In the wake of Dolly Parton’s death, it is abundantly clear that she was beloved by just about everyone. Her kind, bubbly, and innocent charm, coupled with her remarkable career, disarmed even those—like Sting and King Charles—who might be critical of her genre, rhinestones, and twang.
What Dolly’s life exhibited through her faith in God, generosity, and maternal instincts (despite not ever having children of her own) was simply kindness, joyfulness, and fun. Dolly seemed positively guileless and focused on her own mission instead of comparisons of herself to others. How, then, did Dolly escape the dour and cynical celebrity ethos that most fall into?
I’ve spent the last decade researching feminism, chronicling the movement in three books. Power, control, pride, manipulation, and bitterness are at the core of the ideology. In contrast, three Catholic women of the roughly the 20th century offer an alternate view to the self-absorbed and grandiose desires of the feminist ideology. When we understand their common vision and missions, we will see why they—and Dolly—were so beloved.
A look at salvation history reveals that God sends the antidote when problems, heresies, and ideologies arise: St. Benedict established monasticism while the urban world crumbled; St. Francis preached and lived poverty while Church was choked in riches; and St. Ignatius provided intellectual heft to combat the intellectual unraveling of the Reformation. Certainly, Marian devotion has been an antidote to feminist agitation, but there is more that is easy missed. The divine course corrective to the feminist problem has been hiding in plain sight.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), a French Carmelite nun, was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1997. Her elevated status didn’t come from soaring intellectual heights, expansive conversions, or founding a religious order.
This young woman had a very simple approach to the spiritual life, captured even in her religious name, Sr. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. Known today as “The Little Flower,” Thérèse is now renowned for her remarkable surrender to Jesus through the tiniest and most mundane of spiritual offerings. She offered everything to Jesus as a means of sanctifying herself—with a missionary zeal that was fruitful not by going on a great adventure, but by staying small, quiet, and unassuming in her great gift of self. She simply wanted to be small so that Jesus, who is not small, could do great things through her littleness, through her “little way.” Her life, cut short by tuberculosis at the tender age of 24, was, by most any accounts today, unremarkable.
Historically, two things about St. Thérèse are particularly interesting. First, the timing of her life with its unique charism. Thérèse was alive at the very time when feminism was gaining steam in Europe and the United States. Women are being encouraged to reject the little ways in which they have loved their families since creation. Instead, women have been encouraged to grasp at some kind of “grown-up” self instead of a life “infantilized by motherhood.” Thérèse emphasized the opposite: embracing a life that is small and child-like (not childish), caring and loving those around us through very seemingly insignificant things.
Second, Thérèse’s witness arrived with the emergence of radical Marxism, which grasped at remaking man and woman and prioritized work over God. In contrast to the powerful revolution that enlisted millions around the world to impose its contagion, Thérèse’s spirituality was the polar opposite. She had no armies, revolutionaries, shock troops, or assassins. Rather, her power came in being small, unseen, and insignificant: through surrendering, not conquering. “Jesus points out to me,” the little French Carmelite wrote, “the only way which leads to Love’s furnace—that way is self-surrender—it is the confidence of the little child who sleeps without fear in its father’s arms.” Surrender and humility, not brazen action and massive upheaval. Love and self-forgetting, not fear and self-aggrandizement. “What matters in life is not great deeds,” she explained, “but great love.”
Caryll Houselander
The message of Thérèse did not end in her grave. Four years after her death, another remarkable woman was born who focused on the same ideas of childlike devotion to Christ. Caryll Houselander (1901–1954) has been called a “divine eccentric.” A poet, author, and mystic, she conveyed to those around her and in her books the precious and small ideas of St. Thérèse. Houselander had a devotion to her, even attributing a miraculous healing to her intercession. But this lay Brit’s vocation was much different than that of the young French Carmelite.
Houselander, who came from a broken home, had a natural genius for helping those with mental and emotional poverty: those suffering from deep psychological breaks from the wars or family conditions. Though also deeply involved with aiding the materially impoverished, probably her most needed gifts were for those who lived under the mental strain of the 1940s in London. She was keenly aware of being present emotionally to those whom she helped. She did not offer some one-size-fits-all scalable program for mass production. It was simple, earthy, personal, and tender. Deeply feminine.
Houselander’s inspiration was the keen awareness that God is in each person. Like Thérèse, she understood the importance of small things, small gestures, small kindnesses. But she also knew well the radical self-surrender required of her for deeper union with God, particularly through her devotion to the child-Jesus and his Holy Face. “We are only syllables,” she wrote, “of the perfect Word.” And in so far as we conform ourselves to the Word, there will be the fruit. Houselander explained:
[W]hen the years move on and we look back, we find that it is not the social reformer or the economist or even the church leader who has done tremendous things for the human race, but the silly saints in their rags and tatters, with their empty pockets and their impossible dreams.
Houselander captured richly the deep surrender required of us all to care for those around us in a unique and specific way instead of reaching for utopian policies or ideological fixes of the human condition.
Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa (1910–1997), now St. Teresa of Calcutta, was also a contemporary of Houselander, although she lived much longer. Her chosen religious name, Sr. Mary Teresa, was inspired by St. Thérèse. Mother Teresa, of course, was laser focused on caring for the poorest of the poor: people left dying in ditches and trash heaps, abandoned children, and those most forgotten by the world, often left to die alone, unnoticed, on the streets. She, like Houselander and other saints before her, knew these bodies were Christ in a distressed disguise. Like her namesake, she conveyed to the world that these small, thankless, and often unnoticed activities are essential. “Not all of us can do great things,” she wrote, “but we can do small things with great love.” For those looking outward with grand desires to save the world, she turned our attention inward: “What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.” The family, she understood, was the bedrock of society, and if it is in disarray or crumbling, society inevitably collapses. “More and more people,” she said, “realize that unless we bring back prayer and love into the family we will never have peace.”
Mother Teresa’s emphasis on small acts and great love echoes The Little Flower and Houselander. These examples of Mother’s message could have easily come from the pens of either:
“Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.”
“A word, a kindly smile, will often suffice to gladden a wounded and sorrowful heart.”
“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”
Mother Teresa embodied the model of small, sacrificial love.
These three women understood the ironic truth that our contemporary world fundamentally misses: that the only way out of spiritual and emotional adolescence is through childlike surrender to Christ. Houselander described the women who are unable to face the self-surrender that comes with every God-gifted vocation:
[They] invent for themselves a kind of pseudo-companionate marriage with the Lord in the world, or an extraordinary mission in life, which precludes fulfilling all their ordinary obligations, but eludes definition which might commit them to any self-surrender at all, and is itself a lifelong delaying action.
But self-surrender is the sure path to spiritual maturity. It is a humble and childlike spirit because the soul understands and accepts that she isn’t in control, and that the God who made the universe accepts her tiniest offerings for others and magnifies them well beyond any invading army or pink-hatted protest.
Without this spiritual leap of faith, women remain sealed in a kind of adolescence, which is where the capacity to abort a child lives, or the belief that women are too big or important to care for their own children. True wisdom comes from a surrender and gift of self to others, not in the worship of the idol of self-autonomy. Women were made for love, for self-gift, and to pour their gifts out for the most vulnerable. When we choose, instead, “a lifelong delaying action” and neglect our “ordinary obligations,” misery will likely follow Which makes it no surprise that one in four women in America is on some kind of anti-depressant.
What does all of this have to do with Dolly Parton? While we don’t know if Dolly is a saint, she was a woman of deep faith, and that was always what she led with. She was so beloved because she was kind, feminine, devoted to her husband and family, and deeply concerned with those whom she could help. Fame didn’t go to her head, which was clear in the way she prioritized others. Her mission, ultimately, was quite similar to the missions of St. Therese, Caryll Houselander, and Mother Teresa.
As Dolly reminds us, there is something wonderful and infectious about people who understand and live this way: those who, the more they mature, the more childlike they become, and the more we just want to be near them. For a woman known for being big, Dolly chose the little. May she rest in peace. And may we all embrace her little mission.
