On the Wisdom of Therese of Lisieux

In a remarkable piece, well worth a read in it's entirety, the "Chinese Chesterton" pays tribute to the Little Flower:

My only wish is to see people so thoroughly sophisticated as to be aware of the utter worthlessness of their sophistication, so thoroughly skeptical as to be able to doubt their own doubts, and so thoroughly disillusioned as not to fall in love with their own disillusionment, but with something greater than themselves...

To my mind, Thérèse is so significant to the spiritual life of our age, precisely because she is a saint fully aware of her mental states. She is charmingly subtle and subtly charming. She is ingenuously ingenious, and she is holy. She is as complicated as she is simple. She is delicately audacious, and audaciously delicate. She has the head of a witch, and the heart of an angel. She is as flexible as water, and as passionate as fire. She is a genius who knows how to hide her genius gracefully. She knows the masculine, but keeps to the feminine. She is as sharp as a two-edged sword, but she always keeps her sword in its scabbard. She was a precocious child; but she pasteurized her precocity by always remaining like a hidden sprout and not rushing to early ripening. Even now, after she has become a veritable prodigy of miracles, she is still a hidden sprout at heart; and, in spiritual things, as we know, a sincere disposition of heart is all that matters. I think that now more than ever she has realized the truth of what she said before she had shed her mortal coils, "It is Jesus who does all, and I...I do nothing."

I suppose that Lao Tzu would have said, "It is the Tao (the Word) that does all, and I...I do nothing." But the Tao is such an impersonal entity that it appears to me to be of the ice, icy: whereas Jesus is such a living flame of love that He enkindles every fiber of my heart.

To me as a Chinese, the great thing about Christianity is that it combines the profound mysticism of Lao Tzu with the intense humanism of Confucius. It differs from Taoism in that the Tao, or the Word, has taken on flesh and has a warm pulsating heart. It differs from Confucianism in that it is the Word, and nothing short of the Word, that has done so.