This, the title of the less interesting of Barack Obama’s two books, would have been much more appropriately applied to the autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul. The new book The Complete Thérèse of Lisieux is something of a misnomer — it’s 394 pages long, and Thérèse’s Oeuvres Complètes actually amount to over a thousand pages of text. (The French text can be read for free online, at the Editions du Cerf website, here.) But the new English edition does contain her most essential writings, and they are as audacious now as they were when they first captured the hearts of readers a century ago: “Even when I might have on my conscience all the sins that can be committed, I would go with a heart broken with repentance to throw myself into Jesus’ arms, because I know how much He cherishes the prodigal who comes back to Him [Lk. 15:20-24]. It’s not because God, in his kind mercy, has preserved my soul from mortal sin that I rise and go to Him in confidence and love.”

This is a spirituality of radical humility, and radical trust. It’s what Martin Luther was grasping for when he said, “Pecca fortiter sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo” (“Sin boldly, but even more boldly have faith and rejoice in Christ”), a phrase that came, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be misunderstood as an assertion of cheap grace. Yet Thérèse, like Luther, knew that God’s grace takes away man’s sin but not his struggle. She had bouts of great spiritual darkness of the same kind that racked Mother Teresa decades later. From Story of a Soul: “When I want to give rest to my heart, fatigued from the darkness that surrounds it, by remembering the luminous country toward which I aspire, my torment redoubles. It seems to me that the darkness, borrowing the voice of sinners, tells me mockingly, ‘You’re dreaming up the light. . . . You think that someday you’re going to get out of all this fog that surrounds you. Go ahead, go ahead, rejoice in death, which will give you, not what you’re hoping for, but a still deeper night, the night of nothingness.’ . . . The image that I tried to give you of the darkness that obscures my soul is as imperfect as a model compared to the real thing, but I don’t want to write any longer. . . . I’m even afraid of having said too much already.”

Thérèse knew the darkness, vividly. But she held on, with the true audacity of hope: “If all weak and imperfect souls felt what the smallest of all souls feels, the soul of your little Thérèse, not a single one would despair . . . since Jesus does not ask for great actions, but only for abandonment and gratefulness. For He said, in Psalm 50[:9-13]: ‘I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle of a thousand hills. . . . If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine and all that is in it.’”

Here, indeed, is light in darkness. The translation, by Robert Edmonson, is contemporary, even colloquial; the book is a fine introduction to an important spiritual teacher.