A Reflection on Suffering & St. Therese’s Example – Lent 2026

Summary

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Through the witness of St. Thérèse, this talk reflects on suffering not as an obstacle to holiness, but as a hidden path to God. By offering our pain with love and humility, we learn how even our weaknesses can become places of grace.

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Reflective Study Guide Questions

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“He longs to give us a magnificent reward. He knows that suffering is the only means of preparing us to know Him as He knows Himself, and to become ourselves divine.”

St. Therese of Lisieux

1. How do you usually handle suffering? Do you see it as an avenue to grow closer to Christ?

2. In what ways are you suffering right now? What might be holding you back from fully offering your suffering to Jesus and letting Him bring Good from it?

3. Do you relate to St. Therese’s feeling of love for suffering? Do you find suffering “sweet” as she did? What might you take away from her story and her words

4. St. Therese did not seek out dramatic, outward forms of penances but rather embraced small sufferings with love. In what ways can you do this in your daily life, especially during this Lenten season?

Text: A Reflection on Suffering & St. Therese’s Example

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During this session, we will talk about suffering, one of the things that it is hardest for us to grapple with as humans, and we will look at Saint Therese and her example of how we can approach our own suffering, so let us open in a prayer.

Opening Prayer

In the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord, we just thank you for all that you have done. We know we live in a broken world, and we know we are running into suffering every day, and it causes heartache and pain, and it doesn’t feel good, and we can say that you bring good out of it all day long, and that doesn’t change the fact that suffering is still suffering, and it’s still so hard sometimes.

And so Lord, I just pray that you open our eyes, our hearts, and our ears to see it in a new light, that maybe it won’t feel better, but maybe we can see it with a new meaning, and we can endure it in a different way, and that as we endure it in a different way, you would use our sufferings to bring good out of it and to draw us closer to you, and so we submit this time to you as an act of worship, Lord, and we submit to you our sufferings as honestly as we can. We don’t want them, because we know we were created for heaven, and yet we trust you with them. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Why Is There Suffering?

So one of the most difficult questions that the human heart grapples with is the question of suffering, or many people stop believing in God because they don’t know what to do with suffering, and so questions come up with, why do we suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people? And so often, we just look around, there’s not really a great answer, and even whenever we can hold onto something that brings us comfort, it doesn’t change the fact that suffering doesn’t feel good, it feels bad, that’s why it is suffering. We see this in our own lives.

Whenever something bad happens to us, or life throws us a curveball, or we experience a tragedy, or we just have to suffer the consequences of our own broken choices, we can just kind of fall into the spiral and start to ask, why me? And we can start to look around and feel like everyone else has their lives together, because they’re not dealing with what we’re dealing with. We can start to think there’s something wrong with us. We can start to think that we deserve it, that we’re defective, that we’re hopeless, and we can start to get angry at God for allowing this to happen in the first place, or we can look at other people in our lives.

Maybe it’s a family member, maybe it’s friends, and they’re great people and they’re good Christians, and they’re following God, and yet they are hit out of nowhere with an unspeakable tragedy, and we are left just to hold it and not know what to do with it, and yet, even with all that, the heavens still declare the glory of God, as the psalmist says. The scriptures tell us that all creation reveals God’s nature, and so if we were to take a moment and to really reflect on what suffering is, we might find the answer in itself. We might find some comfort there, something we can hold onto and have confidence in.

We Are Created For Heaven

Years ago, I was reading through Pope John Paul II’s encyclical “Salvifici doloris,” and I came across this, and I thought it was beautiful, because instead of suffering pushing us away from God, if we’re really to look at it, it should draw us to God, because it proves something about how we were made and about who God is, so let me read you this from that encyclical. He says, “Christianity proclaims the essential good of existence and the good of that which exists. It acknowledges the goodness of the creator, and it proclaims the good of creatures.”

So what Pope John Paul is saying is that Christianity acknowledges that the creator is good and that creation is good. There is an essential goodness that exists, and he says, “Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation, or distortion of good. We could say that man suffers because a good exists and he does not share in it.”

That is suffering, and if I read that or as I read that, I think, from my own experience, that it is true, that man suffers on account of good in which he does not share. We know there’s a good, we know there is something we should be experiencing, and that thing is not in our lives. It was either taken away, or it was distorted, or it is limited, and so what should that tell us? It should tell us, first of all, that goodness does exist, because when we suffer, we don’t share in it, so God exists, He is good, and that we were created ultimately for heaven, and the fact that we were created for heaven is always with us.

When we get frustrated, when we don’t get what we want, when we start to suffer, it’s just a reminder that we are not sharing in something we were created for, and that where we live now because of sin is a broken valley of tears, I always say this, that no amount of money, no amount of comfort, no amount of technology can cover up the fact that, at its core, the earth is a valley of tears. Now, that doesn’t mean that God cannot enter in and make it a valley of the springs. He can bring good out of it. Life can be sweet, and life can be good, but because of its brokenness, we were created for a goodness that we do not share in, and when that happens acutely, we suffer.

That is what suffering is, and sometimes, we handle it well. Probably, for the most part we handle it poorly, but if we were to look at the life of St. Therese, we would see that this woman who lived a very short life, she died when she was 24 years old, she suffered tremendously, and she suffered so well that it almost boggles the mind. It almost made me ask questions about her, and when we look at the way she suffered and why she was able to suffer the way she suffered, we can learn so much from her, and it can actually change the way we pray.

The Life of St. Therese

All right, so at first, let’s look at her life a little bit. I’m not sure how much you know about Saint Therese’s life. I’ve read “Story of a Soul.” I’ve read a couple of other books about her. Getting to know her and like her was a journey for me. I think it was a journey for many people, but overall, she weasels her way into your heart because she’s so good, and because of who she became and how she fell in love with God, she just has so much to teach us, but her life was short, and she suffered tremendously during her life. She was born in France, and immediately, right off the bat, she was given to a wet nurse, because her mother, St. Zelie Martin, couldn’t breastfeed, and so the woman whose womb she grew in, she was not an infant under, because she was nursed by someone else, so she was taken away from her mother. She was attached to a different woman. She nursed at that mother, or that wet nurse, and then eventually, she was taken from that woman who she had developed attachment to and given back to her mother, so that’s the very beginning of her life.

Her mother died whenever she was four years old, and I can’t imagine the kind of confusion and grief that left her with. When her mother died, her father moved them from Alencon, where they were living, to Lisieux, so she was taken away from where she was growing up and where she was putting down roots, and then she started to look at her sister Pauline, who was much older than her, as her mother.

Not too long after that, Pauline went into the convent, and so another mother was taken away from little Therese. She suffered scruples, she cried often whenever anybody corrected her whatsoever, and when she was 10 years old, she fell ill, and people think she just fell ill because she was under so much grief and so much stress, and she started to hallucinate, she had fevers, and she had convulsions, and if you read her story, she accounts this time with this mysterious illness, where she just lay in bed, and her family tried to be there for her, but ultimately, it was a miracle of our blessed mother who cured her.

She had a deep desire to know Jesus. She loved Him so much, she wanted to be in the convent in Carmel, and they kept telling her no, because she was too young. She even asked the Pope whenever she went to visit him, and so her hope in being in Carmel was delayed and delayed, because she knew she wanted to be with Jesus, and then her other older sisters entered into the convent.

Eventually, Therese is accepted into the Carmelite monastery, and she’s so happy and she’s so joyful, but as she enters in to the Carmelite monastery, and as she becomes a nun, she is taken ill with tuberculosis, and she tells no one. She keeps all of the suffering to herself, and she offers it up to our Lord Jesus, and then of course, she eventually dies when she’s 24 years old. Other sisters in the convent remarked on how unremarkable her life was, and yet, through her short life, through all of her suffering, she was able to teach the entire world something not new, but at least fresh, and so here is something that she said about her suffering, and there are many quotes about her talking about how suffering became sweet to her, and how she began to value it and to love it so deeply because it brought her closer to Jesus.

Nothing In This World Will Fully Satisfy Us

And I even remember the first time I was reading “Story of a Soul,” I just read it because I thought I should, and I was on a mission trip, and I looked over to my friend, and I said, “I don’t understand her. I don’t know why she loves suffering so much,” and yet, that night, we went to our Holy Hour as a mission team, and I found myself asking Jesus to make me more like her so that I can endure my sufferings with better grace. That’s the power of Saint Therese, and so this is something she wrote to Pauline, her sister who she saw as a mother who eventually went into the convent and caused even more suffering in her life. She says,

“Oh, Pauline, it is very true that a drop of gall must be mingled in all chalices. I find that trials help very much in detaching us from this earth. They make us look higher than this world. Here below, nothing can satisfy us. We cannot enjoy a little rest except in being ready to do God’s will.”

Saint Therese teaches us what we just don’t want to accept, that nothing in this world, as good as it can be, can completely satisfy us. Maybe it will give us momentary comfort, right? Creation is good, it does declare the glory of God, and God has given it to us as a comfort on this journey, but nothing will ever fully satisfy us. I know you know the feeling of getting something new and thinking it’s great, and then experiencing the feeling of it losing its luster and looking to the next thing to make you happy, or finally hitting a certain life milestone and realizing it’s not as great as you thought it was, because there’s still this emptiness that can only be filled by God, and everything exists to remind us that we are journeying towards Him, and so with that perspective, Therese was able to see her sufferings as an avenue to Jesus, and she teaches us how to do the same, and how was she able to do that?

Rediscovered The Heart of the Gospel

That’s the question, because I can promise I’m going to do that and change my attitude, and then I start to suffer, and I realize that I haven’t changed very much at all, and yet Pope Pius XI, who spoke at her canonization, said something about her that teaches us how she was able to suffer so well. He said this. He said, “Saint Therese has rediscovered the heart of the gospel with grace and freshness.” That was her secret, that this little French girl rediscovered the good news that was given us to us so long ago that can become stale as we go through our Christian life, as we just go through the motions, we do these things, and Saint Therese, as she suffered, fell more in love with Jesus and rediscovered the very heart of the gospel message for a new generation, and that’s what makes her writing so brilliant. That’s what made her able to suffer so well. That’s what makes her such a powerful doctor of the church, an example for us, because what is the heart of the gospel?

The heart of the gospel is that, where everything was hopeless, when we had given ourselves over to the enemy, made a deal with the devil through our sin, sin gained power over us, Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death, which means that, where there is sin, there is death, and where there is sin and death, there is also suffering, because in our original state, we weren’t made for that, but we had given ourselves over to that. We had given ourselves to this power that we could not get out of. It had a grip over us, and when everything was hopeless, God, in His goodness, sent His Son in pure, unadulterated, extravagant, overflowing love to enter into the world so that sin and suffering and death would not have the last word, but that Jesus would, and He suffered.

He learned obedience through His suffering. He experienced that suffering for the sake of the joy that laid before him, He died on the cross, and then He took away the power of sin and death. He took away the power of sin and death. Yes, we still experience the consequences on earth, but no longer do they have the same power over us. Jesus has the last word, and when we draw close to Him, He uses everything for His good, for His glory, and to turn us into saints, including suffering, where suffering was once hopeless, and we suffered in vain with nothing at the end, Jesus came in, and as Pope John Paul II said, infused suffering with love, linked it to love, and now, He can bring good out of it.

In rediscovering the heart of the gospel, Saint Therese rediscovered the love that Jesus infused into suffering and the power that we give Him when we unite our sufferings to His cross. And so through His grace, and miraculously, in my opinion, she was able to suffer well and fall more in love with Jesus.

Are we willing to do the same? Are we willing to open our eyes, not that suffering feels good, but that we can see it as having a purpose? And then, when we do that and we unite our sufferings to our Lord and allow Him to link it with love, He changes us into saints, and He uses our circumstances to bring out mercies anew that we could not, not even imagined. We know what it’s like to see somebody who is good who something bad happens to, and they handle it with such grace that that circumstance is completely turned on its head, and somehow, miracles flow out of it.

That’s the call, and so as we are journeying towards the cross this Lent, we can look at this little saint who beared her crosses so well that the Lord elevated her for all eternity in the eyes of the world after her death, and we can see the miracles that abound in her life. He wants to do the same with us, and he can, so let us see our sufferings differently, and let us let them usher us into God’s heart so that He can use it to bring about His love in the world. Let us pray.

Closing Prayer

In the name of the  Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord, we thank you. We go so far as to thank you for our sufferings and thank you for what you’ve done in those sufferings, that your love is so powerful over sin and death and suffering that you can flip all of it on its head, and something that the enemy wanted to use for bad in our lives and for destruction in our lives, you can just use it for good, and you can use it to make saints if we will let you, and so wherever we are, in the power of your name, we open up our hearts to let you, to give you the bitterness we want to hold onto, the questions we want to hold onto, the anger we want to hold onto, we give them to you, and we ask you to fill the spaces where those questions existed, and that you would fix our eyes and our gaze on you and all that you can do to make this valley of tears a place of springs.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

About Mallory Smyth

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