Shirt of Flame Quotes

“We're called to speak to people to whom we often don't feel like speaking; to refrain from surrounding ourselves with people "just like us," whose thoughts, ideas, and actions we can more or less manage and control; to share not just with the poor, but with the rich, the mediocre, the irritating, the Republicans, the Democrats, because we never know who the poor are. We never know whose heart is hemorrhaging. We never know who needs a kind work, a smile, a helping hand.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux

“We can discover that of the rough material we’ve been given, every single thread of what we’ll eventually contribute back to the tapestry of all humanity is every bit as important, needed, wanted, and cherished as every and any other scrap and thread.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

“one of my biggest illusions was that other people were meant to assuage my anxiety by filling some lack that I was responsible for filling myself. If I wanted to give, the giving had to be “for fun and for free.” The giving couldn’t be out of guilt, nor because I secretly wanted to get something back, nor because I wanted the other person to respond in such a way as to satisfy my longing to be useful. Thérèse”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

“All along, I had thought that the attachment, or midlife crisis, or dark night of the soul, or whatever my experience had been, was a terrible stumbling block, a sign of shameful weakness, evidence of some core, incurable insanity: in short, The Problem. Now I knew that, in some very difficult, mysterious way, it had actually been The Solution. My struggle went way beyond any relationship with, or way of seeing, a mere human being. All along, I had thought my error lay in failing to find the formula to love correctly, unselfishly, when the very idea of trying to be perfect myself, with respect to human relationships-or any other way- was the real problem. Forget trying to achieve your own holiness, Therese seemed to be saying: you are infinitely too feeble, weak, and misguided to accomplish anything on your own. You're like a bleating lamb, wandering blindly around with your divided, wayward heart... Sit down on the floor, like a baby, and Christ will bend down and lift you up.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux

“Thérèse may not have been brought to a spiritual crisis in the particular way I had been—through alcoholism—but she had been brought to a crisis by a “neurotic illness”: her hypersensitivity, her inability to put the desire to please God before the desire to be noticed, coddled, and loved, which—along with the neurological glitch that gives rise to the phenomenon of craving and the “allergic” response that gives rise to mental obsession—is really what alcoholism consists of. Görres’s description of the lightning-quick opening that takes place below the strata of consciousness paralleled the “yes” I’d given to getting sober: a consent to grow up, take on the responsibilities of adulthood, and orient my life toward service.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

“I had also pled, the whole year, to be wholly relieved of my romantic attachment; begged to stop loving so much. But I had finally been given to see that my desire was what made me human; that desire was my glory and my cross; that desire had given me a window onto the divine that would sustain me all my life. I had seen at least one person as God must us-for where did my eyes come from but God? - and that is a rare and precious gift.”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Lisieux

“On the contrary, that someone as weak and”
― Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux