Posted by St. Teresa of Avila/Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, as well as commemorating the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost. St. Teresa was born at Avila in Castile in 1515. She was a devout child whose greatest pleasure was reading the lives of the saints. On one occasion as a child she tried to go into the country of the Moors to seek martyrdom. After that she and her brother sought to build a hermitage in their garden. After her mother died when she was fifteen she spent a few years with a convent of Augustinian nuns. She desired herself to become a nun, but her father was unwilling to give his consent. At the age of twenty she went secretly to a convent of Carmelite nuns near Avila. Her father ceased to oppose her desire to enter the religious life and she made her profession a year later. She suffered from illness but gradually recovered her health. The discipline of the convent was quite lax, but she eventually resolved to become stricter in her observance. She began to experience the mystical visions for which she has ever since been noted for. She worried at first that she might be suffering from delusions, but was eventually persuaded that her visions were from God. One day while she was reciting the Veni Creator Spiritus she heard words spoken within her soul “I will not have you hold conversation with men, but with angels”. She had frequent similar ecstatic experiences after this which filled her with a profound sense of love, joy and peace. She also had experiences of spiritual espousals and the piercing of her heart with divine love. She made a vow to always seek to do that which is most perfect and pleasing to God. Her mystical experiences strengthened her faith and are reflected in her writings such as “The Way of Perfection” and “The Interior Castle”. They also strengthened her desire to reform the Carmelite order, which had become very lax in observance at the time. She was given permission to establish a new monastery in Avila, but the people of the town were hostile to what they saw as a dangerous new innovation. A new convent was eventually established based on strict enclosure, poverty and perpetual abstinence and the nuns wore sandals rather than shoes (hence they were called Discalced Carmelites). In 1567 she went to Medina del Campo and founded a second convent. It was there that she met another Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, who was also desirous for reform. They worked well together. St. Teresa left to St. John of the Cross the care of the foundations for men, while she continued to found convents. The reformed Carmelites encountered bitter opposition. St. John of the Cross was for a time imprisoned in a monastery, where he experienced his famous “Dark Night of the Soul”. St. Teresa was initially told to retire and abstain from further foundations. Eventually it was agreed in 1580 that the reformed Carmelites would be exempt from the jurisdiction of their more relaxed brethren. By this time St. Teresa was broken in health and she died two years later on October 4, 1582 with the famous words to one of her sisters in the convent “At last my daughter, the hour of death has come.” The next day the Gregorian reform of the calendar came into force and ten days were dropped. Consequently her feast was placed on this day, 15th October.
But why did her attempt to reform the Carmelite order encounter such opposition? At the root of the problem lay a tension in the nature of the Carmelite order itself. The Carmelites had originally been founded on Mount Carmel in Palestine as an order of hermits in the time of the crusader kingdom. After the crusades ended in failure and the kingdom collapsed they sought refuge in western Europe. The existing orders such as the Augustinians, Franciscans and Dominicans were very suspicious of the Carmelites since the order had not existed in Europe until this time. In order to gain acceptance from the ecclesiastical authorities the Carmelites remodelled themselves from being an enclosed order of hermits to being more like the existing orders of friars. This meant that over time, as so often happens, the order rather lost the original sense of purpose that it had been founded for. St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross desired to reform the Carmelites so that they would became more like the original Carmelites in Palestine. They believed that the Carmelites had made too many compromises with the world and needed to return to being a more strictly enclosed order. In practice, this was too much to expect from the lax Carmelites of the time, so instead of reforming the whole order they in effect ended up establishing a separate order of Discalced Carmelites. Once they were exempt from the jurisdiction of their laxer brethren their future was now secure. It serves as a reminder that pragmatism as well as principle is necessary in the reform of the religious life. The stricter and more enclosed forms of religious life are not for everyone, even for all members of religious orders, but they are very important to keep the candle of faith alive in the face of the prevailing worldliness, even among those who consider themselves devout and religious.
St. Teresa left for posterity a wealth of spiritual writings which are marked for their realism and psychological insight. We tend to think of psychology as a modern discipline. But in fact it has deep roots in the writings of many saints and mystics. Long before Freud, St. Augustine was aware of the unconscious self and that it is possible to know more than you seem to know. St. Augustine’s Confessions was a favourite work for St. Teresa and probably her most famous writing “The Interior Castle” stood firmly in this tradition. The Interior Castle was the powerful image she used to describe the inner life of the soul. There was a whole world to be discovered within, as well as an external world. But the journey inwards was not a desire to cultivate the type of impassive serenity that is associated with the Buddha, indifferent to the sufferings of the world. It was rather seen as an exercise in re-centering so as to become more aware of the world around and the need to respond to those in need and suffering, the way of withdrawal from worldly standards in order to return with a new vigour to live in love and service to God and neighbour. It was a favourite saying of hers that it was those who walked closest to Christ who experienced the greatest trials. The journey inwards was not an occasion for human pride but only made possible by the grace of God. She put it like this “It is true that, however strong you may think yourselves, you cannot enter all the mansions by your own efforts; the Lord of the Castle himself must admit you to them….. He is a great lover of humility…. Once you have been shown how to enjoy this castle you will find rest in everything, even in the things which most try you, and you will cherish a hope of returning to it which nobody can take from you.” It was above all necessary to be realistic in our expectations. “The devil sometimes puts ambitious desires into our hearts, so that, instead of setting our hand to the work which lies nearest to us, and thus serving Our Lord in ways within our power, we may rest content with desiring the impossible. Apart from praying for people, by which you can do a great deal for them, do not try to help everybody, but limit yourselves to your own companions; your work will then be all the more effective because you have the greater obligation to do it… By your doing things which you really can do, His Majesty will know that you would like to do many more, and thus he will reward you exactly as if you had won many souls for him… The Lord does not so much look at the magnitude of what we do as the love with which we do it. If we accomplish what we can, His Majesty will see to it that we become able to do more each day…. We must offer the Lord whatever interior and exterior sacrifices we are able to give Him, and His Majesty will unite it with what has been offered to the Father upon the Cross, so that it may have the value won for it by our will, even though our actions in themselves may be trivial.”
Let us take heed to these words today. It is easy to despair of our accomplishing anything that is of lasting value when the world is so filled with hatred and violence. But, in the face of whatever trials and adversities may come our way, it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. St. Teresa faced much opposition in her attempt to reform the Carmelite order, but she persevered and her writings of great spiritual and psychological insight still speak to us today. Let us seek to follow her example by praying for all, but focusing our energies on helping those around us in our own time and place. A small seed may yet, by the grace of God, eventually bring forth a rich harvest.