PETALS AND THORNS: THE TRAGEDY OF A SAINT

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the theological existence of Saint Teresa of Lisieux from a reading that notifies, on the one hand, the complexity of her corpus given by its discursive layers, due to the fact that it is composed of three autobiographicalmanuscripts, a series of letters, poems, prayers, and a notebook written by Mother Agnes, her biological sister, which collects the ideas that Teresa would have expressed during the last six months before her death. This manuscript took the name of Yellow Notebook and can be considered a second-instance autobiography, and, on the other hand, the depth of her doctrinethat is manifested in this patchwork of informal texts, but, at the same time, brutally genuine. The selection made from thefragments of this corpus seeks to invite reflection on the plausibility of a religiosity embedded by the paradoxical as a vitalsign of the sacred, as the irreversible access to mystery, and also on the possibility that the dialectal force of paradox is sustained by the ineffability of Love.