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Light of the Night: The Last Eighteen Months in the Life of Th'r'se of Lisieux

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Jean-Francois Six has given Therese back to the world. As a Carmelite contemplative living at the end of the 19th century, Therese was in the midst of a cultural and spiritual revolution as Faith began to give way to Doubt and Cynical Skepticism. Her struggle was to remain faithful to her mystical devotion to Christ in the midst of a world eager to find new, and even more dubious, devotions. Her solution: if you can't beat them, join them; not by discarding faith, but by allowing the full force of doubt to fill and break her heart in order to understand and feel kinship with the doubting world around her, making her an even greater Saint than the revised, silly, "canonized" version given by her sister, Mother Agnes, and the Church. Her courage was to stare down the night in loving trust that there would be a dawn...somehow. Whether you understand or agree with Therese's spirituality, you cannot help but admire her mature and courageous faith and her simple belief in the power of Love. This book takes her down off the altars and solidly in our hearts, where she would most want to be...

St. Therese's famous and flowery autobiography, Story of a Soul, was so heavily edited by her sister Pauline (Mother Agnes of Jesus), that it could be considered more Pauline's views of the future Saint's theology than St. Therese's, herself. After reading it, I was left still searching for Therese, herself, and her beliefs and theology. How did she become such a great Saint, so favored by Jesus?

Light of the Night, flawed by the author's anger at his rejection by the established Lisieux hierarchy, helped me to better understand Therese's depth, which was and is considerable. I found it to be quite helpful to me on my quest to understand St. Therese and her process.

Father Six has rescued Therese from the excessive sentimentality foisted on the world by her sister Pauline (Mother Agnes) and the Lisieux Carmel. He has shown us the real Therese, a giant of the spiritual life. By showing how even the change of one word by Pauline altered the meaning of her work, we are able to finally arrive at a portrait of Therese that is true. Her emphasis on love which is the core of her teaching is given its proper place by Father Six's reinterpretation. This is a valuable book for those who wish to experience the real Therese.

Jean-Francois Six shows you how St. Therese's sister editd The Story of A Soul and how it changes crucial elements of the saint's theology. It also covers the "touch-ups" of the saint's photographs. But the most provocative portion of the book points out how the saint died in the "dark night of the soul"..

This book is the 21st-century antidote to the 19th century sentimentality which throughout the 20th century unjustly presented St Therese of Liesieux , the greatest saint of modern times, as a cloying idealization of spiritual infantalization. ---In this book we discover a woman with a profound understanding that anyone, however "unimportant" or "ordinary" in the worldly sense, is capable of profound holiness and heroic virtue through dynamic positive acceptance of life's inevitable disappointments, adversities, losses, and sorrows.

In the post-Christian society of institutionalized secular humanism, here is an unexpected new look at St Therese as beset by a terrible darkness of soul; anticipating the existential Hell of unbelief which underlies the current "Heresy of Relativism" and the "Culture of Death." She stared, for 18 months, into the terror of the dark abyss, and resolutely willed to believe: even when there was no emotional solace in the thought of faith, hope or love.

Therese, surrounded by her distracting, well-meaning, spiritually blinkered sisters endured a Purgatory of of the trivial, the annoying, the boring, as well as mental depression as she watched her body slowly and painfully disintegrate. Her lingering, painful death-bed and spiritual darkness lasted 18 months--yet she was able to make jokes to cheer her nurses, and exhausted her last strength writing letters to encourage others. She is called the Little Flower--she was in fact, for the Love of God and the salvation of those who do not believe, ---a will of iron, with a spine of steel, and she is a powerful and sympathetic (if unknown) friend for those enduring empty, trivial lives who have no faith, or else have lost it.