In his very kind review, Derrick Jeter writes:

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is not only beautifully written, it is beautifully thought. It is a book of love and loss, leaving and home coming, life and death, hurt and forgiveness, individuality and community, displacement and finding your place, cosmopolitanism and country values, philosophy and simple faith, sadness and joy, a brother and a sister. At its heart, Little Way is about the ordinary life of a southern Louisiana country girl who changed the lives of those she touched, including her brother.

…

Now, some of my evangelical friends will quibble with Dreher’s references to praying to Mary and saints, even to his own deceased sister. They’ll quibble with his emphasis on icons and his mystical approach to faith. But quibble not. Little Way is not a theological way. Ruthie, herself a life-long Methodist, quibbled with her brother’s conversion to Catholicism and later to Orthodox Christianity. Nevertheless there is much we can learn from Dreher’s and Ruthie’s different approaches to faith. In both his intellectual and mystical approach, and her, what even Dreher would call, anti-intellectual and simple approach to faith we discover anew the awesome mystery and sovereignty of God—His inscrutable grace.

Reading Little Way and walking with the Dreher and Leming families through Ruthie’s cancer and death motivates us to keep short accounts with those we love dearest. It motivates us to show mercy and grace to all people—they, after all bear the imago Dei, the image of God. Dreher’s book also motivates us to find the finger of God in the little things of life, for it is in the little way that we find the fulness of life.

I so appreciate Jeter, trained at Dallas Theological Seminary, making this point. I don’t hide my Catholicism and subsequent Orthodox Christianity, because that is how I came to know Jesus Christ as an adult, and because my own spiritual journeys in Catholicism and Orthodoxy largely define who I am. But Little Way is not an apologetic for either way of Christianity, and it’s not really a direct apologetic for Christianity, though Ruthie’s faith was at the core of her response to her condition (if it’s an apologetic, it’s an indirect one; there is no altar call in this book, is what I’m saying).

Ruthie remained a Methodist, and while she didn’t criticize my conversions, she always had a highly skeptical view of my theological speculation and religious adventuring. For Ruthie, faith was not what you thought about; it’s what you did. She couldn’t have told you the slightest thing about Methodism, or at least nothing more important than the fact that it was the church in which she was raised, and in which generations of our family worshiped. God was praised there, the name of Jesus was proclaimed, and people were good to each other under that roof. That’s all she looked for in a church.

What you see in Little Way, though, is the power of a simple faith, lived with deep conviction. You see I Corinthians 13. Unlike Ruthie, I could give you a church history, and a theological argument, and there’s nothing wrong with that per se. But Ruthie had way more love than I did, and man, could you ever see it.

And that love for others caused her to accept the prayers of all. Several of her Catholic friends brought her relics to keep by her bedside. To my knowledge, Ruthie didn’t understand the theology of relics, and if she did, she almost certainly did not believe in them. But what she did believe, I am certain, is those relics symbolized the love her believing Catholic Christian friends had for her, and their prayers for her healing. They were therefore precious, and she was genuinely grateful. When I told her that a Turkish Muslim reader of my blog was praying to Allah for her, she smiled genuinely and asked me to thank him. She was grateful for anyone’s prayers. She really was. She didn’t care how theologically “incorrect” any of us might have been. For Ruthie, theological correctness was measured by the humility of one’s heart, and the love of God and neighbor within it.

I’m not going to say that’s the only measure of theological correctness. But I will say it is by far the most important one.  That’s the God you encounter in Little Way. Thank you, Derrick Jeter, for pointing this out.