📦 Free shipping throughout Italy on orders over € 59.00
Couldn't load pickup availability
In an age marked by haste and inner disorientation, the volume Believing Without Feeling: Saint Thérèse of Lisieux offers an essential spiritual compass to those who experience God's silence and the aridity of prayer. Through the wise voice of Sister Alma Maria Joseph Sponziello, a Carmelite nun, the work reveals the authentic heart of the "little way," bearing witness to how holiness blossoms through trusting adherence to divine Mercy even when the heart feels no sensible consolations.
The figure of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face has often been wrapped in a sugary devotion that risks obscuring the dramatic depth and theological greatness of her witness. In Believing Without Feeling. The Little Way in the Night of Faith, the author, Sister Alma Maria Joseph Sponziello — a Discalced Carmelite of the "Most Holy Trinity" Carmel in Jesi — undertakes an act of rigorous evangelical truth: restoring to believers the living experience of a young woman who knew the harsh trial of inner darkness and illness, choosing to remain anchored in Love.
As highlighted in the presentation prepared by Brother Juliano Luiz da Silva O. Carm., Thérèse was not a soul preserved from pain or constantly filled with mystical consolations. She herself wrote in Manuscript B:
“Do not think that I swim in consolations, oh no! My consolation is in having none on earth. Without showing Himself, without making His voice heard, Jesus teaches me in secret.”
The volume gathers this cry of hope against all hope and translates it into a journey of spiritual healing for contemporary people, often lost before the mystery of divine silence.
Structured in nine meditative chapters, the reflection begins by exploring the human and relational roots of Teresa Martin in Alençon, within the holy family of Louis and Zélie Martin, marked by bereavement and uncertainty. The author shows with psychological and spiritual subtlety that the saint's intense sensitivity, far from being a moral defect to be eliminated, became the raw material shaped and transfigured by grace.
Through this path of inner purification, the central points of Theresian mysticism emerge:
Weakness as a threshold of grace: human frailty ceases to be experienced as guilt or an insurmountable obstacle, revealing itself instead as the "narrow door" through which the Father's mercy descends upon the soul.
The naked decision to love: true theological charity (1 Cor 13) breaks free from the fluctuations of passing feelings to take root in a free act of the will, faithful in the small duties of everyday life.
The fruitfulness of the Carmelite cross: symbolized by the motto Crux, Ave, Carmeli and by the mystery of the Holy Face, accepted suffering is transformed into universal intercession for the Church and for those who are far away.
