Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
I’ve been doing a series of counsels for a healthy and a holy spirituality. The last counsel that we spoke about was discipline and how a disciple of Christ needs to live a disciplined life—essentially, how we need to practice what's called self-mastery. Discipline and sacrifice go hand in hand. Any athlete or any person with a military background—you have to be disciplined. You have to sacrifice.
As Catholics, self-discipline is tied to sacrifice and is done for the sake of charity, so we can love God more and that we can love others more as God does too.
What are some examples from the life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux which speak about discipline and self-mastery? We've been using her as an example of someone who lived a healthy and a holy spirituality. Some of the examples from her life where she was disciplined and had a sense of self-mastery:  From when she was very young, she was accustomed to making little sacrifices. Her mom wrote in a letter dated from 1876—this is when she was three years old. “Even Thérèse is anxious to make sacrifices. Marie, her sister, has given her little sisters a string of beads on purpose to count their acts of self-denial—little beads; you count your acts of self-denial each day. And the mom says it's amusing to see Thérèse put her hand in her pocket time after time to pull a bead along the string whenever she makes a little sacrifice.” This is when she was very young, three years old. But her mom died about a year and a half after that when Thérèse was four and a half. Thérèse became very overly sensitive because of the trauma of that loss. As a simple example, she says that she would cry if someone contradicted her, if something happened that hurt her feelings, and then she would cry for having cried.
Thérèse writes in her autobiography, she said, “I had a constant and ardent desire to advance in virtue, but often my actions were spoiled by imperfections. My extreme sensitiveness made me almost unbearable. All arguments were useless. I simply could not correct myself of this miserable fault,” she says.
When she was almost 14, she received a special grace at Christmas. After coming home from midnight Mass, her father made a sharp remark about the custom of Thérèse opening gifts that were placed in her shoes near the chimney corner in the house. He thought it was too childish. She was too old for this. He was too tired and upset. Those words, Thérèse actually heard them, and it really hurt her. But she wrote this. She said, “Choking back my tears, I ran down to the dining room, and though my heart beat fast, I picked up my shoes and joyfully pulled out all the things, looking happy as a queen. Papa laughed and did not show any trace of displeasure, and Celine, her sister, thought she must be dreaming. But happily, it was a reality. Little Thérèse had regained once and for all the strength of mind which she had lost at four and a half. On this night of grace, the third period of my life began,” Thérèse says, “the most beautiful of all, the one most filled with heavenly favors. In an instant, Our Lord, satisfied with my goodwill, accomplished the work I had not been able to do during all these years.”  And after her Christmas conversion, she writes in her autobiography, “The practice of virtue gradually became sweet and natural to me. At first, my looks betrayed the effort, but little by little, self-sacrifice seemed to come more easily and without hesitation. Our Lord has said, ‘To him who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance,’” unquote.
So as a Christmas gift, Thérèse was given by Jesus the grace to conquer her emotional impulsivity and her extreme sensitivity, and she cooperated with that grace. From that time forward, she was able to gain that mastery over herself, that self-discipline or self-possession.
Our Lord loves giving gifts to us—even on His birthday, He loves giving gifts to us, and especially gifts that without His help, we could actually never acquire. Again, Thérèse received this special grace of self-mastery after many years of struggle. We too should pray to our Lord for a special grace like the one that she was given—if we struggle with anything that discourages us from leading a life which is more disciplined and more guided by grace. Because the more we are able to be self-disciplined, the more we will become generous disciples of our Lord.
Some examples of St. Thérèse's spirit of self-discipline and sacrifice that you'll find in her writings and testimonies include these, and most of these are in the convent with the sisters: holding her tongue when she wanted to defend herself—takes a lot of discipline to do that; giving up small preferences at table when eating without making any comments; choosing the least desirable foods at meals; being very disciplined in regards to dealing with people who actually irritated her.
She writes how a sister in Carmel had a talent for getting under St. Thérèse's skin by constantly correcting her and misunderstanding her kind gestures. Thérèse would respond smiling at the sister and speak kindly to her and do kind gestures for her—so much so that the sister actually thought that Thérèse liked her. And she really didn't. She didn't even realize, the sister, that Thérèse—she had been Thérèse's hair shirt for so many years. Her little hair shirt. If anyone calls you a hair shirt, just be aware that's not a compliment. Just kind of be aware of that as we go forward in life.
If people interrupted Thérèse when she was talking, she would just yield the floor to them without showing any annoyance. She would do the least desirable tasks in the convent. She was very faithful to her Carmelite rule of life, as faithful as she could have been—very faithful to prayer, even though in Carmel pretty much all that she experienced was dryness in prayer. She didn't have any consolation in prayer. Constant dryness. And yet she was very faithful to it. She endured discomforts without complaining. She maintained serenity as much as she could when her soul was plunged into the dark nights and into suffering.
So reading from her life, you very much get a sense that St. Thérèse was a seasoned, self-disciplined expert. And the fruit it bore, the result of it, was that she was truly overflowing with the love of God. And God made her one of the most popular saints of our times as well.
So let's ask Our Lady for the grace of self-mastery, for the grace to be in control of our passions rather than letting them control us, for the grace to respond with a supernatural spirit to the natural everyday annoyances, and all this so that we can become better disciplined disciples of her Son, and in this way be more effective channels of God's love, His grace, and His mercy.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.