Teresa of Ávila, OCD (Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda Dávila y Ahumada; also called Saint Teresa of Jesus, (feast day October 15) was a Spanish nun, one of the great mystics and religious women of the Roman Catholic Church, and an author of spiritual classics. She was the originator of the Carmelite Reform, which restored and emphasized the austerity and contemplative character of Carmelite life.
St. Teresa was canonized in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, abd was elevated to doctor of the church in 1970 by Pope Paul VI, the first of four woman to be so honored.
Teresa lived in an age not unlike 2024, an age of exploration as well as political, social and religious upheaval. The 16th century, like in 2024, was a time of turmoil and reform. Her life began with the culmination of the Protestant Reformation, and ended shortly after the Council of Trent.
Teresa was born in Avila, Castile, Spain, on March 28, 1515 to wealthy parents one of ten brothers and sisters.
From her youth, Teresa showed great zeal and piety, as well as courage and stubbornness. When she was seven years old, Teresa ran away with her brother to the land occupied by the Moors in hopes of attaining the crown of martyrdom. However, they only made it a few miles down the road.
When Teresa was 15 her mother died. Seeing that she needed better guidance, and especially disapproving of the too close relationship between her and her cousin, her father placed Teresa in the care of the Augustinians at Santa Maria de Gracia.
Teresa decided she would enter a convent, but her father would not allow it. As a result of the stress and despair Teresa felt, she became extremely ill. She returned home to become well, and one night she ran away and entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation in 1535.
She was held back by her attachments to worldly things, as well as her attachments to others. Eventually, with much struggle she overcame her attachments and her pride, and around the age of forty she experienced a conversion and began to conform her life to God. Her faithfulness to living the Gospel deepened her spiritual life. She began to experience extraordinary favors from God.
Teresa realized that the life she lived at the convent of the Incarnation was not the way the Carmelite Fathers had originally intended the Carmelite life to be. She vowed that she herself would follow the rule perfectly and "without mitigation." Her sisters at the Incarnation caused her much pain because they did not approve of her aspirations. However, she soon won a few other sisters over to her side, and despite opposition from her sisters and from the townsfolk, she established the convent of St. Joseph on August 24, 1562. She endured much, including a lawsuit, but eventually the resistance subsided, and Teresa enjoyed several years of peace at her convent of St. Joseph. It was during this time that she wrote her beloved Way of Perfection
Her own conversion was no overnight affair; it was an arduous lifelong struggle, involving ongoing purification and suffering. She was misunderstood, misjudged, opposed in her efforts at reform. Yet she struggled on, courageous and faithful; she struggled with her own mediocrity, her illness, her opposition. And in the midst of all this she clung to God in life and in prayer. Her writings on prayer and contemplation are drawn from her experience: powerful, practical and graceful. A woman of prayer; a woman for God.
Her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, and her books The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection are prominent works on Christian mysticism and Christian meditation practice. In her autobiography, written as a defense of her ecstatic mystical experiences, she discerns four stages in the ascent of the soul to God: mental prayer and meditation; the prayer of quiet; absorption-in-God; ecstatic consciousness. The Interior Castle, written as a spiritual guide for her Carmelite sisters, uses the illustration of seven mansions within the castle of the soul to describe the different states one's soul can be in during life.
Prayer of Recollection by St. Teresa
“Give me the grace to recollect myself in the little heaven of my soul where You have established Your dwelling. There You let me find You, there I feel that You are closer to me than anywhere else, and there You prepare my soul quickly to enter into intimacy with You … Help me O Lord, to withdraw my senses from exterior things, make them docile to the commands of my will, so that when I want to converse with You, they will retire at once, like bees shutting themselves up in the hive in order to make honey"
No comments:
Post a Comment