One autumn day, a day perhaps very much like today, little Therese Martin was playing outdoors with her sister Celine when their older sister Leonie came out with a special surprise. It was a basket full of doll’s dresses and scraps of material for making others. Putting the basket down, Leonie said, “Here, my little sisters, choose.” Celine looked into the basket and was content to take out a little ball of wool. Therese, however, made a much bolder move. Taking the basket in hand, she said, “I choose all” and walked off with the treasure. Her boldness was extraordinary, as was her selfishness and sense of entitlement.

And yet this childhood incident would become the key to Sister Therese of the Infant Jesus’ sanctity in the Carmel at Lisieux. “I choose all” became the guiding principle of her life as she came to understand that holiness is God’s gift to us. It is not the reward of our merits or the fruit of our own striving. It is a gift, but it is a gift we must choose, and not half-heartedly but with all our heart. For Sister Therese, the boldness she exhibited as a child in taking the basket full of doll’s clothes all for herself is precisely the kind of boldness we must exercise in choosing the gift of holiness God wants to give us.

This is the essence of the Little Way—holiness made simple: choose all that God wants to give you. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that because it is simple, it is therefore easy. Nothing could be further from the truth. St. Therese writes in her autobiography, “I always feel the same bold confidence of becoming a great saint because I don’t count on my merits, since I have none, but I trust in Him who is Virtue and Holiness. God alone, content with my weak efforts, will raise me to Himself and make me a saint, clothing me in His infinite merits. I didn’t think then that one had to suffer much to reach sanctity, but God was not long in showing me this was so…”

What Therese came to realize in her brief life in Carmel is that the Little Way means choosing the cross as God gives it to us, renouncing our will and choosing his will. Many saints of other times practiced severe penances and austerities. This was not true of St. Therese. Certainly, she observed all the austerities prescribed by the Carmelite rule but did nothing beyond or extraordinary in this regard. Her austerity was to always desire, to always choose what God wanted for her, even when this meant choosing what was outwardly distasteful or even painful. A perfect example of this spirit of “choosing all” is the way she reached out to a sister in Carmel who was most disagreeable to her. You know the kind: the one whose off-key singing in choir drives you crazy, who growls at you when you try to do something nice. It’s one of those universal experiences of community life! Yet Therese chose to love this sister precisely because she was her sister in religious life, God’s gift to her! And so genuine was Therese’s love for this particular sister that one day at recreation the sister asked her: “Sister Therese of the Child Jesus, would you tell me what attracts you so much towards me?” “What attracted me,” the saint writes, “was Jesus hidden in the depths of her soul; Jesus who makes sweet what is most bitter.”

Early on the morning of Good Friday 1896, Therese felt what she describes as a stream of blood bubbling up to her mouth. This was the first sign of the tuberculosis she was to suffer from for over a year. The disease ravaged her body, and entailed excruciating pain and the feeling of suffocation. But even worse than the physical suffering was the dark night of the soul she began to experience and which afflicted her right to the very end. Here again, she chose all—the physical suffering of the body and the interior suffering of the soul. She chose all as a way of proving her love for Jesus, even when she felt that he had abandoned her.

Far away now was that autumn day when Therese had boldly proclaimed to her sisters, “I choose all” as she happily walked off with a basket full of pretty dolls’ clothes. Yet in her brief life at Carmel and as she lay in bed dying of tuberculosis at the age of 24, she had come to learn the true meaning of these prophetic words. She writes, “I don’t want to be a saint by halves, I’m not afraid to suffer for You. I fear only one thing; to keep my own will; so take it, for ‘I choose all’ that You will.”