Deep Dive: The Context of Holiness

 The Context of Holiness, by Marc Foley

While fiction has a continual presence in my reading life, I have reflected recently that I also have some historical figures, authors, and fact-based subjects that make up much of my reading fare. For me, my nonfiction interests seem to work in waves. I'll pursue a subject with high intensity for a time - a few months, a year, maybe longer - and then it will drop off as another subject takes its place. I say "drop off," because I don't think these interests really die out. Tolkien, the importance of reading, Holly Ordway, great children's literature commentary, and Fr. Jacques Philippe are some of the names and subjects that show up on this blog pretty regularly.

When I realized that Little T - St. Therese of Lisieux - was showing up regularly on blog posts the last few months, I felt a sense of pleasure descend upon me. Little T is a very old friend, and I first made her acquaintance when I was in middle school. I remember reading about her at different times, maybe in high school, but definitely in college - but I hadn't read much about my confirmation saint recently. Then, in July, I finished a book about her family, and it included the portion that included her in the history of the Martin family. Fr. Jacques Philippe will reference her from time to time in his books, and I've been reading more widely of his works over the last year or so. Well Read Moms, a reading club I have recently become associated with, recorded I Believe in Love - a book that reflects upon St. Therese and her Little Way - was one of the books they read in previous years. Finally, my spiritual director encouraged me to reread 33 Days to Merciful Love, a book by Fr. Michael Gaitley that focuses on St. Therese of Lisieux and Divine Mercy. 

Suffice it to say: Little T has been making serious inroads on my reading fare over just the last two or three months. I decided to capitalize on the moment and pick up a book that has been on my to-read list for years: The Context of Holiness, a book that examines St. Therese's life from a psychological perspective. This post is a deep dive into the work.

Why This Book?

I think I first heard about this book at some point during my undergraduate - I associate a memory of being at the campus bookstore - the location of my part-time job - with hearing something about St. Therese suffering from OCD - well, not OCD, but anxiety of some sort. I also seem to recall my spiritual director (met during grad school) saying something about St. Therese experiencing severe separation anxiety. In any case, Little T became an even dearer friend to me because I struggled with anxiety myself in different ways.

It was time to pick up this book. Little T kept coming up in my other reading, and I was in the mood to track down a copy. I'd kept my eyes open for it for years, but I never came across it at a library or on the shelf of a bookstore. I ordered this one via interlibrary loan. Since there are some pretty serious fees associated with not returning an interlibrary loan book, and no renewal options for these checkouts, I decided to zip through it quickly. It was back at the library drop off within the week. 

A Few Notes

Since I wanted to be extra careful about not missing the due date, I took notes as I read and kept track of special quotes. Please know that there will be "spoilers," insofar as I'm not trying to keep anything secret. There's not a plot, or plot twist, but I just figured I better say I won't be trying to hold back on detail. 

I should also probably start off with my overall impression of the book. I think there is danger in psychologizing or diagnosing people who are no longer alive. All we know about St. Therese probably comes from her writings and the memories and writings of her family members and Carmelite sisters. While psychology is a broad field with many helpful applications, it also seems to me to be like the field of communication - theories about, but there's no single "master theory" that captures all of the human experience. These theories do their best to explain what is observed in humans, but one can turn from a strategy recommended by one theory to a different one recommended by another at will.

With that being said, I think there can be value in considering Little T's life in this way. When I read Story of a Soul, I feel like she was a saint almost from the womb. It is a bit discouraging. However, reading Fr. Foley's book has helped me to realize that Therese may have been saying a lot more than I realized, but I didn't have a keen enough observation to detect things. It's enough to make me want to reread Story of a Soul again - sometime - and see if I can pick up on more of those more hidden things.

So, without much structure, here I go.

Lacking the Whole Picture

Fr. Foley did a lot of research for this book. It seems to me that he also has a deep working knowledge of psychological theories. I'm not sure if he had a background in psychological work, but a little bio blurb I found from searching on the Internet indicates that he does spiritual direction. Regardless of his psych studies credentials, I found him to be very credible.

However, there were some points upon which I don't think Fr. Foley had the whole picture in mind, and there were other points that I definitely felt shouldn't be accepted wholesale. This first time I came to this conclusion concerned his take on Zelie, Therese's mother. During a section in which he discusses, amongst other things, attachment theory, Fr. Foley said that Zelie wouldn't have been a secure attachment for little Therese in part because she was too distressed and distracted to nurse her properly - Therese had to be sent to a wet nurse for the first year of her life.

The reason this argument didn't sit well with me was because Zelie was suffering from breast cancer, and probably had been for a while. Zelie mentioned in various letters that she had observed a lump in her breast, and had actually had trouble nursing several, if not all, of her babies. Therese was not the only baby who had to be sent to a wet nurse. In fact, one sibling's death seems to have been caused, or at least probably affected, by the neglect of a wet nurse.

This is not to say Therese didn't suffer an anxious attachment with her mother. It is possible she did, since she had nursed originally with Zelie, then been sent to live with a wet nurse, then come back to the Martin household when she was around a year of age. That is indeed a lot of separation, and it is possible that not only she, but other siblings who experienced something similar, may have developed a strained relationship with Zelie from it. However, I don't think it's fair to assume these separations, Zelie's struggle with breast cancer, and her continuing work in a demanding lacemaking business made her a distracted mother. Zelie was a working woman her entire career as a mother, I think, and I'm assuming the breast cancer could have caused issues with nursing with other children, although I don't know for sure. Zelie wrote many letters and, according to those letters, seemed a very astute observer of those around her.

The truth is that we will never know, this side of Heaven, whether Therese had an anxious attachment to her mother or not. I'm not sure how much it matters that we know it, but I think it was this first possibility of the presence of anxiety in St. Therese's life that drew her even closer to me in college.

More Going On

I'm going to include a quote that had me thinking that I may have missed a lot in Story of a Soul. 

“Therese may have had the right intention to suffer in silence, namely, not to be a burden to her family, but her decision to do so, may have lacked the prudence that she acquired in later years. We need to read Story of a Soul with intelligence and interpret the events of Therese’s life within context, so that we do not canonize every action of this canonized saint.” (39-40)

The quote basically says it all. A very young Therese didn't complain to her family, but that was actually not a healthy decision. Her later illness, around the age of 11 or 12, and which ended with a miraculous cure, appears to have possibly been her body manifesting symptoms because of repressed memories. I don't think it makes her recovery non-miraculous, but I would certainly be interested to reread this part of her autobiography again with The Context of Holiness hard by.

Not in Any Category

One part of this book that I found intriguing, and perhaps mildly off-putting at times, was that I couldn't quite fit it cleanly into a genre. It is nonfiction, for sure, but also a lot of conjecture. It pulls in psychological theory, but definitely views them through a Catholic lens. The author pulls in historical fact, but also examples from great works of fiction and the author's own life experiences.

It's an unusual type of work, but a happy little corner of me smiles because this seems like the sort of book that would have been mentioned with approbation by some college professors who led the courses I audited about five years ago. The fact that Fr. Foley can bring in so many different areas of study to bear upon his subject speaks of a mind that has been well-rounded in the sense that he hasn't had an education in just one specialty. He is adept at considering Truth in the many diverse fields in which we find it - faith, history, psychology, and the arts. 

I'm not sure what that makes this book, but it was mostly enjoyable.

Only a Deep-ish Dive

It turns out this dive is not quite as deep as I thought it would be. I recorded about 10 quotes elsewhere that struck me. However, the brevity of this post is not an indicator that this was a lame book or not worth reading. I definitely am glad that I picked it up. While it may not be the best book I read this summer, it was pretty good, and it most certainly held my interest. I appreciate that this book made Little T "more human" to me, if I may say that. I didn't find her one of those saints who was just so incredible that I couldn't relate to her, but she did seem to have a degree of perfection that was a little deflating to me in more recent years. After reading this book, I feel a renewed sense of kinship with this dear big sister - because I do consider her a big heavenly sister to me, even if she considers herself the smallest of God's servants. This book provided a lot of food for thought, and I'm glad to have read it.