Thérèse

Although this book should not replace a reading of Thérèse’s autobiography, it does offer interesting insights into her life and her family. Dorothy Day does a great job at offering us a fuller picture of who Thérèse was as a regular, ordinary person living out the universal call to be a saint.Day’s insight into the meaning and value of suffering are also very helpful in a time when we see no value or purpose there.

I have read St. Terese's "Story of a Soul". as well as a couple other books about her. Dorothy Day's book is an easy read with descriptions that help you better visualize and understand St. Teere's life and philosophy. The best one I have read on this subject.

Enjoyed the book very much. I try to read as much as I can about Dorothy Day and her insights into the Little Flower are excellent.

A beautifully written biography that everyone should read.

Inspiring

Dorothy Day's treatment of the life of St. Therese is outdated and slanted. Day struggles mightily to view Therese as one of the proletariat, but Therese and her family were solidly bourgeois. M. Martin was a jeweler who retired to manage his wife's successful lacemaking business. The family had servants, took seaside holidays, and provided their children with elaborate clothes and toys. Therese's father as a young man in Paris avoided meetings of "secret societies" and Day questions his choice. "Secret societies" refers to anarchist and Marxist organizations that Day approved of in her other writings.Father Piat's "Story of a Family," which Day criticizes, is available in English and worth reading. So is Ida Gorres's excellent "The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Therese." And there is of course Therese's own "Story of a Soul," the translation published by the Institute of Carmelite Studies being the one I prefer.

Finished Day's Therese. Day said she was somewhat disappointed by her biography of Therese and should just admit she was primarily a diarist and a journalist. But her bio of Therese worked for me. Though Day may be struggling as a biographer, my knowing that she gave up fortune to serve the poor and gave up a comfortable family life to be a Catholic made me trust her effort. Perhaps the fact that Therese was also a diarist, an existential theologian as Von Balthasar said, made them kindred souls. I'm now on to Von B's theological study of Therese, now sold as the first part of a 2 in 1 called Sisters in the Spirit, surprisingly readable. Day's book is a good background. Of course I would say Day's autobio should come first.

Thérèse by Dorothy Day is a look into the life of the Little Flower through they eyes of Day. She provides a compelling look into the family life of Thérèse and her sisters while highlighting the harshness of life in the 1800's. She did her research in finding letters and documents written by the family and inserting them into the dialog so that we understand the emotions and feelings of this saintly family. While Day interjects some of her own thoughts and opinions into the story, it is an interesting perspective of the life of our beloved Saint Thérèse. I highly recommend this quick read to learn more about St. Thérèse, and to learn more about the thoughts of a future saint, Dorothy Day.

Really, just a great biography of an incredible Saint. Brings together a lot of information from other sources.I think it manages really well to capture St. Therese. I've heard that it takes a Saint to write about a Saint, and I think that is what's happened here. Dorothy Day also does well not to force herself or her own ideas onto the Saint as well, as I've seen elsewhere.

A very honest book on Thérèse. It's a short and well written book, so it's readable. You will get new insights on her family, with that typical Dorothy Day style.

Upon first reading Thérèse’s autobiography, which she received from a priest soon after her conversion, Day found it “colorless, monotonous, too small in fact for my notice.” In short: “pious pap,” saying, “What kind of a saint was this who felt that she had to practice heroic charity in eating what was put in front of her, in taking medicine, enduring cold and heat, restraint, enduring the society of mediocre souls, in following the strict regime of the convent of Carmelite nuns which she had joined at the age of fifteen?” And yet Day would come to see in Thérèse not only a great saint but one with a message particularly relevant for our times.Day began writing her biography of St. Thérèse in the early 1950s. Her main point, as she described it to a friend, was “to make people realize their personal responsibility, how everything they do matters.”With governments becoming stronger and more centralized, the common man feels his ineffectiveness. When the whole world seems given over to preparedness for war and the show of force, the message of Thérèse is quite a different one. She speaks to our condition. Is the atom a small thing? And yet what havoc it has wrought. Is her little way a small contribution to the life of the spirit? It has all the power of the spirit of Christianity behind it. It is an explosive force that can transform our lives and the life of the world, once put into effect.Day sees in Thérèse’s “little way” the living defiance of “the system,” of any “system” that reduces human agency to a mere out-working of itself.Day says: Also I wrote to overcome the sense of futility in Catholics, men, women, and youths, married and single, who feel hopeless and useless, less than the dust, ineffectual, wasted, powerless. On the one hand Thérèse was “the little grain of sand” and on the other “her name was written in heaven”; she was beloved by her heavenly Father, she was the bride of Christ, she was little less than the angels. And so are we all.In these days of fear and trembling of what man has wrought on earth in destructiveness and hate, Thérèse is the saint we need.She (Therese) knew with a certainty that is heaven itself, or a foretaste of heaven, that she had been taught the secret, the “science of love.” She died saying, “Love alone matters.” She died saying that she did not regret having given herself up to love. Her secret is generally called the little way, and is so known by the Catholic world. She called it little because it partakes of the simplicity of a child, a very little child, in its attitude of abandonment, of acceptance. Generally speaking, the little child is dependent and trustful, ready to accept everything from the hand of its parent, with no knowledge of prideful independence. Thérèse is content to be considered always the little child, the little grain of sand, the creature who can give nothing to its Creator but the willing acceptance of this status, taking from the hand of its Creator all that comes in daily life.She knew with a certainty beyond doubt that she was teaching the way of the early Christians, the way Jesus Himself spoke of when He said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”