LENTEN LESSONS FROM SAINT TERESA OF ÁVILA
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Saint Teresa of Ávila, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun, mystic, and Doctor of the Church, writes compellingly about prayer, meditation, and perfect love. French existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir lauded Saint Teresa as a feminist figure for the modern age, stating in The Second Sex, “Saint Teresa is one of the only women to have lived the human condition for herself, in total abandonment.” (1) While I, too, find feminist inspiration in lives of female mystics like Saint Teresa, I am captivated by Saint Teresa’s work for a different reason: her prescriptive advice on living contemplatively and embodying virtue.
Two of Saint Teresa’s most prominent texts, The Way of Perfection and Interior Castle, offer Christian contemplatives maps to deepen their relationships with God. In The Way of Perfection, Saint Teresa describes stages of “mental prayer”: meditation, silence, soul rest, and union with God. In The Interior Castle, Saint Teresa guides the reader through a more complex paradigm: as the name suggests, a castle within oneself divided into seven “dwelling places” or “mansions.” Describing this highly mystical idea, she writes, “You mustn’t think of these dwelling places in such a way that each one would follow in file after the other; but turn your eyes toward the center, which is the room or royal chamber where the King stays…think of how a palmetto has many leaves surrounding and covering the tasty part that can be eaten.” (2)
Through describing her conviction and devotion, Saint Teresa paints of portrait of Christian theology rooted in attention, humility, simplicity, compassion, and love. Although she wrote to fellow cloistered sisters, insights on the fruits of contemplation, which Saint Teresa illuminates, are equally as instructive for people of faith who live, work, and pray on the other side of monastery walls.
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Before I dive in, I feel it is important to note that it was not always my instinct to turn to a female mystic for guidance. My discernment has been winding, an unfurling which has stopped and started. Three years ago, when I shared my decision to go to divinity school with loved ones and colleagues, I received mixed reactions, mostly “What? Do you want to be a priest??”
Their confusion was not unwarranted. I was raised Catholic in a rural-suburban town just outside Cleveland, Ohio. As a biracial woman from a bicultural family (the only family of color in our parish for most of my childhood), I felt more watched than welcomed in church on Sundays. The pain and gift of this positionality – one of constant liminality – granted me a sharper eye with which to view culture and faith. During my adolescence, I spent many rides home from Mass bemoaning the shortcomings of Catholic social teaching. Eventually, I stopped going.
By the time I found myself on a train bound for Yale Divinity School, years later and, more precisely, the week after the 2016 presidential election, I sensed a void within my life. I craved the textured language of truth. I longed for a more wholehearted way of relating to others, of being in and serving the world.
For the following two years, in the cold, vibrant, changing New England landscape of New Haven, I discovered new voices, new dimensions to the Godhead, and, therefore, new layers to my heart. In the arms of mystics like Saint Teresa, I found undeniable rivers of truth: contemplation leading to justice, clarity leading to compassion, principle leading to practice. My faith was cleansed anew.
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Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II says, “There’s nothing worse than being loud and wrong.” In the United States, too often, the loudest voices on the subject of Christianity make a false monolith of Christian people. Christianity, bathed in conservatism, takes on the character and habits of dominance and oppression: power over women’s bodies, the earth, people of color, indigenous communities, immigrants, refugees, and people living in poverty.
In Miranda Tasker and Marcus Nield’s short film, “Life in Hidden Light,” about the Discalced Carmelites of Wolverhampton, UK – a community which had been closed to visitors for over 90 years – a Carmelite sister exclaims, “The world today? It’s a mess! Thank God for the good people who are trying to make it better. It’s a Godless world on the whole. And God loves us all so much, he wants us to love him back…. To do work with him in mind.”
Saint Teresa and her Carmelite daughters offer a well-worn template for being quiet and contemplative, for loving God and our neighbors well, for living in alignment with the treasured and foundational virtues of our faith.
Humility
Saint Teresa places a significant emphasis on humility as the precursor to a relationship with God. Without humility in prayer, connection to God is impossible. This begins with self-knowledge. Saint Teresa writes, “Knowing ourselves is something so important that I wouldn’t want any relaxation in this regard, however high you may have climbed into the heavens. While we are on this earth nothing is more important to us than humility… We should set our eyes on Christ, our Good, and on His saints. There we should learn true humility.” (3)
In the Interior Castle, Saint Teresa plainly states that progressing through the dwelling places to draw closer to God is something not that we can achieve, but rather, something which God allows to occur.
In “Life in Hidden Light,” a sister shares, “Carmelites are inclined to be drawn into the stillness. And the presence, the felt presence, as it were, in prayer. You come to realize very soon that prayer is not something you do. It is something that God does that you’re open to. The more you try to be open to God, that is surrendered to his will, and receiving him, his life flows into us in prayer.” Humility makes God’s work within our lives and within us possible – the space where pride once was, God fills.
2. Simplicity
Saint Teresa emphasizes the importance of detaching oneself from a wide range of things, everything from sins and vices to earthly possessions. She lauds the Carmelite way of life, particularly its “holy poverty” - austerity which leads to freedom and peace.
In “Life in Hidden Light,” a sister states, “[This way of life] automatically gives access to truth. Because very little in the world today that puts over truth. I say I listen to the news, but what I hear in my eye and what I interpret in my mind, you are sifting it in your mind to see how much of it is true. There’s nothing true. It’s only people who are people of integrity can appreciate truth. Simplicity gives you truth.
3. Love
While smiling, a sister shares the joy and fulfillment she derives from her vocation. “It’s not suffering for the sake of suffering. It’s suffering, perhaps that’s a difficult word for some people, but it can be like that. It’s for love. Because we love Jesus, that we want to give ourselves to him. We love what he loves. We love people, the church, the world, and so we give ourselves for them.”
While contemplative prayer leads to union with God, it opens into love, the foundational call of Christian life. Saint Teresa states, “Let us understand, my daughters, that true perfection consists in love of God and love of neighbor; the more perfectly we keep these two commandments the more perfect we will be.” (4) Further, she writes, “Spiritual love seems to be that love which the good lover Jesus had for us…the kind of love I would desire us to have.” (5) Love is the balm which heals suffering by our shared love with God and the acts of love which hold us all together. We are the living sacrament of love in the world.
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The crosses we bear are different than those borne by sheltered contemplatives, Saint Teresa points this out, but contemplative virtues – the lessons which Saint Teresa teaches and practices – can ground and strengthen the way our faith is lived out in the economy, in the political sphere, in our communities and neighborhoods and workspaces and families. The virtues at the heart of the Christian contemplative tradition are healing virtues, if we are paying enough attention to understand.
As we move through the season of Lent – the time in the liturgical year dedicated to contemplation, introspection, fasting, holy thirst – may you find your clarity in the spiritual wilderness. For those of us who return from prayer and contemplation to the bright, loud, messy work, may we carry the brightness of God with us. May we imbue our lives with contemplative virtues, knitting prayer into actions of love.
Let nothing disturb you,
let nothing frighten you,
all things will pass away.
God never changes;
patience obtains all things,
whoever has God lacks nothing.
God alone suffices. Amen.
- Saint Teresa of Ávila
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (First Vintage Books, 2011), 750.
Saint Teresa Ávila, The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Ávila: Volume Two (ICS Publications, 2017), 291.
Ibid, 291-292.
Ibid, 295.
Ibid, 67.
