Embrace the "Little Way," the Secret of True Greatness and Holiness

Have you ever had one of those days where nothing remarkable happened—and that was precisely the problem?

You woke up. You made coffee. You answered emails. You drove to work or shuffled to the kitchen table to begin another round of tasks you've done a thousand times. You folded laundry. You wiped down the counter. You listened to someone talk about their day when you were tired and would rather have been silent. You went to bed, and if someone had asked you, "What did you accomplish today?" you might have struggled to name a single thing that felt significant.

Most of our lives are made up of days like this. Not crises. Not epiphanies. Not mountaintop encounters with the divine. Just ordinary hours filled with ordinary tasks performed for ordinary reasons. And somewhere in the quiet repetition, a dangerous whisper begins: This doesn't matter. You don't matter. Nothing you're doing here counts for anything.

It is precisely into that whisper that a young French Carmelite Sister who died at twenty-four speaks with astonishing authority—and her answer has the power to transform everything.

 

A Saint Who Did Almost Nothing

Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin entered the Carmelite convent in Lisieux, France, in 1888 at the age of fifteen. She never founded a religious order. She never went on mission to a foreign land, though she longed to. She never wrote a great theological treatise. She never performed public miracles. She washed dishes. She did laundry. She endured the company of a fellow sister whose every habit irritated her. She swept floors. She prayed. She suffered from tuberculosis in the final eighteen months of her life with almost unbearable pain, much of it in spiritual darkness.

And yet, she became one of the most beloved and influential spiritual voices in the history of the Christian faith, and in 1997 was declared a Doctor of the Church—a title given to those whose teaching is considered to have shaped the understanding of the faith itself. How? What could a cloistered young woman who died before her twenty-fifth birthday possibly teach the universal Church?

Everything, as it turns out. Everything about what love actually looks like when it takes off its dramatic costume and puts on an apron.

Thérèse called her approach la petite voie—the "little way."

It was not a system. It was not a method. It was a orientation of the heart toward God so complete that every action, no matter how small, became saturated with intentional love. In her autobiography, Story of a Soul, she wrote:

"Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers, and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love" (Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, trans. John Clarke, ICS Publications, 1996, p. 196).

Scattering flowers. That was her revolution. Not grand gestures, but small, deliberate acts of love performed with the whole heart turned toward God.

 

The Theology Beneath the Simplicity

It would be easy to sentimentalize the little way—to reduce it to a kind of spiritual niceness, a pious version of "do small things with great love" printed on a refrigerator magnet. But beneath its simplicity lies a theology of stunning depth, one rooted in Scripture itself.

Consider what Paul writes to the church in Corinth, a community obsessed with spiritual spectacle—with tongues and prophecy and dramatic displays of power:

"If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:1–2, NRSV).

Paul's argument can be devastating to those who've spent their lives "building" things they think matter. The grandest spiritual accomplishments imaginable are nothing without love. Not diminished. Not less impressive. Nothing. A zero. An empty sound.

This means that the inverse must also be true—that the smallest act performed in genuine love carries an eternal weight that the most spectacular loveless achievement cannot touch.

This is what Thérèse understood. She grasped, with the intuition of a mystic and the precision of a theologian, that love is not measured by the size of the action but by the depth of the self-giving within it. A glass of water offered with the whole heart oriented toward God and neighbor is heavier on the eternal scale than a cathedral built for the architect's glory.

Jesus himself made this exact point. Watching wealthy donors deposit large sums into the temple treasury, he drew his disciples' attention elsewhere: "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on" (Mark 12:43–44, NRSV).

The measure was not the amount. The measure was the totality of the gift. How much of oneself was in it.

 

The Irritating Sister and the Revolution of Attention

One of the most instructive episodes in Thérèse's life involved a sister in the convent who annoyed her profoundly. Everything about this woman grated on Thérèse—her mannerisms, the sounds she made, her habits. Thérèse's response was not to avoid her, nor to grit her teeth in cold tolerance. Instead, she chose to treat this sister as though she were the person Thérèse loved most in the world. She smiled at her. She sought her company. She performed small acts of kindness for her—so convincingly that the sister once asked Thérèse what it was about her that Thérèse found so attractive.

This is not mere politeness. This is a radical act of the will choosing love in the absence of feeling, repeated in the smallest possible gestures, in the most hidden possible setting, with no audience and no applause. And this, Thérèse insisted, is where holiness actually lives.

It is easy to love humanity in the abstract. It is extraordinarily difficult to love the specific person in front of you who chews too loudly, who repeats the same stories, who never asks how you are doing. Yet this is exactly where the rubber of theology meets the road of real life. As the apostle John writes with almost uncomfortable directness: "Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen" (1 John 4:20, NRSV).

The little way takes this truth and makes it a daily practice. It says: Here. This person. This moment. This task. This is where I will love God today.

 

Practicing the Little Way

So what does this mean for you, today, in the life you are actually living?

It means this: the next thing you do can be an act of profound holiness. Not because you change what you do, but because you change why and how you do it.

Here are three practices drawn from the little way:

First, sanctify the task in front of you. Before you begin the next ordinary thing—washing dishes, writing an email, driving to an appointment—pause for half a breath and silently offer it. This is for you, Lord. I do this small thing with all the love I can bring to it. You will be astonished at how this tiny reorientation changes the interior texture of your day. Maybe all you're doing is taking out the garbage, cleaning up a "stain" on the carpet, or making food for a host of demanding and ungrateful children. Do it in love. Sing a song of praise as you do it, or offer a prayer. Make yourself smile even in the midst of what's usually an unpleasant task, and remind yourself that you're doing it out of love. You're scattering flowers.

Second, choose the difficult person. Identify the person in your life who irritates you most, and commit to one deliberate act of kindness toward them this week—not out of duty, but as a conscious act of love. Smile when you don't feel like smiling. Ask a question about their life. Let them finish their story. This is where the little way has teeth. So, you find a person whom God created in His image annoying? Remember that they bear God's image. Perhaps the annoyance you feel is less on their account than it is on your remaining imperfection. The cure is simple. Small acts of love--the little way. In a single conversation, seeing the person you've so often avoided, through the loving eyes of Christ, will do more than change your relationship with this person... it will radically and powerfully change you.

Third, stop measuring your significance by visible results. The world tells you that you matter when you produce, achieve, and perform. The little way tells you that you matter when you love—and love is often invisible. The most important thing you do today may be something no one ever sees.

Thérèse of Lisieux did not change the world by doing extraordinary things. She changed the world by revealing that there are no ordinary things—not when they are done in love. Every moment is a vessel. Every task can be elevated to a sacramental quality, a tangible manifestation of sacrificial love waiting to happen. Every encounter with another human being is an encounter with Christ himself.

She had a short earthly life, indeed. Though, I have to say, since I first met little Thérèse, she’s taught me more than most of my seminary professors. She’s become quite the delightful companion as of late. They say we are likely to “resemble” our friend group. Find a few “little flowers” you admire, and welcome them as friends. We are all members of the same body of Christ, after all, and there is no division that can separate the members of His body, the least of all being death, which His body definitively conquered. So do not hesitate to make friends with someone like Thérèse, if you admire her "little way." I highly recommend "Story of a Soul," it might just change your life. No one who "dies" in Christ is truly dead (John 11:25-26). You might be surprised how much you can learn from such friends.

Have you considered that in God’s eyes you do a greater deed when you simply give a troubled or distraught person a smile than anything a billionaire might do for profit or vainglory?

Do you know that when you simply have a kind word and do a simple act of charity for someone you find annoying, you do a greater deed than any President's proclamations or King's edict?

Do you not understand that you do more to advance the Kingdom of God by giving a thirsty person a glass of water than every attack and assault against the Kingdom the devil and his minions can throw at it?

In the end, the accomplishments done for worldly gain, recognition, or pure profit will be burned to ash. The “greatest” of human achievements will be reduced to nothing. But that little cup of “cold” water will endure the refining flames of holiness. 

The question is not whether your life is too small for holiness.

The question is whether your love is big enough for your life.