St. Therese's is the "little way." The left hemisphere values the big. The left hemisphere demands answers and solutions, which require increasingly large effort. The Little Way is a rebuke of such a disposition.
She placed no value on abstractions, opting instead for the real and immediate.
"She had a deep distrust of making surveys and standing back to take her bearings or working out the theoretical implications of every move. To make a survey, one has to separate oneself from the concrete reality of the truth here and now; for Therese, a survey means 'theory, and theory leads one into the world of 'problems,' where untruth begins." Hans Urs von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit (Ignatius, 1992), p. 67.
The left hemisphere is the hemisphere of abstraction and theory. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, p. 30.
The right hemisphere is the hemisphere of experience: fresh, unique, embodied . . . being present with things as they are. Id.
