The Gospel of the Lord.  Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.  
Today we celebrate the memorial of St. Thérèse Martin, who died in the Carmel of Lisieux on September 30, 1897, at 24 years old, making her the youngest doctor of the now 37 doctors of the Church. St. Anthony of Padua was the second youngest, but he passed into glory at the ripe old age of 35. So Thérèse is the youngest of the doctors by a good stretch.  
The words of St. Paul apply to her. We read the Apostle say to Timothy in First Timothy 4:12, he says, "Let no one despise your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity." No one who's wise despises the tender age of Thérèse. But interestingly enough, many of those who knew her in life and knew of her didn't appreciate her greatness.  
Susan Leslie, in a very good book about Thérèse that she wrote called The Happiness of God, says that during the preliminary hearings of her canonization cause, the learned judges, judging Thérèse's case, thought the whole thing was beneath their dignity. They thought it was a waste of time. Actually, the vice postulator, Monsignor Dutilleul, sneered. He said, "We no longer beatify kitchen brothers in the Congregation of Rites." In other words, "You're wasting my time with this," was what he was saying. Canon Dubosc even accused Céline, St. Thérèse's sister, of trying to bring Thérèse down to her own level.  
Most of the Martin relatives even opposed it. They thought that canonizing little Thérèse was an absurd idea. And one of her sisters, Léonie, who was told the news in the Visitation Convent—she was working in the laundry at the time—paused long enough and remarked, "Well, Thérèse was very sweet, but to make her a saint, that's going a bit too far." And she continued hanging up the laundry and doing her work that day.  
Mother Marie de Gonzague, the former prioress of the Carmel of Lisieux, laughed aloud at the idea. "If they canonize Thérèse, they'll have to canonize half the convent," was more or less her thinking. Now, with hindsight, we look back on that and see how foolish those incidents and remarks are. God's saints are always praised by future generations. But when they're right under our noses, they can easily be overlooked, not appreciated. In part, that's to keep them humble. In part, it's because sometimes we have a distorted or incomplete view of who God is. And if you don't know Him very well, you won't recognize or appreciate His saints. They'll remain incognito at times, even to people who seem quite religious.  
Another reason that Thérèse's holiness was overlooked was because it wasn't flashy. It wasn't about great miracles, prophecies, locutions, bilocations, or awe-inspiring virtuous deeds. It was an ordinary holiness, an interior holiness—holiness of the mind and the heart expressed in hidden sufferings and sacrifices and in simple acts of charity. Love and littleness are the hallmarks of her holiness.  
Love and littleness—those who are more choleric by temperament can struggle to understand the beauty of those qualities. Even listen to how St. Thérèse defines holiness. Less than two months before she died, she told her sister Pauline, "Holiness doesn't consist in this or that practice. It consists in a disposition of the heart, which makes us humble and little in God's arms, conscious of our weakness and confident, even daringly confident, in the goodness of our Father."  
Probably worth repeating: “Holiness doesn't consist in this or that practice. It consists in a disposition of the heart, which makes us humble and little in God's arms, conscious of our weakness and confident, even daringly confident, in the goodness of our Father.”  
The Little Way which Thérèse lived and taught has three main ingredients, we could say: knowledge, trust, and love. Knowledge means knowing God, who He really is—so, understanding the Lord. Knowing who I really am in God's sight, which means knowing that I'm a beloved, adopted child of His. Knowing His plan for me, which is holiness. It involves seeing and experiencing God's presence in my life, so not just a head knowledge, but also an experiential and a heart knowledge too.  
The second ingredient is trust—being confident in God, in His plan, in His goodness, and trusting and abandoning myself to Him. So, trusting completely in the Lord, as the Divine Mercy image clearly instructs us and encourages us to do.  
The third ingredient of her Little Way is love—embracing God's love and then loving Him and loving others in return, because love is a two-way street. It's give and take, not just take, take, take, "Give me, give me, give me." No, it's actually give and take.  
The Little Way also involves practicing what we could call the "little virtues" like humility, like poverty of spirit, gentleness, kindness, meekness, gratitude, simplicity, and detachment. So it's not about searching for extraordinary things, extraordinary gifts or graces, or doing things that are enviable in other people's eyes.  
This is a spiritual path that St. Thérèse lived and walked on and left for us, and so it's no wonder why many people didn't understand her greatness, because many people don't understand the love and the humility and the simplicity which is at the heart, really, of any authentic holiness.  
There's a Carmelite brother named Brother John Mary who gave a retreat on the healing power of contemplative prayer somewhere here in Indiana back in August. The retreat's actually online somewhere. During the retreat, he talked about one of Thérèse's patrons, St. John of the Cross. St. John of the Cross says that God heals us through prayer, specifically through contemplative prayer. He does that by healing the three powers of the soul: the intellect, the memory, and the will.  
The intellect is our power to understand. The memory is the soul's power to possess. The will is the soul's power to love. Put another way, the intellect is concerned with ideas. The memory's concerned with our attention—what we give our attention to. The will's concerned with our choices. As God brings us closer to Him, He heals our intellect through the virtue of faith, by giving us a right understanding of Him and of ourselves. He heals our memories through the virtue of hope, by giving us a greater desire to possess God and give our attention to Him and live with Him in the present moment. And God heals our will through the virtue of charity, by making our love for Him grow and our love for others and for other things be put in the right places and in the right proportion and the right balance, so to say.  
So we share these things because one of the ways that we can assist or hasten the sanctification process is by focusing our memory, our attention, on one simple, profound truth which is contained in three words. It's the truth that God loves me. Three little powerful words: God loves me.  
Meditate on that. Reflect on that. Repeat that to yourself, even—God loves me. Much of the genius of St. Thérèse is found in giving our attention to that truth and in taking that truth to heart. Any of us can do that, and all of us actually should do that. Reminding yourself of and focusing on God's love for you, even on Our Lady's love for you, on the saints' love for you—by doing that, it'll change your life. It'll make you very Theresian at the same time too, which is a good thing, which is actually a great thing.  
St. Thérèse one day announced to her novices in Carmel, she said, "If I lead you into error with my little way of love, be not afraid that I shall permit you to follow it for any length of time. I would soon reappear after my death and tell you to take another road. But if I do not return, believe me when I tell you that we can never have too much confidence in the good Lord, who is so powerful and merciful. We obtain from Him as much as we hope for."  
In case you were wondering, St. Thérèse has not returned to correct her teaching. That has not happened, and she won't return to correct her teaching. "Let no one despise your youth," says St. Paul, "but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity" (1 Timothy 4:12). And no one who's Catholic despises our younger sister St. Thérèse, but how many people truly appreciate her?  
Those who are wise will seek to follow the example—the Little Way of love that she left for us, or rather that God left for us through her. So let's ask Our Lady and St. Thérèse to help us understand what humility and holiness, what love and littleness, what goodness and confidence in God really are. And let's ask Him for the grace to embrace and to walk in the Little Way.  
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.