"One of my abiding obsessions is the unsung saint: the person who, unlike Thérèse, is never noticed. But here’s why saints interested me: saints are extreme. Saints have such a bizarre capacity for love that they’re part crazy. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James observes: “[I]t would profit us little” to study a conventional, ordinary, “second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for . . . individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.”
Acute fever—that caught my eye! James clinched it by adding: “[S]uch ‘geniuses’ in the religious line have often shown symptoms of nervous irritability . . . Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas . . . and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.”"
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"The world tells us to strive for fame: Thérèse strove to be forgotten. The world rewards passing things: Thérèse strove for eternity. I wanted to learn to write in a way that glorified God, not myself. I wanted to leave writing that endured. I was willing to spend a year to read about, reflect upon, pray, eat, sleep, and live with a saint. I would look to St. Thérèse of Lisieux for help."
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"Spirituality to me is blood, sinew, tendon, a heart nailed to a cross."
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"Someone once asked the novelist Walker Percy why he was Catholic. He replied, “What else is there?” That’s the way I’ve come to feel as well. You can subscribe to Jungian thought with its archetypes, symbols, and dreams: all utterly valid and part of the light; you can detach from your thoughts through meditation: part of the light; you can experience the healing power of nature: part of the light; you can see and rightfully rail against the ways that we sometimes appropriate “religion” and ideas and belief systems to our own ends, and worse, try to impose [those ends] on others: part of the light; you can unearth the ways your childhood has shaped and wounded you: part of the light. But you will never get to the truth, and become your most authentic self, without seeing your own incredible propensity for darkness and sin; without acknowledging the ways that you have hurt, or are capable of hurting, others. “The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sinner,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, “which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”
The Church is set up for sinners, and the parable of the Prodigal Son, to me, is the central emblem of the way in which we are loved. We are loved in our dereliction and degradation; we are forgiven almost before we’ve asked for it; the place at the banquet table is laid and has been laid all along."
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More and more I see that “spiritual” conversation does not consist in theoretical talk about God. The spiritual—actually, the religious conversation—consists in things like: “I can’t stand my mother-in-law and she’s coming for a week! How can I exercise restraint of tongue while she’s here without losing my mind?” or “I always feel like ‘going the extra mile’ is the spiritual thing to do, but I’m beginning to see the real reason I act that way is that I can’t bear to sit in the anxiety of not constantly trying to make things right,” or “My son’s out on the streets again with his meth habit: should I offer him money or not?”
Religion is not some extra thing we tack onto our lives. It is the meat of our lives. It’s what we do with our wounds, our compulsions, our fear, our loneliness, our hunger for meaning and love, our bewilderment at how to respond to ourselves and the people around us.
At the same time, the banquet table of Christ is very different from, say, the “table” of the barroom. Everyone’s welcome in the barroom as well. But at the banquet table you sit in truth. Implicit in the truth is that you’re trusted to want to respond to the invitation, to come higher, to get in some kind of shape so you can welcome the next person to the banquet table; so you can call the next person higher."
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"Kafka, for whom I feel tremendous affection and admiration, observed, “My life is a hesitation before birth.” He came so far. He saw and described—as perhaps no one else ever has or will—the human condition in all its tragicomic horror. And yet he was paralyzed, he knew he was paralyzed, and he could not
quite reach the point of saying no to the paralysis. “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back,” he wrote. “That is the point that must be reached.” And yet he never reached it. Thérèse reached it.
Thérèse saw and hesitated before the paralysis of her neuroses: her abandonment issues, her morbid sensitivity, her tendency to overbond and overemote. She knew the hesitation was toward death, she opened her heart to grace, and then she plunged in. She consented to endure her anxiety, to walk through her anxiety, to be nailed to the cross, alone—as every follower of Christ is called to—and thus was born.
To say an unconditional yes to life—all the as yet-to-berevealed suffering, all the as-yet-to-be-revealed joy, to a self we cannot yet imagine—is an act of supreme, sublime courage and of course, in the end, love. That yes to the mystery of existence is love.
So the untutored, Bride-of-Christ schoolgirl surpasses the existentially aware, exquisitely attuned,
par excellence intellectual and becomes, as is so beautifully fitting, a Doctor of the Church (one of only three women to have achieved this extraordinary honor).
To penetrate the Gospels is to penetrate reality. Christianity is above all weird: “counter, original, spare, strange” as Gerard Manley Hopkins had it in a poem you all know well. Thérèse to me was more Zen than Suzuki, more existentially profound than Sartre, more conversant with the darkness than Nietzsche (she suffered from fearsome aridity for much of her adult life), infinitely more of a woman and a human being than any mere “feminist.”
As Simone Weil observed, “One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.” The follower of Christ does not speak of rights. The follower of Christ speaks of abandonment. And to abandon oneself is to consent to simultaneously disappear and to be reborn as a creature utterly unique under the sun."
