The Lever That Moves the World

Have you ever felt utterly small? Not in the poetic, stargazing sense, but in the grinding, daily sense of looking at the weight of the world and knowing you cannot lift it? You watch the news and see suffering that spans continents. You sit with a friend whose marriage is crumbling and realize you have no words adequate to the wreckage. You kneel beside your bed at night and wonder whether the prayer you just whispered even made it past the ceiling.

We live in a culture that worships leverage. Financial leverage. Political leverage. Social media leverage. We are taught that to change anything, you need a platform, a following, resources, influence. And if you lack those things, the quiet verdict settles in: you don't really matter.

It was into this very question that a young French woman, dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four, scratched out some of the most revolutionary words in the history of Christian spirituality. Her handwriting was faltering. Every stroke of the pencil cost her something. And yet what she wrote has the force of a thunderclap.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux recalled the ancient boast of Archimedes, the Greek mathematician who declared that with a lever and a place to stand, he could move the entire world. It was a brilliant insight into physics, but it remained forever theoretical. He never found the fulcrum. Thérèse, however, claimed that the saints had found it. Their fulcrum is nothing less than God Himself. And their lever is prayer set on fire by love. "With this lever they have raised the world," she wrote, "and will raise it to the end of time."

Here is the full quote from Story of a Soul:

“‘Give me a lever and a fulcrum on which to lean it,’ said Archimedes, ‘and I will lift the world.’ What he could not obtain because his request had only a material end, without reference to God, the Saints have obtained in all its fulness. They lean on God Almighty's power itself and their lever is the prayer that inflames with love's fire. With this lever they have raised the world—with this lever the Saints of the Church Militant still raise it, and will raise it to the end of time.”

Consider the audacity of that claim. A cloistered nun, hidden behind convent walls, wasting away from disease, unable even to walk to the chapel most days near the end of her life, writing these words in pencil because she couldn't even leverage a pen anymore, declared that she possessed and still wielded the instrument capable of lifting the entire world. Not metaphorically. Not sentimentally. Actually.

What did she know that we have forgotten?

 

The Physics of the Invisible

Archimedes understood something profound about the physical world: that a small force, applied at the right point and with sufficient leverage, can move an object many times its own weight. The principle is elegant in its simplicity. What matters is not the size of the force but the length of the lever and the placement of the fulcrum.

Thérèse saw that the spiritual world operates by an analogous but far more radical logic. In the kingdom of God, the fulcrum is not a hypothetical fixed point somewhere in space. It is the immovable, infinite power of God Himself. And the lever is not a beam of wood or steel. It is prayer animated by love, which is to say, prayer that participates in the very life of God, who is love.

This is not wishful thinking dressed up in mechanical metaphor. It is rooted in the deepest currents of Scripture. Consider what Jesus told His disciples: "Truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you" (Matthew 17:20, NRSV). The point is not that faith is a magic spell. The point is that faith connects a small, finite human being to an infinite God, and when that connection is real, the disproportion between the person and the task becomes irrelevant. The lever extends all the way to omnipotence.

Or consider the letter of James: "The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest" (James 5:16b-18).

Notice the deliberate emphasis: Elijah was a human being like us. The text insists on his ordinariness. His power did not come from some superhuman quality within himself. It came from the God on whom his prayer leaned.

This is the secret Thérèse had grasped. Prayer is not the effort of a creature shouting into the void, hoping to be heard. Prayer is the act of placing the lever of one's love onto the fulcrum of God's own power and then watching what only God can do.

 

Why Love Is the Lever

But why love? Why not willpower, or eloquence, or theological precision? Why did Thérèse specify that the lever is prayer "that inflames with love's fire"?

Because love is the only thing that truly connects a human soul to God.

Knowledge can remain in the head. Willpower can remain in the ego. Even religious devotion can remain on the surface of the self, a performance rather than a communion. But love, by its very nature, moves outward. It reaches. It binds. It unites.

The apostle Paul understood this when he wrote his great hymn to love in First Corinthians. "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).

Even mountain-moving faith, without love, is nothing. The lever, without the fire that animates it, is just a dead stick.

Love is the fire because love is what God is. "God is love," John writes plainly, "and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them" (1 John 4:16b). When our prayer is animated by love, it is not merely our prayer anymore.

It becomes a participation in God's own desire for the world. 

We are no longer pushing against the weight of things from the outside. We are caught up in the movement of God Himself, who is always already at work redeeming, healing, and raising up what has fallen.

This is why the smallest prayer, offered with genuine love, can accomplish what armies and empires cannot.

 

The Hidden Ones Who Hold Up the World

There is an ancient Jewish tradition that the world is sustained by thirty-six righteous people whose identities are hidden even from one another. Christianity has its own version of this intuition. Throughout history, the most world-shaking spiritual work has often been done by people no one noticed.

Think of Monica, praying for decades for the conversion of her wayward son Augustine, who would become one of the most influential thinkers in Western civilization. Think of the anonymous Christians in Rome's catacombs, whose prayers and faithfulness outlasted the greatest empire the world had ever known. Think of the countless men and women in hospitals, nursing homes, and quiet rooms who, at this very moment, are lifting their suffering and their love to God on behalf of people who will never know their names.

Thérèse herself is perhaps the supreme modern example. She entered the convent at fifteen. She never traveled. She never preached to crowds. She never wrote a theological treatise. She scrubbed floors, endured petty conflicts with difficult sisters, and struggled with aridity in prayer. And then she died young, in obscurity, in a small Norman town most people had never heard of.

And yet. Within decades of her death, her influence had spread across the globe. She was declared a Doctor of the Church, one of only a handful of women to receive that title. Missionaries, soldiers, and ordinary believers on every continent testified that her intercession and her "little way" had transformed their lives. The lever, it turned out, was very long indeed.

 

Placing Your Lever Today

So what does this mean for you, today, in the middle of your ordinary life?

It means that the prayer you are tempted to skip this morning because you are tired and it feels pointless is not pointless. It is a lever resting on the power of God. It means that the love you pour into a conversation with a struggling neighbor, the patience you offer a difficult coworker, the quiet act of intercession you make for someone who has hurt you, all of this is world-moving work, even if no one sees it and no one applauds.

Here is something practical to try. Choose one person or one situation that feels impossibly heavy to you right now. Something you cannot fix, cannot control, cannot change by any effort of your own. And then, each day this week, take that weight to God in prayer. Do not pray with clenched fists, trying to force a result. Pray with open hands and a loving heart. Place the lever gently on the fulcrum. Say, in whatever words come naturally:

I cannot lift this. But You can. I offer You my love, small as it is, and I trust that it is enough, because You are enough.

Do not measure the results. Do not set a deadline for God. Often, in his grace and infinite wisdom, God prevents us from seeing the direct result of our prayers. He knows the temptation to take pride that “my prayers” get answered, while so-and-so prays with “less power” than I do. Remember, the fulcrum is God’s power, which includes his will. To press the “lever” of love means surrender to His will. Regardless of what you think is effective, or the results you see or don’t see, simply keep returning, keep placing the lever, keep loving. This is the prayer that inflames with love's fire. This is the prayer that has raised the world and will raise it to the end of time.

Remember, the longer the "lever" of love, the farther the end result might be from our sight, particularly extended beyond the fulcrum of God's power. It may be, as it is with the longest lever, that the most powerful prayers are, in fact, those made when the result is out of focus, at a distance, obscured from view. Think of it like this. The greater the love the less we're praying for a particular result, and the more we're submitting the prayer to He who is love, Himself.

The greater the love, the longer the lever, the less "attached" we are to the results we may or may not see, and the more we're aligned with love itself.

Often, we do not see the results of a specific prayer, because God has taken our love and has bigger plans than we’re prepared or willing to see. We also don’t see what might have happened if we’d never offered our prayers.

As tempted as we are to look at the world and lament its current condition, consider how much worse things might be if it wasn’t for the little nuns and the humble monks who pray for the world in obscurity, if it wasn’t for the faithful Christian who offers a prayer at bedside for the suffering and the poor?

You may feel small. You may feel invisible. You may feel that the weight of what you carry or what you see in the world is far beyond your strength. And you would be right. It is beyond your strength. But you have a fulcrum that Archimedes never found. You have the living God, who invites you to lean the whole weight of your love against His infinite power.