c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Thomas R. Nevin has a complicated relationship with a saint.

The modest, erudite professor at John Carroll University in Cleveland has just finished “Therese of Lisieux: God’s Gentle Warrior,” a book that is both readable and provocative. He begins it in a Carmelite monastery in 1897 as the French saint succumbs to tuberculosis. She is 24.

When told that she was not a good nun, this “very young woman who had come to prefer bitter things to the sweet” responded: “To hear on my deathbed that I’m not a good nun, what joy! Nothing could please me more.”

Therese of Lisieux, arguably one of the most popular Catholic saints of the modern era, died without believing in heaven, clinging to her love of mankind. Her gravestone reads: “I want to spend my heaven doing good on Earth.”

Known as “The Little Flower of Jesus,” the saint is sometimes rendered insipid and sentimental. But her appeal has grown across faith and geographic boundaries. She is venerated in Baghdad, Iraq, and Cairo, Egypt, where there is an Islamic shrine to her.

Therese’s autobiography, “The Story of a Soul,” has been translated into 60 languages, inspiring readers as diverse as Thomas Merton, Jack Kerouac and Dorothy Day. It also caused Nevin, 62, to drop the scholarly book he intended to write about 19th-century French Catholicism and focus entirely on Therese.

Nevin, a peripatetic researcher with four adult children, a wife and a home in Brittany, France, is known as gently eccentric _ he sleeps some nights in his cramped academic office. He sat down to answer questions about his work.

Q: Why is your book different?

A: I think it’s going to offend a lot of people, particularly the eighth chapter on her theology. That’s understandable. She is a conciliatory figure in Catholicism. My book pours out the rose water part of her cult. Therese is famous for the scattering roses, the gesture of one who cannot do much more than that for Jesus, but was in fact a hard hitter. By the end of her life, she is identifying herself with the type the church has a hard time receiving: those who reject the notion of God, those indifferent to Christianity.

Q: What was it about Therese that caught your attention?

A: I knew nothing about her, but when I read the autobiography, I realized that there was so much research to do with her that the others all fell away. One of the Carmelite (nuns in Cleveland Heights) here told me, “You did not choose Therese. Therese chose you” _ a kind thing, but unsettling, too. I’m not in the Catholic fold, I’m Anglican.

Q: But why is “The Story of a Soul” so broadly appealing?

A: The appeal is a kind of lucidity, a simplicity that is unadorned and has great immediacy. Others I have written books about have been overripe intellectual sorts. My work is very much about the (Carmelites), not just her, and her family and her mother.

Q: Therese was a sickly girl who had no friends beyond her biological sisters and then lived in a convent cell. How is it that you, a man, even saw her formation in this cloistered female environment as significant?

A: I have no sisters, and I was never close to my mother, but I am very close to my two daughters. I guess they helped me pay attention to the feminine.

Q: How has your subject’s spirituality influenced your own?

A: I’ve had to ponder everything anew. I’ve had to ponder chiefly what I feel about the Trinitarian virtues: faith, hope and love. From my own experience as a parent, I can see love as sacrificial _ a giving and a giving-up, a continuous attempt to lose self. It is very hard. Only by grace can you even try.

(Karen Long writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

KRE/PH END LONG

Editors: To obtain file photos of St. Therese, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by “Therese.”