The 24-Year-Old Who Still Speaks to Everyone: Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

Let's close this series with the shortest story, and maybe the most surprising one. A French girl who died of tuberculosis at just 24, in 1897, inside a small enclosed convent she almost never left. She never did any great public works, never wrote theological treatises, never converted a nation, never founded a religious order.

Her name was Therese Martin, known today as Therese of Lisieux. At her superior's request, she wrote three autobiographical manuscripts, later gathered after her death into the book Story of a Soul, along with letters, poems, and other prayers she left behind.

In those pages, this young woman describes what she herself calls her little way. The idea that you don't need grand, heroic gestures to live a deep spiritual life. That it's enough to do the small, everyday things, even the most ordinary and tedious ones, with real love and attention. A concrete, radical offering of self, even without dramatic outward achievements. That text became one of the most widely read and translated spiritual works in the world during the 20th century.

Pope John Paul II will proclaim her a Doctor of the Church in 1997, exactly 100 years after her death. The youngest Doctor of the Church in history. Someone who never wrote a single page of systematic theology in her life. It's a fitting way to close this series, because it leaves us with an open question about all of these figures. What actually makes a life great?

In Therese's case, the answer seems to be, you don't have to be extraordinary. You just have to be real, all the way through, even in the smallest things.