The Little Way
Dear Friends,
This Sunday we will celebrate the Feast of All Saints. For much of my life, I thought that the Saints we honor on this day were limited to particularly holy and exemplary people who transformed lives and communities through exemplary or miraculous acts of courage, self-sacrifice, and service. But later on, I learned that the word “Saint” in the early church was given to everyone who had been “sanctified” in the waters of baptism. Everyone, that is, who said yes to their true belovedness as a child of God, just as Jesus did on the day of his own baptism.
The more I’ve lived with this understanding, the more likely I am to hear the word “saint” and think the word “beloved.” More and more, I try to seek the “saint” in everyone by asking myself, “what is in them that shows me what being beloved means?” Is it their curiosity? Their care for children or animals or plants? They way they laugh or make me laugh? How do they bring out the saint in me? How do they encourage the parts of my own beloved self that I may or may not embrace or really trust as worthy or worthwhile or true?
One of my favorite “canonical” Saints was the 19th Century Carmelite Therese of Lisieux, because she was also one of the most every day “saints” – so much so that her way of life was called “the little way.” In her ordinary interactions with family and community, she sought opportunities to recognize belovedness in others and in herself. When her tired and cranky father scolded her on Christmas Eve, she resisted the impulse to cry and felt charity enter her soul. When she heard that a criminal was to be executed, she prayed that he would make peace with God in the end. When she was bent over the laundry trough in the convent and the nun next to her kept splashing her with dirty water, she offered up her aggravation in love to Jesus. “My dear Mother,” she wrote to her prioress about this episode, “you can see that I am a very little soul and that I can offer God only very little things.”
People around the world cherish St. Thérèse’s little way because she shares the experiences of which all our lives are made and makes choices available to us all: to listen closely to another rather than remaining distracted; to respond to another with generosity rather than impatience; to resist meeting anger with anger. She taught herself how to keep loving even as she suffered from tuberculosis and stretches of spiritual dryness and doubt.
So, today, in the midst of all that is shaking our world, I will remember the child-saint of Lisieux, who found glimpses of belovedness in ordinary, fleeting, “little” moments that lit up, with the force of revelation, a larger vision. And I encourage us all to seek such a vision in our own experience of the world, among our own doubts and hopes. On this feast of All Saints, let us remember all the beloved of God--big, little, and in-between--under one wide sky.
In Christ,
Amelie+
