Thérèse of Lisieux

Died at twenty-four in a provincial convent, having reduced the whole spiritual life to something you can attempt during a bad afternoon.

She entered the Carmel at Lisieux at fifteen and died there at twenty-four, having done nothing a newspaper would report. What she left was a method, and the method was deliberately small.

The clearest example she gave is this. During evening prayer a sister behind her made a faint scraping sound, over and over — like two shells rubbed together, Thérèse wrote. It drove her to distraction. She could not turn around and could not make it stop. So she stopped fighting it. She turned toward the noise instead, listened to it closely, and treated it as if it were music.

That is the little way in one gesture: not heroics, not a grand renunciation, but the tiny redirection of attention available to you in the exact circumstances you are stuck in. She thought this was the only kind of greatness most people ever get offered. She may have been right.