What are saints made
of? Are they brought up with eyes
cast downward and mumbling prayers non-stop? You’d be surprised in getting to know St. Teresa of Avila,
Doctor of the Church and Teacher of Prayer who was born to Don Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda and Doña
Beatriz Davila y Ahumada
on March 28, 1515, in Avila, Spain, at a time when women were raised to become
perfect homemakers.
Before she even
turned seven, the little Teresa had desired to see God. She had heard from pious elders that
martyrs go to heaven, and therefore see God, and one way to become a martyr was
to be beheaded by the Moors. What
was she to do but persuade her younger brother Rodrigo to join him in her quest
for martyrdom? So they ran away
from home to go to the land of the Moors to offer their necks. Missing the children, their mother set
up a search party, and as the siblings barely left Avila’s walls, an uncle
found them and brought them back to their anxious parents.
With her plan
thwarted, Teresa settled for a less drastic way to see God: she again convinced
her kid brother, this time to become hermits instead. They gathered stones in the garden and piled them up to
build quaint “hermitages” where they could pray all they wanted. This future Master of Prayer indeed
manifested pluck and uncommon fervor at such a tender age.
Playing hermits was
not to be a lifetime preoccupation, however. Teresa’s mother died when she was
barely 14, and she later wrote of her sorrow in these words: “As soon as I
began to understand how great a loss I had sustained by losing her, I was very
much afflicted; and so I went before an image of our Blessed Lady and besought
her with many tears that she would be gracious enough to be my mother.”
Despite her loss, Teresa
grew into a charming teenager, a magnet for attention. At 15, she was vivacious,
pretty, fond of clothes, jewelry and perfume. She adored romantic novels of knights and chivalry—a passion
she shared secretly with her mother. She liked people who liked her, one of them an older female cousin
who was fond of gossip and vanities.
This cousin’s influence would sooner than later get Teresa involved in a
flirtation which sent the town abuzz with gossip, and caused her father
sleepless nights.
Convinced that the
budding woman would not be safe without some female watchdog tethered to her, her
father sent her off to a
nearby Augustinian convent that ran a kind of finishing school where young women of
her class were being educated—on
social graces, home arts, and things like embroidery, cooking, child care, etc.—and
really being prepared for a devout domestic life.
This period showed some change
in the self-centered teenager, due perhaps to Teresa’s deep and abiding
affection for the nuns of Our Lady of Grace, notably the novice mistress, Sr.
Maria Briceño, who impressed the young Teresa with her piety and goodness. Little by little, in that prayerful
environment, her thoughts turned towards God. She was to write later, however, that while she feared
marriage, she also asked God not to make her a nun.
Then Teresa succumbed
to a mysterious illness, one of the many that would accompany her throughout
her life. Long story short, she
decided on her vocation and sought her father’s permission. Don Alonso said she could become a nun
only over his dead body. But Teresa would not hear of it,
confided to her brother Antonio her desire, and one November night secretly
left home with him to enter the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Avila. She took the habit in 1536.
From an early age she
suffered from debilitating physical illnesses. Although famous for her supernatural mystical experiences
and her writings on mystical prayer and the spiritual, she spent 18 years
struggling to pray.
She would write: “Over a period of several years, I was
more occupied in wishing my hour of prayer were over, and in listening whenever
the clock struck, than in thinking of things that were good. Again and again I
would rather have done any severe penance that might have been given me than
practice recollection as a preliminary to prayer. Whenever I entered the
oratory I used to feel so depressed that I had to summon up all my courage to
make myself pray at all.”
She gave up her habit
of mental prayer, using as a pretext the poor state of her health. “This excuse of bodily weakness,” she
wrote afterwards, “was not a sufficient reason why I should abandon so good a
thing, which required no physical strength, but only love and habit. In the midst of sickness the best prayer
may be offered, and it is a mistake to think it can only be offered in
solitude.”
Despite her
experiences of extraordinary ecstatic states she never saw these as the
objective of the spiritual life. They were by-products, not something to be
sought after. She was greatly
troubled by them at first and sought advice from her spiritual directors. As
she wrote, “the pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so
excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never
wish to lose it.” Some
acknowledged the experiences to be of the Holy Spirit. Others didn’t, and one ordered her to
repel them as if from the devil. She
obeyed. She was subjected to much
ridicule. She was ordered to destroy
one of her books; she obeyed.
Eventually both she
and her superiors accepted the experiences as being of God. As Pope Gregory XV would say of Teresa
on her canonization on March 12, 1662, “She was wont to say that she might be
deceived in discerning visions and revelations, but could not be in obeying
superiors.”
Teresa was an
immensely practical, down to earth person, advising hard physical labor and
household chores as a remedy for spiritual blight and spiritual
pretentiousness. She had no time
for spiritual pretensions. “God
deliver us from anybody who wishes to serve Him and thinks about her own
dignity and fears to be disgraced…. No poison in the world so slays perfection
as these things do….” She was
deeply aware of her own sin and character defects.
It was not until her
fifties that she began to found a reformed order of Carmelite nuns, finding the
Order she was in too lax in its disciplines. Despite much controversy and opposition she went on to found
16 more convents before illness drained her. She met St. John of the Cross, a holy man 27 years her
junior, and formed a close spiritual bond and personal friendship with him that
would lead to their collaboration in reforming the Order and the running of the
new convents.
To found reformed
convents Teresa would often ride on mule carts and travel extremely difficult conditions that she would one
day say, “There is no such thing as bad weather. All weather is good because it
is God’s.” Once during a
thunderstorm when her coach overturned into a ditch she said, “It is no wonder
Lord that you have so few friends when this is how you treat them.”
St. Teresa of Avila,
also known by her religious name “Teresa of Jesus” was proclaimed Doctor of the
Church on September 27, 1970 by Pope Paul VI, a distinction given to those whose writings, being in
accord with the doctrine of the Church, may be used universally as Church teachings.
Never had it occurred to Teresa that she would one day be given the
distinction of being the “first woman Doctor of the Church”, but she once
wrote,
“About the injunction of the Apostle Paul that women should keep silent in
church? Don’t go by one text only…..ask them if they can by any chance tie my
hands.” This reflects a “holy
stubbornness” that spurred the plucky little girl to long ago dare to be
beheaded to become a martyr—but that is Teresa, a woman for all seasons.
Present-day searchers
for God would find endearing both the common sense and the wisdom in Teresa’s
words:
“It is true that we
cannot be free from sin, but at least let our sins not be always the same.”
“For my own part, I
believe that love is the measure of our ability to bear crosses, whether great
or small.”
“Be gentle to all,
and stern with yourself.”
“To reach something
good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquired experience.”
Her most famous books
are The Way of Perfection, Life, and The Interior Castle, most quoted works on
prayer by theologians of any Order or religion. March 28, 2015 will mark the 500th birth
anniversary of this remarkable woman.
Poem IX
Let nothing disturb thee;
Let nothing dismay thee:
All things pass;
God never changes.
Patience attains
All that it strives for.
He who has God
Finds he lacks nothing:
God alone suffices.
Let nothing dismay thee:
All things pass;
God never changes.
Patience attains
All that it strives for.
He who has God
Finds he lacks nothing:
God alone suffices.
Poem IX, in Complete Works St. Teresa of Avila (1963) edited by E. Allison Peers, Vol. 3, p. 288
