This Transfigured Chapel of the Threads: Poems

By Sarah Law

These short poems, one hundred in number, meditate on religious life, its patterns of deep darkness and gleaming light. Sarah Law has been inspired by the Carmelite nun Saint Therese of Lisieux (1873-97) for many years and in this collection blurs the borders of self and saint. The poems follow a loosely chronological and biographical trajectory, drawing on sparks of image and memory. The resulting work is intimate, lyrical, and innovative, and by turns dreamlike, confessional, passionate, and poignant. The whole forms a chapel from poetic threads and fragments of faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385204212

Sarah Law

Sarah Law is an associate lecturer for the Open University and elsewhere. She has published six previous poetry collections, including Thérèse: Poems (2020), and a novel, Sketches from a Sunlit Heaven (Wipf and Stock, 2022), winner of an Illumination Book Awards Silver Medal. She edits the online journal Amethyst Review, for new writing engaging with the sacred, editing and publishing occasional collections and anthologies under Amethyst Press. She lives in Norwich in the UK.

Book preview

Introduction: Reflecting on a Beloved Saint

Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–97) is a much-loved saint, made famous by her poignant autobiographical writing, her letters, and other creative pieces. Her brief life was lived in seclusion: she longed to be a nun from a very early age and joined the Carmelite monastery in the Normandy town of Lisieux when she was just fifteen. She died from tuberculosis nine years later, having suffered dreadful physical and spiritual trials. A wealth of information is available about her life and spirituality, as are some very moving photographs taken mostly by her own sister Céline, who also joined the Lisieux monastery, as had her two older sisters, Marie and Pauline.

All her writings are precious and have been much discussed by those with more theological and devotional insight than myself, and I have written about her life and legacy previously in both poetry and historical fiction. The idea for this collection, however, was initiated when I started to think about what is lost or missing from her work. I became increasingly interested in the idea of lost letters—of gaps and absences that elude satisfactory understanding, the tantalizing idea that spiritual and literary gleanings are hiding somewhere, just out of reach.

Thérèse herself wrote a lot of letters. Most of them are still extant and can be read as intelligently annotated, published collections, and can also be viewed in English and as the original French documents on the website of the Lisieux Carmel archives, a wonderful resource. Thérèse’s letters to her sister Céline, and to the missionary seminarian correspondent of her last year, Maurice Bellière, are particularly rich in compassion and guidance. Family letters, especially those between Thérèse and her sisters, are often sweetly humorous and intimate too, so much so that there was hesitation over their initial publication. But one significant recipient throughout her life, from her pre-Carmel days until her death, was her spiritual director Père Almire Pichon (1843–1919), a Jesuit priest who had considerable spiritual sway over the whole Martin family, but who was generally absent in person from their lives, spending many years in Canada. He was a talented spiritual director and particularly astute at helping young women discern a religious vocation—something Thérèse needed no help with, although her oldest sister, Marie, did. There also seems to have been a fundamental kindness and compassion in his manner, which many of his correspondents clearly both needed and appreciated. He was a busy man, a priest, a Jesuit, a spiritual director to many souls. He was not always able to answer at length or at all to the letters sent him. His eyesight took the toll of a huge, unrelenting, correspondence. Thérèse wrote to him on a regular basis from Carmel, at least monthly, but understood how burdened he was. She wrote more as an act of discipline and self-examination than in a plea for guidance. She tended to rely on the Gospels and her own inner lights for that. But although she