Thérèse

Dorothy Day’s mature assimilation of Thérèse of Lisieux’s spirituality is a vital legacy for the Catholic Worker movement and for anyone whose life is dedicated to working for peace and justice.

James Allaire

The Catholic Worker

Dorothy Day may not be remembered as one of Thérèse’s greatest biographers, but in Day, Thérèse may well have found her most adept and significant student. On both a personal and a social level, she embraced the implications of Thérèse’s most famous words, ‘All is grace.’

From the foreword by Robert Ellsberg

Editor-in-chief of Orbis Books and

former managing editor of The Catholic Worker

I feel honored to be able to pay this small bit of homage to a book by a saint of our day, Dorothy Day, whose love made her challenge the lie of what she always called ‘this filthy rotten system’ and enabled her to see deeply enough into another saint of our day to recognize a kindred spirit, though her life, on the surface, seemed so different from Dorothy’s own.

From the afterword by John C. Cavadini

Theology professor and director of the Institute for Church Life

University of Notre Dame

____________________________________

Foreword © 2016 by Robert Ellsberg

Afterword © 2016 by John C. Cavadini

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Christian Classics™, Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556, 1-800-282-1865.

Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

www.christian-classics.com

Paperback: ISBN-13 978-0-87061-306-7

E-book: ISBN-13 978-0-87061-307-4

Cover image © Office Central de Lisieux.

Cover design by Angela Moody, amoodycover.com.

Text design by Andy Wagoner.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Day, Dorothy, 1897-1980, author.

Title: Thérèse / Dorothy Day.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : Christian Classics, 2016. | Includes

bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016022586 (print) | LCCN 2016023493 (ebook) | ISBN

9780870613067 (pbk.) | ISBN 0870613065 | ISBN 9780870613074 () | ISBN

0870613073 ()

Subjects: LCSH: Thérèse, de Lisieux, Saint, 1873-1897. | Christian

saints--France--Lisieux--Biography. | Lisieux (France)--Biography.

Classification: LCC BX4700.T5 D29 2016 (print) | LCC BX4700.T5 (ebook) | DDC

282.092 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022586

Contents

Foreword by Robert Ellsberg

Preface

Part I: The dearly loved garden of home

1. Louis Martin

2. Zélie Guérin

3. Marriage

4. War and Unrest

5. Thérèse Is Born

6. Zélie Dies

7. The Sisters of the Little Flower

Part II: If a little flower could speak . . .

8. Earliest Memories

9. Confession and Communion

10. Reading

11. Mental Illness

12. Vocation

13. Pilgrimage

14. Carmel

15. A Life of Work

16. Spiritual Development

17. Night and Death

18. The Shower of Roses

Afterword by John C. Cavadini

Bibliography

Author Biography

Foreword

Those who know Dorothy Day as the indomitable leader of the Catholic Worker movement, a courageous activist frequently arrested in the cause of peace and justice, may find it curious to discover her devotion to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun who died at the age of twenty-four in a small convent in Normandy. At first glance, these two women, the activist and the contemplative, would appear to have little in common.

Day’s devotion to the Little Flower, as St. Thérèse is popularly known, is all the more striking in light of her initial reaction. 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.

What accounted for her change of heart? The answer lies in her experience with The Catholic Worker. Through years of living among the poor and unwanted, enduring not only cold and heat but also the sights and smells of squalor, she came to appreciate the power of Thérèse’s little way. Many charged that her practice of the Works of Mercy offered no real answer to the problems of modern society. Many felt her pacifism and small protests against nuclear war were naïve, foolish, and irrelevant. It was in this light that Day came to appreciate Thérèse’s message.

Thérèse had indicated a path to holiness that lay in performing all our daily tasks and duties in a spirit of love and in the presence of God. From Thérèse, Day learned that each sacrifice endured in love, each work of mercy, might increase the balance of love in the world. She extended this principle to the social sphere. Each protest or witness for peace—though apparently foolish and ineffective, no more than a pebble in a pond—might send forth ripples that could transform the world.

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. In an article in The Catholic Worker she acknowledged the many books about St. Thérèse but noted, the social implications of her teachings are yet to be written. The significance of our smallest acts! The significance of the little things we leave undone! The protests we do not make, the stands we do not take, we who are living in the world!

It is hard to claim that these intentions were fully realized in the final book. Day struggled with this project over many years, feeling blocked and finding the results in many ways dull and undistinguished. Though every page of Thérèse reflects her love and admiration for her subject, Day came to acknowledge that biography was not her true forte: I am faced with the humiliating fact, she wrote a friend, "that I can write only about myself." Curiously, that admission invites us to imagine a different book. Perhaps, instead of focusing on a loving, though conventional, account of Thérèse’s family life and childhood, Day might have offered a window into her own struggles to live Thérèse’s message in the context of her life.

However, that understanding of this book awaited the publication of Day’s diaries. There we find numerous references to her work on Thérèse interspersed among accounts of her arrests and imprisonment for resisting compulsory civil defense drills; threats by the city to close down her house of hospitality; and the constant stress of sustaining a community among the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the crazed, and the solitary human beings whom Christ so loved. In one revealing diary entry she writes, "Working on Thérèse but I feel a nervous wreck with so many neurotic people, women, etc."

Though rejected by her original publisher (somewhat to Day’s relief), Thérèse was eventually published in 1960 by Notre Dame’s Fides Press. Reprinted today by Ave Maria Press, it will surely contribute to the rising interest in Day—now a Servant of God on her own path to canonization. I suspect that current readers of Thérèse will be interested less in what it reveals about the social implications of Thérèse’s spirituality than in clues about the spiritual implications of Day’s own life of social engagement.

Thérèse’ little way, in fact, offers an essential key to interpreting the message of Day. In a time when so many feel overwhelmed by the vast powers of this world, she bore witness to another power, one disguised in what is apparently small and weak. Certainly, life at the Catholic Worker offered daily, hourly, opportunities for self-mortification—the little decisions to sacrifice one’s time, privacy, comforts, and cravings for the sake of others. It was the practice of these small, daily choices—as rigorous as anything St. Thérèse could have desired—that equipped Day for the extraordinary and heroic actions she performed on a wider stage. And who can measure their power? As Day noted, We know that one impulse of grace is of infinitely more power than a cobalt bomb.

For the centenary of her death in 1997 (which was also the centenary of Day’s birth), St. Thérèse of Lisieux was declared a Doctor of the Church. Day may not be remembered as one of Thérèse’s greatest biographers, but in Day, Thérèse may well have found her most adept and significant student. On both a personal and a social level, she embraced the implications of Thérèse’s most famous words: All is grace.

Robert Ellsberg

Preface

The first time I heard the name of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face (to give her whole title), also known as Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, was when I lay in the maternity ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Bellevue is the largest hospital in the world, and doctors from all over the world come there. If you are poor you can have free hospital care. At that time, if you could pay anything, there was a flat rate for having a baby—thirty dollars for a ten days’ stay, in a long ward with about sixty beds. I was so fortunate as to have a bed next to the window looking out over the East River so that I could see the sun rise in the morning and light up the turgid water and make gay the little tugs and the long tankers that went by the window. When there was fog it seemed as though the world ended outside my window, and the sound of fog horns haunted the day and the night.

As a matter of fact, my world did end at the window those ten days that I was in the hospital, because I was supremely happy. If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure, I could not have felt more the exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms. To think that this thing of beauty, sighing gently in my arms, reaching her little mouth for my breast, clutching at me with her tiny beautiful hands, had come from my flesh, was my own child! Such a great feeling of happiness and joy filled me that I was hungry for Someone to thank, to love, even to worship, for so great a good that had been bestowed upon me. That tiny child was not enough to contain my love, nor could the father, though my heart was warm with love for both.

We were radicals and had no particular religious affiliations. If I was drawn to any organized church it was to the Catholic. I knew of such saints as St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Augustine, and William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience had introduced me to St. Teresa of Avila, that well-traveled yet cloistered contemplative with her vigorous writing and her sense of humor.

What are you going to name your baby, the girl in the next bed to mine asked me.

Teresa, I told her. Tamar Teresa. I have a dear friend whose husband is a Zionist, and she has a little girl named Tamar. It means little palm tree, in Hebrew.

And Teresa is after the Little Flower?

I had never heard of the Little Flower and she had never heard of Teresa of Avila. She was a Catholic, and although she didn’t read much, she knew the outlines of the life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In her pocketbook where she kept her powder and lipstick, tissues and rosary beads, money to buy candy and the Daily News when the boy made his rounds, she also had a medal of the Little Flower. Here, I will give it to you for your baby, she said. Pin it on her.

I was some years from being a Catholic and I shied away from this evidence of superstition and charm-wearing. I wanted no such talisman. Besides, the baby might swallow it. The pin might come unloosed and pierce that tender flesh.

But if you love someone you want something around you to remind you of them, the girl protested. So I took the medal, and after hearing of St. Thérèse as the young novice mistress in her far off convent of Lisieux in Normandy, who had died the year I was born, and whose sisters were still alive, I decided that although I would name my child after the older saint, the new one would be my own Teresa’s novice mistress, to train her in the spiritual life. I knew that I wanted to have the child baptized a Catholic and I wanted both saints to be taking care of her. One was not enough.

The next time I heard of St. Thérèse of Lisieux was in 1928, a year after I had been baptized a Catholic. I was thirty years old. I had read the New Testament, The Imitation of Christ, St. Augustine, and had dipped into the writings of some of the saints William James had introduced me to. I had a daily missal, too, which presented a little biography of the saint of the day, commemorated in the Mass. I still knew nothing of modern saints. Perhaps, I thought, the days of saints had passed.

At that time I did not understand that we are all called to be saints, as St. Paul puts it. Most people nowadays, if they were asked, would say diffidently that they do not profess to be saints, indeed they do not want to be saints. And yet the saint is the holy man, the whole man, the integrated man. We all wish to be that, but in these days of stress and strain we are not developing our spiritual capacities as we should and most of us will admit that. We want to grow in love but do not know how. Love is a science, a knowledge, and we lack it.

My confessor at the time was Father Zachary, an Augustinian Father of the Assumption, stationed at the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe on West Fourteenth Street. He was preparing me for Confirmation, giving me a weekly evening of instruction.

One day Father Zachary said to me, Here is a book that will do you good. He had already given me Challoner’s Meditations and the St. Andrew Missal. The book he now handed me was The Little White Flower, the Story of a Soul, an unbound book which had a tan cover with a not too attractive picture of a young nun with a sweet insipid face, holding a crucifix and a huge bouquet of roses. I was by now familiar with the statues of this little sister which were to be intellectual whom I had known when he went to Columbia University and took part in the anticonscription campaign of the First World War, who went to Russia to attend the Third International, who was active in the party for some years and who was dismissed in one of the frequent party purges some years later. My companions on the job were two women, both of them former Catholics, who looked on me indulgently and felt that my faith was a neurotic aspect of my character and something quite divorced from my daily life.

One woman was an adventurous young widow with a child who was living with a Scotch party official who was always being sent around the world on various party missions. Sometimes we would hear that he was in India or in Russia, but when he was home he devoted himself to Elizabeth. One time when I was sick with a bad cold they came to see me with a little roast chicken and some ginger ale. They took rooms in the same old tenement I was living in (quite a few other radicals lived there) and Elizabeth baby-sat for me on Sunday mornings when I went to Mass. Jack is dead now and the last time I saw Elizabeth was in 1936 in South Chicago during the Steel strike when she was writing pamphlets for the party and helping run a soup kitchen.

The other woman was a tragic figure to me, because her child had been run over by a truck on the New York streets, and she herself was beginning to suffer with the cancer which eventually killed her. Her husband was a big Irishman whose radical career began as a miner out west when, during a strike, he had a dispute with a priest which led him and his brothers to leave the Church and join with the most radical element of the labor movement, the I.W.W., which later lost many of its members to the Communist Party. Bill was always being disciplined by the Party for drinking and irresponsible conduct, suffering suspensions from active duty every now and then. But he was an able and dramatic leader and valued by the party.

The work that Elizabeth, Mary and I were engaged in under the leadership of Manny Gomez was to publicize and seen in every church. They always called her little, although it is said she was very tall, and completely emaciated when the last photographs of her were taken. She had a broad face, however, and her habit and cloak concealed how thin she was. She was very young and her writing seemed to me like that of a school girl. I wasn’t looking for anything so simple and felt slightly aggrieved at Father Zachary. Men, and priests too, were very insulting to women, I thought, handing out what they felt suited their intelligence; in other words, pious pap.

I dutifully read The Story of a Soul and am ashamed to confess that I found it colorless, monotonous, too small in fact for my notice. 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? A splash of dirty water from the careless washing of a nun next to her in the laundry was mentioned as a mortification when the very root of the word meant death, and I was reading in my Daily Missal of saints stretched on the rack, burnt by flames, starving themselves in the desert, and so on.

Anatole France had made me familiar with Thais and Paphnutius, who were more to my taste. Joan of Arc leading an army fitted more into my concept of a saint, familiar as I was with the history of labor with its martyrs in the service of their brothers. Love of brother is to lay down one’s life on the barricades, in revolt against the hunger and injustice in the world, I told Father Zachary, trying to convert him to my point of view. Living as we were, in time of world revolution, when, as I felt, the people of the world were rising to make a better world for themselves, I wondered what this new saint had to offer.

As a matter of fact, I was working at the time for the Anti-Imperialist League, a Communist Party affiliate with offices