the very gaze by which God is known and loved.

IV. Practical Conclusions for Spiritual Formation

1. The Priority of the Interior Configuration

The first practical consequence concerns the priority that must be accorded in spiritual formation to the interior configuration of the soul’s relationship to God and not merely to the transmission of correct doctrine or the practice of virtuous acts. One can teach someone all the truths of the faith, and they will receive each truth through the distorting filter of an image of God shaped by fear, self-interest, or a mercantile logic of merit. The truth will be received, but deformed by the modality of reception.

Spiritual formation must therefore attend, before all else, to this interior architecture. The question is not only: what does the soul know about God? But: what is the soul’s deepest image of God? What does God’s gaze feel like to this soul? How does this soul experience being loved by Him?

2. The Mystery of the Child Jesus as Formative Centre

The contemplation of the Child Jesus is not, in this light, a secondary devotional option. It is a formative centre, a school of a particular quality of relationship. For before a child, one cannot maintain the posture of the performing subject. One cannot present one’s spiritual curriculum vitae. One cannot display one’s merits. The very absurdity of doing so before a child dismantles the pretension spontaneously.

To propose to souls a contemplation of the Incarnation under the figure of the Child is therefore to propose a formative experience of the breakdown of all religious calculation. It is not to retreat from depth; it is to discover a depth that calculation had prevented one from reaching.

3. Dispossession as an Ongoing Orientation, Not an Achievement

The genetic observation made above — that Thérèse’s orientation of “pleasing” precedes her great passive purifications — has an important implication for the pedagogy of the spiritual life. Dispossession is not a terminus, a summit to be attained after long years of ascetical conquest. It is an orientation that can be present from the beginning, even if it will only be fully clarified and purified in time.

The spiritual guide’s task is therefore not to wait until the soul is sufficiently purified before introducing it to the dynamics of pure love. It is rather to invite the soul, from the beginning, to cultivate this orientation, to act less for merit, less for spiritual consolation, less for interior progress as an end in itself, and more simply for the joy of God. The purifications will come in due time. But the orientation can and should be proposed from the first.

4. The Lightness that is More Demanding

Finally, it must be insisted that the lightness of Thérèse’s approach is not a spiritual minimalism. The dispossession she proposes is in fact more demanding than many ascetical programmes that are apparently more rigorous. For a rigorous ascetical programme still leaves the soul something to possess: its discipline, its fidelity, its spiritual achievements. What Thérèse proposes leaves the soul nothing to possess, not even its love.

This is an extraordinarily high bar. It is the bar of evangelical poverty understood in its most interior dimension. And it may well be that precisely this quality of Thérèse’s spirituality — this stripping of the last possessions of the spiritual ego — is what makes her so relevant for an age in which the most serious spiritual danger is not a lack of religious activity but a subtle narcissism that annexes even the most devout practices to the project of self-construction.

Conclusion

“To please God.” We began with this phrase and we return to it. What has the journey shown?

It has shown, first, that this expression designates a complete displacement of the centre of gravity of the spiritual life, from the self to God, carried out with a consistency and a radicality that arguably exceeds what most ascetical treatises propose under more demanding-sounding titles.

It has shown, second, that the source of this displacement is not primarily an ascetical practice but a contemplative orientation, a particular gaze upon God under the mystery of the Child Jesus, who reveals a God of pure gratuity, pure relationship, pure offered vulnerability, before whom all religious calculation becomes not merely forbidden but simply absurd.

It has shown, third, that what is at stake is a theological law of reception: the God who is received is always received according to the modality of the one who receives Him. To choose the God of Thérèse, that is the God of childhood, mercy, and gratuity, is not to choose a lesser God but to consent to a modality of access that dismantles the last fortifications of the spiritual ego.

And it has shown, finally, that this orientation is not the achievement of a long purification but its presupposition, present from the beginning as a foundational grace, clarified and purified in time, but not created by the passive nights. The little way is not a way of diminishment. It is, at its heart, a theology of tenderness and tenderness, when it is pure, is the most radical form of love.

When she says that the good God will do her will in heaven because on earth she did only His will, Thérèse is not reverting to calculation. She is describing the dynamic of total correspondence: not a soul that earned a reward, but a soul that, having become entirely transparent to the will of God, now participates in it from within. To please, and then to disappear into the joy of the One pleased. That is everything.

Addendum I

As an addendum, it is worth clarifying a subtle but important semantic and affective difference between the French expression “faire plaisir au Bon Dieu” and its usual English rendering, “to please God”.

The English phrase “to please God” tends, in standard usage, to carry a primarily normative or moral sense: it denotes acting in accordance with God’s will, such that one’s conduct is judged as pleasing in the moral order. In ordinary lexical terms, “to please” is commonly glossed as meaning “to make someone feel happy or satisfied”. This formulation, while correct, easily shifts in theological usage towards the idea of compliance with a standard rather than an interpersonal gesture.

By contrast, “faire plaisir au Bon Dieu” has a more immediately relational and affective tone. The verb faire plaisir is active and directional: it implies doing something in order to give pleasure, joy, or delight to another. The nuance is not merely that one’s action is approved, but that it is offered as a gift intended to gladden the other. Hence the more literal force is closer to “to give joy to God” or “to bring joy to God”, even if such renderings sound unusual in idiomatic English.

This is precisely where the limitation of “to please God” becomes apparent. While not incorrect, it often flattens the interpersonal dynamic contained in the French expression. “Pleasing” in English can sound static or evaluative, whereas faire plaisir is dynamic and relational, suggesting an intentional act oriented towards the joy of the other.

One may therefore say that the French expression preserves a more concrete sense of loving intentionality, whereas the English idiom tends to abstract the relationship into conformity with divine approval. The difference is subtle, but it is significant for spiritual theology, because it affects how the relationship between the human person and God is imaginatively and affectively construed: not only as obedience to a will, but as actions offered in love that are meant to delight the One loved.

Addendum II: An unpetaled rose

(French – English)

Poésie 51, du 19 mai 1897   : Une rose effeuillée, Air du fil de la Vierge ou bien : La rose mousse

J M. J T.

19 Mai 1897

Une rose effeuillée

An unpetaled rose

1. Jésus, quand je te vois soutenu par ta Mère

Jesus when I see you sustained by your Mother

Quitter ses bras

 leaving her arms

Essayer en tremblant sur notre triste terre

Trying to take while trembling on our sorrowful earth

Tes premiers pas

  your firsts steps

Devant toi je voudrais effeuiller une rose

Before you I would like to unpetal a rose

En sa fraîcheur

 in its freshness

Pour que ton petit pied bien doucement repose

In order that your little foot will rest

Sur une fleur !….

 on a flower !….

2. Cette rose effeuillée, c’est la fidèle image

This unpetaled rose, is the faithful image,

Divin Enfant

 Divine Child,

Du coeur qui veut pour toi s’immoler sans partage

of the heart which wants to immolate itself without any division

A chaque instant.

 at every instant.

Seigneur, sur tes autels plus d’une fraîche rose

Lord, on your altars more than a fresh rose

Aime à briller

 likes to shine

Elle se donne à toi….. mais je rêve autre chose :

She gives herself to you….but I dream another thing:

« C’est m’effeuiller !… »

  “it’s to unpetal myself!…”

3. La rose en son éclat peut embellir ta fête

The rose in her brightness can embellish your feast

Aimable Enfant,

 Lovable Child,

Mais la rose effeuillée, simplement on la jette

but the unpetaled rose (usually) one only (with simplicity)throws it away 

Au gré du vent.

 to the whims of the wind.

Une rose effeuillée sans recherche se donne

An unpetaled rose without studied care gives herself

Pour n’être plus.

 In order no longer to be.

Comme elle avec bonheur à toi je m’abandonne

Like it, with happiness, to you, I abandon myself

Petit Jésus.

 Little Jesus.

4. L’on marche sans regret sur des feuilles de rose

 One walks without any regret on the petals of a rose

Et ces débris

 and its debris

Sont un simple ornement que sans art on dispose

are a simple adornment that we arrange without art

Je l’ai compris.

 I have unterstood it.

Jésus, pour ton amour j’ai prodigué ma vie

Jesus for your love I have squandered my life

Mon avenir

 my futur

Aux regards des mortels rose à jamais flétrie

in the eyes of mortals, (I am) a rose forever wilted

Je dois mourir !…

 I have to die !…

5. Pour toi, je dois mourir, Enfant, Beauté Suprême

for you I must die, Child, Supreme Beauty

Quel heureux sort !

 what happy lot!

Je veux en m’effeuillant te prouver que je t’aime

I want, In unpetaling myself,  to prove to you that I love you

O mon Trésor !…

 O my Treasure!…

Sous tes pas enfantins, je veux avec mystère

Under your childish steps, I want with mystery

Vivre ici-bas

 to live here below

Et je voudrais encor adoucir au Calvaire

And I want also to sweeten on Calvary

Tes derniers pas !….

 your last steps !….