It is customary to assume that children rebel against their parents. What is often discounted, though, is just how strong the influence of parents is. If children do rebel, it is rebellion against the standard the parents have established. Rebellion itself shows the outsized influence of parents.
It turns out, however, that the myth of rebellion is overblown.
The lives of the saints are never mere biographies, because their real lives are hidden in Christ with God (cf. Col 3:3). To see these men and women as a saint means learning to see Christ’s beauty in their particular life. Perhaps no one is better suited to see a saint for who he or she really is than other saints. Some of these men and women even write about other their fellow members of the Church triumphant as a testament to Christ’s glory made present to and effective in the lives of those who have learned to love them.
In this third installment in a series on biographies of the saints, we examine two works about saints — one written by a saint himself (St. Bonaventure on St. Francis), and another written by one whose cause for canonization has begun (Dorothy Day on St. Thérèse of Lisieux).
