In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher chronicles his decision to return to the small town where he grew up following his sister’s death from cancer. In an interview about the book, he reveals the Catholic saint who inspired the book’s title:
St. Therese, for your readers who don’t know her, was a Catholic saint, who died at age 24. Died young of tuberculosis in a convent in France in the late nineteenth century. She was a nobody. Came from a faithful family, but she was a nobody. Kind of a flibbertigibbet within the convent. After she died, the Mother Superior sent one of the nuns into her room to collect her things, and they found her writings there. They started reading them, and the scales fell from their eyes. They’d realized they had something extraordinary there within their own community.
Within thirty years, Therese was declared a saint and not just a saint. Pope John Paul II on her 100th anniversary of her death declared her a Doctor of the Church, which for Catholics means she was one of the rare saints that has the power to teach the essence of Christianity. She’s recognized as a great teacher. What did she teach? She was just a 24-year-old girl. She taught simplicity. She taught holiness through simplicity. She called it her little way. My sister was not a Catholic. She was a Methodist and not a particularly well-informed Methodist at that, but I think she was a saint because she showed how the simple life in an out of the way place can lead to greatness and to holiness.
That’s the encouragement I want to bring to people who read the book: don’t think your life doesn’t mean anything. God sees, and the people around you see. You never know what God is going to do with that. We’re all part of the great chain. That’s what Dante says too. You see over and over in El Purgatorio about the meaning of community, how Dante has to relearn this about how the chains of connection between the living and the dead, between the people in the community pray for us. What can I do for you? That’s something I’ve had to learn, not because I consciously rejected community, but it’s so easy to forget.
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The Dish 