With the story of Thérèse, and only with her story, we see a fully realized mystic and saint portrayed as someone living at the center of a web of intense relationships: embedded, that is, in an intimate personal context within which everyone is continually affecting everyone else. Theoretically, of course, a Carmelite does not retain relationships with her family members. Thérèse never stopped caring intensely for her sisters, though, and felt no need to, because she was relating to them as friends in the spirit, in precisely the terms Teresa of Avila had set forth. (Indeed, once she became a Carmelite, she stonewalled every attempt her sisters made to draw her back into a “special” familial configuration.)
–Carol Lee Flinders, Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics
