When you want to give everything to God but feel the weight of your own smallness, pray this. St. Thérèse of Lisieux composed this Act of Oblation to Merciful Love on June 9, 1895, offering herself as a victim not to divine justice (the traditional form), but to divine mercy itself.
O my God, most blessed Trinity, I desire to love thee and to make thee loved, to labor for the glory of holy Church by saving souls upon earth and freeing those who suffer in purgatory. I desire to accomplish thy will perfectly, and to reach the degree of glory thou hast prepared for me in thy kingdom. In a word, I wish to be a saint, but feeling my powerlessness, I beg thee, O my God, to be thyself my sanctity. In order to live in one single act of perfect love, I offer myself as a victim of holocaust to thy merciful love, asking thee to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within thee to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of thy love, O my God.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux, June 9, 1895
How this prayer works
Thérèse is asking God to be her holiness because she knows she cannot manufacture it herself. The traditional “victim offering” was to God’s justice, accepting suffering as reparation. Thérèse inverted this: she offered herself to mercy, asking to be consumed by love rather than punished for sin. This is the Little Way in a single prayer.
She prayed this daily from June 1895 until her death in September 1897, and encouraged her sisters at Carmel to do the same. The Church canonized her in 1925 and declared her a Doctor of the Church in 1997, largely because of the spiritual revolution contained in prayers like this one.
Pray it when you are tempted to measure your holiness by your achievements. Pray it when you want to love God but feel the gap between desire and capacity. Let the phrase “be thyself my sanctity” settle into the quiet places.
Carry it through this morning.
