Teresa of Avila was a woman who possessed plenty of what we would today call “grit”. She and others like her needed a lot of grit to navigate their way spiritually though the tumultuous years of the 16th century Europe. The Protestant Reformation had ushered in a new age of religious freedom with an emphasis on Biblical, personal faith – an idea embraced by many. People like Teresa agreed with some of the Reformers’ critique of the Roman Catholic Church. But, she remained within the church as a Carmelite nun to work for internal renewal.
Teresa’s major work began when she was over 40 years old. One day while deep in prayer, she had the first of many heavenly visions, in which an angel pierced her heart with a flame-tipped spear, leaving her pierced with great love for God and a renewed passion to serve Christ. She wrote this prayer:
“Thine am I. I was born for Thee.
What wouldst Thou, Master, make of me?
Tis Thou alone dost live in me.
What wilt Thou I should do for Thee?”
Teresa’s best known work is “The Interior Castle”, and allegory in which the soul moves from the outer courtyard to the innermost sanctuary of the castle’s seven mansions. Along the way, prowling beasts, symbolizing the hindrances to prayer, seek to waylay the pilgrim. Each mansion is a stage along the way to union with Christ, which is beautifully pictured as the emergence of a silkworm from a cocoon to the life of a white butterfly. Beyond the mansion of union with Christ is the dark night of the soul, and finally that of spiritual marriage to Christ.
Through the mystic, Teresa was very practical and uncomplicated in her advice about prayer. She compared the cultivation of prayer to the cultivation of a garden in which Christ himself pulls the weeds and we with his help water the flowers so they will delight our Lord with their fragrance. “Pray as you can”, she advised “for prayer doesn’t consist in thinking a great deal, but loving a great deal.” She believed God could lead the simplest Christian using only the words of the Lord’s Prayer into the heights of contemplation. For her, the bottom line was that we must “never, for any reason whatever, neglect to pray.”
By the time of her death, Teresa had founded 20 new Carmelite convents and had spread mysticism as a practical method of reform throughout Spain. She and her friend St. John were criticized and even imprisoned by the church they loved for their reform efforts. Today they are considered by many Christians of diverse traditions to be the preeminent authorities of the theology of spiritual life.
Teresa’s Prayer:
“Govern by all your wisdom, O Lord, so that my soul may always be serving you according to your will and now as I desire. Do not punish me, I pray by granting what I want and ask, if it offends your love, which would always live in me. Let me die to myself that I may serve you, let me live to you, who in yourself are the true life.”
Psalm 84:1-2
“How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty? My soul yearns, even faints; for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry for the living God.”
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