St. Therese of the ‘Little Way’
What do the movie There Will Be Blood, the newly released book of the Diaries of Dorothy Day, and working on my gardens have to do with each other? Besides all being a part of my day today, they all deal with passion. The character in the movie has a passion for oil and making money from it. Dorothy Day was passionate about following the Way of Jesus by serving persons in need. Gardeners like me are passionate about their gardens. Living humans have a passion for something, be it their faith or a computer game. A passion can take over a person’s life like it does in the movie. A passion can put us at risk like it did with Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. A passion takes time to exercise like working in a garden. We all need passions in life; the trick, however, is not to be consumed by our passions but to use our passions to make ordinary things extraordinary.
Ordinary people can be passionate and by their passions can be extraordinary. In the creature world a worm is a good example of an ordinary creature that by its passions to eat, castoff and procreate is an extraordinary creature. A ordinary worm can take compost, digest it though its system and cast it off as extraordinary rich organic soil, “black gold” as some call it. St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower and favorite saint of Dorothy Day, was just an ordinary religious woman living in a convent dong her daily chores, yet she is considered an extraordinary saint, the patron saint of missionaries, although she died young without leaving the convent. Dorothy Day called this way of St. Therese of making the ordinary extraordinary the “little way”. We do not need to be an oil mogul as in the movie, a saint as Dorothy Day is now considered, or a major organic gardener and farmer. Like Therese we can be extraordinary human beings dong ordinary things, like working in the garden, filling up the gas tank or sharing a meal. We just need to do the ordinary with passion for it to be extraordinary.
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