SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
John, Chapter 19,
Verse 26
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said
to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.”
It was Christ’s desire that
we should all be a family; a family united in love. This is why our Lord
submitted to His mother showing that now she was the mother and mediatrix of
all mankind.
I would like to focus on the word desire. I
like to hike and pray. One day I was
hiking in the Fay Canyon area of Sedona, Arizona and I was reflecting on the
seven deadly sins and the opposing virtues of our Lord sermon on the
mount. As I was hiking and musing over
the words that are associated with the deadly sin of lust: such words as long
for, hanker for, hunger for, yearn, crave, and desire. In my mind I repeated desire, desire, desire
and I asked our Lord what do you want me to desire? As I asked that question I looked up at the
canyon and spied a rock formation in the shape of a chalice. Yes Lord, I exclaimed. I shall desire to receive you in the Holy
Mass. Lust is just a corrupted form of love that takes yet our desire should be
to give love and receive with a grateful heart.
Today would be a good day to rest in the Lord and
go to Mass and receive His body and blood.
As we receive realize that He has heard our cry’s and has saved us. Such is the love of our God!
Love believes all things. This goes beyond simply presuming that
the other is not lying or cheating. Such basic trust recognizes God’s light shining
beyond the darkness, like an ember glowing beneath the ash. Love trusts, it
sets free, it does not try to control, possess and dominate everything. This
trust enables a relationship to be free. It means we do not have to control the
other person, to follow their every step lest they escape our grip. This
freedom, which fosters independence, openness to the world around us and to new
experiences, can only enrich and expand relationships. The spouses then share
with one another the joy of all they have received and learned outside the
family circle. At the same time, this freedom makes for sincerity and
transparency, for those who know that they are trusted and appreciated can be
open and hide nothing. Those who know that their spouse is always suspicious,
judgmental and lacking unconditional love, will tend to keep secrets, conceal
their failings and weaknesses, and pretend to be someone other than who they
are. On the other hand, a family marked by loving trust, come what may, helps
its members to be themselves and spontaneously to reject deceit, falsehood, and
lies.
Saint
Teresa of Avila
Teresa, whose name was Teresa de Cepeda y
Ahumada, was born in Avila, Spain, in 1515. In her autobiography she mentions
some details of her childhood: she was born into a large family, her “father
and mother, who were devout and feared God”. She had three sisters and nine
brothers. While she was still a child and not yet nine years old she had the
opportunity to read the lives of several Martyrs which inspired in her such a
longing for martyrdom that she briefly ran away from home in order to die a
Martyr’s death and to go to Heaven (cf. Vida,[Life], 1,
4); “I want to see God”, the little girl told her parents.
A few years later Teresa was to speak of
her childhood reading and to state that she had discovered in it the way of
truth which she sums up in two fundamental principles.
On the one hand was the fact that (1) “all
things of this world will pass away” while on the other God alone is (2) “for
ever, ever, ever”, a topic that recurs in her best-known poem: “Let nothing
disturb you, let nothing frighten you, All things are passing away: God never
changes.
·
Patience
obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices”. She was
about 12 years old when her mother died, and she implored the Virgin Most Holy
to be her mother (cf. Vida, I, 7).
·
When
she was 20 she entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation, also in
Avila. In her religious life she took the name “Teresa of Jesus”. Three years
later she fell seriously ill, so ill that she remained in a coma for four days,
looking as if she were dead (cf. Vida, 5, 9).
·
In
the fight against her own illnesses too the Saint saw the combat against
weaknesses and the resistance to God’s call: “I wished to live”, she wrote,
“but I saw clearly that I was not living, but rather wrestling with the shadow
of death; there was no one to give me life, and I was not able to take it. He
who could have given it to me had good reasons for not coming to my aid, seeing
that he had brought me back to himself so many times, and I as often had left
him” (Vida, 7, 8).
·
In
1543 she lost the closeness of her relatives; her father died and all her
siblings, one after another, emigrated to America. In Lent 1554, when she was
39 years old, Teresa reached the climax of her struggle against her own
weaknesses. The fortuitous discovery of the statue of “a Christ most grievously
wounded”, left a deep mark on her life (cf. Vida, 9).
·
The
Saint, who in that period felt deeply in tune with the St Augustine of the Confessions,
thus describes the decisive day of her mystical experience: “and... a feeling
of the presence of God would come over me unexpectedly, so that I could in no
wise doubt either that he was within me, or that I was wholly absorbed in him”
(Vida, 10, 1).
Teresa of Jesus had no academic education
but always set great store by the teachings of theologians, men of letters and
spiritual teachers. As a writer, she always adhered to what she had lived
personally through or had seen in the experience of others (cf. Prologue
to The Way of Perfection), in other words basing herself on her own
first-hand knowledge.
Among her most important works we should
mention first of all her autobiography, El libro de la vida (the book of
life), which she called Libro de las misericordias del Señor [book of
the Lord’s mercies].
Among the most precious passages is her
commentary on the Our Father, as a model for prayer. St Teresa’s most
famous mystical work is El Castillo interior [The Interior Castle]. She
wrote it in 1577 when she was in her prime. It is a reinterpretation of her own
spiritual journey and, at the same time, a codification of the possible
development of Christian life towards its fullness, holiness, under the action
of the Holy Spirit. Teresa refers to the structure of a castle with seven rooms
as an image of human interiority. She simultaneously introduces the symbol of
the silk worm reborn as a butterfly, in order to express the passage from the
natural to the supernatural. The Saint draws inspiration from Sacred Scripture,
particularly the Song of Songs, for the final symbol of the “Bride and
Bridegroom” which enables her to describe, in the seventh room, the four
crowning aspects of Christian life: the Trinitarian, the Christological, the
anthropological and the ecclesial.
Prayer is life and develops gradually, in
pace with the growth of Christian life: it begins with vocal prayer, passes
through interiorization by means of meditation and recollection, until it
attains the union of love with Christ and with the Holy Trinity. Obviously, in
the development of prayer climbing to the highest steps does not mean abandoning
the previous type of prayer. Rather, it is a gradual deepening of the
relationship with God that envelops the whole of life.
Another subject dear to the Saint is the
centrality of Christ’s humanity. For Teresa, in fact, Christian life is the
personal relationship with Jesus that culminates in union with him through
grace, love and imitation. Hence the importance she attaches to meditation on
the Passion and on the Eucharist as the presence of Christ in the Church for
the life of every believer, and as the heart of the Liturgy. St Teresa lives out
unconditional love for the Church: she shows a lively “sensus Ecclesiae”, in
the face of the episodes of division and conflict in the Church of her time.
A final essential aspect of Teresian
doctrine which I would like to emphasize is perfection, as the aspiration of
the whole of Christian life and as its ultimate goal. The Saint has a very
clear idea of the “fullness” of Christ, relived by the Christian. At the end of
the route through The Interior Castle, in the last “room”, Teresa
describes this fullness, achieved in the indwelling of the Trinity, in union
with Christ through the mystery of his humanity.
Dear brothers and sisters, St Teresa of
Jesus is a true teacher of Christian life for the faithful of every time. In
our society, which all too often lacks spiritual values, St Teresa teaches us
to be unflagging witnesses of God, of his presence and of his action. She
teaches us truly to feel this thirst for God that exists in the depths of our
hearts, this desire to see God, to seek God, to be in conversation with him and
to be his friends. This is the friendship we all need that we must seek anew,
day after day. May the example of this Saint, profoundly contemplative and
effectively active, spur us too every day to dedicate the right time to prayer,
to this openness to God, to this journey, in order to seek God, to see him, to discover
his friendship and so to find true life; indeed many of us should truly say: “I
am not alive, I am not truly alive because I do not live the essence of my
life”. Therefore, time devoted to prayer is not time wasted, it is time in
which the path of life unfolds, the path unfolds to learning from God an ardent
love for him, for his Church, and practical charity for our brothers and
sisters.
"Read
these counsels slowly. Pause to meditate on these thoughts. They are things
that I whisper in your ear-confiding them-as a friend, as a brother, as a
father. And they are being heard by God. I won't tell you anything new. I will
only stir your memory, so that some thought will arise and strike you; and so
you will better your life and set out along ways of prayer and of Love. And in
the end you will be a more worthy soul."
99. If you are not a man of prayer, I
don't believe in the sincerity of your intentions when you say that you work
for Christ.
Daily Devotions
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