Thomas Nevin’s The Last Years of Saint Thérèse, the sequel to his Thérèse of Lisieux: God’s Gentle Warrior, is at once beautiful and maddening. It describes the final years of Thérèse’s life in great detail and with helpful insights, but does it in blustery and reductive prose.
Nevin’s guiding image throughout is the table of sinners, a metaphor Thérèse uses at the beginning of Manuscript C—the final part of The Story of a Soul, the most popular collection of her writings. She describes herself as joined in doubt and darkness with those who have rejected God. She is seated at their table, serves them their bread of sorrow and eats it with them. As Nevin notes, this image is the goal of her adolescent desires to be a warrior, missionary and martyr. She longed to spend herself lavishly out of love for Christ, but ended up doing so along an unexpected way of spiritual pain. Elsewhere Thérèse described her spiritual state as a sécheresse, a dryness or tunnel—a long darkness, perhaps like the tunnel she traveled through in Switzerland on her way to Rome when she was 14.
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