ST TERESA OF AVILA; FEAST DAY 15th OCTOBER
ST TERESA OF AVILA
FEAST DAY 15th OCTOBER
“Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes with which Christ looks out His compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.”
St Teresa of Avila was born in 1515 AD, two years before the protestant reformation. She was declared a Doctor of the Church for her writings and teachings, which instructed on the way to inner peace and union with God.
Her parents’ marriage was not particularly happy – her mother was crushed by an overbearing husband who was very strict with Teresa. As a teenager she cared only about boys, clothes and flirting. When she was 16 her father placed her in a convent, which she enjoyed, as the convent was less strict than her father.
Convents at that time were often refuges for women who had nowhere else to go, not places of true vocations. Nuns frequently wore their veils attractively and wore jewellery. Men sometimes visited the convent. What prayer there was often involved “hysteria, weeping, exaggerated penance, nose bleeds and self-induced visions”! https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=208
Teresa studied and practiced mental prayer which she found extremely difficult – trying to ‘keep Jesus present within me”, saying that her “imagination is so dull that I had no talent for imagining or coming up with great theological thoughts.” She prayed for eighteen years without feeling that she was getting results.
Her biography in Catholic Culture provides as follows:
“Teresa suffered from the same problem that Francis of Assisi did – she was too charming. Everyone like her and she liked to be liked. She found it too easy to slip into a worldly life and ignore God.”
She fell ill with malaria and, upon having a seizure, people were so sure that she was dead that, when she woke four days later, she discovered they had dug a grave for her. She had ongoing problems from the malaria, including paralysis for the subsequent three years. She allowed her illness to deter her from persistence with her prayer life.
Later she was to say, “Prayer is an act of love. Words are not needed. Even if sickness distracts from thoughts, all that is needed is the will to love.”
For years she hardly prayed at all, under ‘the guise of humility.’ She thought, as a wicked sinner, that she did not deserve favours from God. But turning from prayer was like ‘a baby turning away from its mother’s breasts, what can be expected but death?’”
A priest convinced her to return to prayer, but she found it burdensome and was frequently distracted, "more anxious for the hour of prayer to be over than to remain there”. She sympathised with those who struggled with prayer: “All the trials we endure cannot be compared to these interior battles.”
Yet her experience gives us wonderful descriptions of mental prayer:
"For mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us. The important thing is not to think much but to love much and so do that which best stirs you to love. Love is not great delight but desire to please God in everything."
When she was forty-three she founded her own convent devoted to a simple life of poverty and prayer – an ambition that attracted opposition from her fellow nuns, priests and lay people.*
“When plans leaked out about her first convent, St. Joseph's, she was denounced from the pulpit, told by her sisters she should raise money for the convent she was already in, and threatened with the Inquisition. The town started legal proceedings against her. All because she wanted to try a simple life of prayer. In the face of this open war, she went ahead calmly, as if nothing was wrong, trusting in God.*
"May God protect me from gloomy saints," Teresa said, and that's how she ran her convent. To her, spiritual life was an attitude of love, not a rule. Although she proclaimed poverty, she believed in work, not in begging. She believed in obedience to God more than penance. If you do something wrong, don't punish yourself -- change. “*
When someone felt depressed, her advice was that she go to a place where she could see the sky and take a walk. When someone was shocked that she was going to eat well, she answered, "There's a time for partridge and a time for penance." To her brother's wish to meditate on hell, she answered, "Don't."*
When she was bucked off her horse into a river on the way to visit one of her convents, she cried out: “Dear Lord, if this is how You treat your friends, it is no wonder You have so few of them!”
She believed that the most powerful and acceptable prayer was that prayer that leads to action. Good effects were better than pious sensations that only make the person praying feel good.”*
She said: ”Within you dwells your God. Enter within, look at Him, talk to Him, listen to Him and stay with Him in your heart.”*
However, she also had no patience for those who exhibited self-pity, saying:
“I often tell you, sisters, and now I want it to be set down in writing, not to forget that we in this house, and for that matter anyone who would be perfect, must flee a thousand leagues from such phrases as: ‘I had right on my side’; ‘They had no right to do this to me’; ‘The person who treated me like this was not right’. God deliver us from such a false idea of right as that! Do you think it was right for our good Jesus to have to suffer so many insults and that those who heaped on Him were right and that they had any right to do Him those wrongs? I do not know why anyone is in a convent who is willing to bear only the crosses that she has a perfect right to expect:”
St Teresa of Avila, “The Way to Perfection,” Dover (2012, at pp. 103-104.
St Teresa advised a combination of contemplative and oral prayer, saying: “Remember, the Lord invites us all; and, since He is Truth itself, we cannot doubt Him. If His invitation were not a general one, He would not have said: ‘I will give you a drink.’ He might have said: ‘Come, all of you, for after all you will lose nothing by coming; and I will give drink to those whom I think fit for it.’ But, as He said we were all to come, without making this condition, I feel sure that none will fail to receive this living water unless they cannot keep to the path. May the Lord, Who promises it, give us grace, for His Majesty’s own sake, to seek as it must be sought.”
Ibid., at p. 145.
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