The Great Saint of Avila
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
When the church raises a servant of God to the honor of her altars, she wishes us to understand that the sanctity she thus honors is meant not only to win beatitude for the saint, but also to offer light and guidance to others.
The life of Jesus is a force. The life of his saints is an inspiration. The life of each hero and heroine of sanctity is a manifestation of a particular aspect of the inexhaustible human and divine perfection of Jesus.
Such a life should be studied not out of idle curiosity or for its historical interest, but in a desire to gain a deeper understanding of God made man.
Objects and drawings are used to convey abstract truth to the minds of children.
The ideals and actions revealed in a well-written saint’s life bear to the ideals and actions of the savior, as portrayed in the gospels, somewhat of the same relation as the object lesson bears to the thought the teacher wishes to bring to birth in the minds of young pupils.
There is a difference, of course. The life of the saint is not a mere symbol of the life of Christ. It is a living sign which is vital with the vitality derived from that which it signifies.
It may be said with truth that the life of every saint is a message from God to us, and the message suited to the particular needs of the age in which we live.
It is a great loss if the import of this message is missed. But it is at once particular and universal.
In answering the requirements of any given time, it loses none of its appeal to souls of all times.
Unlike the utterances of human wisdom, which lose somewhat in their force and applicability with the passage of years and the changes in the conditions of things, the spiritual lessons taught us by God through the lives of the saints never lose their actuality.
Any work of great art is seen to express the spirit of the period which gave it birth. Yet it endures for all ages, and never ceases to strike secret chords of sympathy in the depth of men’s souls.
The life of a saint is a work of divine art. Like all that comes from the hand of God, the sanctifier, it transcends the conditions of time and space, and is new with the newness of eternity and ever fresh with the freshness of immortality.
So it is with the great saint of Avila.
A true child of her epoch, strongly marked by the characteristics of her race and her epoch, she speaks in accents as familiar to us as if she were of yesterday.
As we turn over the pages of her writings, we find nothing outmoded in thought or even, what is stranger still, in expression. She lays bare the secret aspirations of every soul that aspires to spirituality, and gently but inexorably forces on the consciousness the spiritual possibilities such souls catch occasional glimpses of in themselves.
As year by year the liturgical cycle brings around the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila, the church stresses for the faithful the great lesson of her life.
It is a lesson that is old but ever new. The worthy celebration of her feast demands that we should bring a profound faith to the consideration of the great saint’s life and utilize for the practical direction of our conduct such lessons as may be drawn from it.
It would be a mistake to think that because of the mystical heights which she reached in her spiritual ascension, she is a saint only for the select few.
She was forty years of age before she fully surrendered to divine grace. And for twenty years of that time, she battled with the difficulties that beset the path of all those who give themselves earnestly to the practice of mental prayer.
The vicissitudes of those years, with their alternations of fervor and tepidity, find a parallel in the experiences of ordinary souls.
Her final triumph is an encouragement for the lowly as for the great, for the poorly endowed as for the gifted.
This saint seems to have been chosen by God to disclose to men the wonders that are wrought in the human soul when it yields to the action of grace, to inspire them with an ardent desire for the union with God which renders such wonders possible, and to call them to the practice of mental prayer, which is the normal road to such union.
It is not in vain that God used her marvelous talents of description and analysis to give such expression as is humanly possible to the higher mystical states.
It is true that when she speaks of these, a special experience is needed for their proper comprehension. Nevertheless, these passages of her writings are not meant exclusively for the eyes of those who are called to make the ascent of Mount Carmel.
For through them, even the ordinary reader may glimpse something of the glorious destiny that awaits him or herself when the seed of sanctifying grace in his or her soul finally blossoms into the glory of the beatific vision.
The ecstatic happiness that filled the soul of St. Teresa when wrapped in God was but a resultant of the development of the possibilities latent in divine grace.
For her readers, these experiences open vistas on the bliss which “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man” (1 Cor. 2:9).
St. Teresa’s ecstasies give one a more satisfying notion of the joys of heaven than do the learning of theologians and the eloquence of preachers.
God, who is the undisputed and irresistible master of created minds and hearts, might if he so willed produce by his own direct action all that he desires to effect in souls.
But it appears to be a law of his providence to take instruments from among men to carry out his divine purposes.
But even in doing this, he unfailingly manifests his mastery over all things, by making it abundantly clear that there is no proportion between the native capacity of the instruments he chooses and the great effects he secures through them.
St. Paul declares this to be a principle of the divine action. He says, “The foolish things of the world has God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world has God chosen, that he may confound the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27).
Yet while thus safeguarding the attribution to himself of the principal role in all enterprises for the salvation and sanctification of men, God is not unmindful of the order and harmony that are characteristic of his inward being and his outward actions.
In all, he has a studied attention to the fitness of things. In the chosen of God, there are in all cases found certain qualities which adapt them admirably to the undertakings which they are to be instrumental in bringing to a successful issue.
This is seen in the organizing talent of a St. Ignatius, the romantic temperament of a St. Francis of Assisi, and in the quick and flexible intelligence of a St. Catherine of Siena.
Saint Teresa’s natural endowment lay in a clear and penetrating mind, a warm heart, and a will in which force and tenderness were admirably blended.
Many an eminent and learned person that had occasion to discuss with her matters charged with spiritual or temporal import left her presence filled with admiration for the masculine quality of her intellect.
It was true that in her power of grasping principles, in going straight to the very heart of a question, in seizing the point at issue in a problem, in her independence of the concrete, and in her power to rise superior to personal considerations, there was much of what belongs to a man’s mental processes in the working of her mind.
Yet with all this, she was in no sense a masculine type. She was utterly womanly and had all the greatness, distinction, and grace that are signified by that term.
She had all a woman’s quick intuition, and a good deal of woman’s incapacity for discernment of character. The logical processes of discursive reasoning were as distasteful to her as they are to the average member of her sex.
She had a woman’s quick sensibility and responsiveness to all that is attractively noble. She had, too, a woman’s unselfish impetuosity in giving herself regardless of cost in terms of pain and hardship to whatever captured her.
Intellectual images came more easily to her than imaginative ones. She confesses that her efforts in prayer to form concrete images of spiritual realities were as a rule very ineffectual.
Her will, without struggle, embraced with ardor the good presented to her by the intelligence. Unhesitatingly, she flung herself into the prosecution of the project that seemed right to her to compass.
Her life combined the highest contemplation with the most active labors in the service of His Majesty, as she affectionately styled the Lord Jesus.
The natural elevation and chivalry of her spirit disposed her to cleave with intense loyalty to Jesus once she had experienced his generosity in her regard.
The quick decision of her will and the keen discernment of her intelligence impelled her towards the life of arduous labor for the salvation of souls as the most fitting way of giving expression to the ardent loyalty that burnt within her.
During the last twenty years of her life, from 1562 to 1582, at the time that her natural and supernatural qualities had attained their highest development, all Saint Teresa’s energies were consecrated to her great commission, the reform of the order of Mount Carmel.
As soon as she had established on a firm basis the convents of the strict observance, she set herself with indomitable courage to the formation of monasteries for men who desired to forgo the amenities of the mitigated rule and take up a life of primitive austerity.
The first house of the strict observance for men was opened at Duruelo in the year 1568. From that date until her death, the sufferings, trials, opposition, and contradictions of all kinds that she was called to undergo for the cause of the reform forged her soul to an eminent degree of perfection.
Seeing that the undertaking of this reform was laid upon her by the express orders of her divine master, seeing that he called upon all the quick resources of her sanctity to bring it to a happy termination, and seeing that the most fruitful years of her life and her last days upon earth were wholly devoted to it, one might be tempted to think that this was the great purpose of her life, determined from all eternity.
It might seem therefore that the message of her life that was meant by God to convey to us is that, arming ourselves with confidence in him, we should never allow discouragement to paralyze our efforts when confronted by the difficulties that invariably confront those who undertake some great work for the divine glory and the salvation of souls.
There is no doubt that her life is a strong, a stirring trumpet call to contemplative souls in the middle of the world, to be actively apostolic by prayer and penance.
One cannot read the life history of the great saint without being deeply impressed by the example she has set of undaunted heroism and supernatural daring, and without being moved to admiration of a career devoted to the active service of Jesus Christ.
Yet, in spite of all this, neither the founding of her convents nor the reform of the friars was the ultimate goal of her earthly labors.
The reform looked to something beyond, which was Teresa’s great preoccupation. The reform is not the end of her strivings. And this would be incredible for us had we not the assurance of her own words for it.
What was the great purpose that she ever had in mind in all that she did and attempted?
It was to recall to men the basic truth of Christianity. This is that the soul of every Christian is called to engage in the closest ties of intimacy with God through Jesus Christ.
Saint Teresa’s great contribution to Christian culture was to reveal the immense possibilities of growth in the divine which may be found in the gift of sanctifying grace.
Describing its marvelous effects in her soul, she shows what it can develop into when its action is not impeded.
She has nothing so much at heart as to persuade men that all, without exception, are by grace called to taste the intoxicating bliss that is experienced by the soul in intimate intercourse with its creator.
Having herself found after painful tentatives the way to this intimacy, her ambition is to share her knowledge with all others.
She makes herself the apostle of mental prayer. Prayer, she explains, releases all the latent possibilities of sanctifying grace.
Her writings are a passionate appeal to men to rise from the natural to the supernatural, which has become theirs by virtue of their divine adoption.
She reformed Mount Carmel in order that there might be a society, the life of whose members should be a constant evidence to the world that on this earth there can be a real foretaste of the life experience of heaven.
The Carmelites, according to her design, were to arouse in men a longing for the supernatural experience that promised such great happiness, and then to initiate those in whom such longings should be aroused into the ways of the interior life.
Saint Teresa is the heaven-sent advocate of the interior life.
Realizing that it is not the function of women to teach, she called to her aid friars who, being men of prayer themselves and versed in mystical theology, should be capable guides for consecrated souls in the cloister and for souls in the world seeking union with God.
St. Teresa’s voice was raised at a critical moment in history. The Protestant revolt had taken place, and few men, scarcely any men, realized the far-reaching consequences with which that revolt was pregnant.
Even the great theologians were too close to it to discern in it anything other than matter for theological dispute.
St. Teresa’s intuitions penetrated deeper than the profound reasonings of the scholars.
Did she in some measure divine that it was the very notion of the supernatural itself that was at stake?
Did she discern that the perversion of the true notion of the supernatural by the heretics contained in germ the religious aberration that would ultimately substitute something human in the place of God as object of man’s worship and man’s loyalty?
An instinctive sense of what was really at stake moved her to devote her powers as a writer and a saint to a searching analysis of the supernatural.
She calls on her own experience as well as on the teachings of theology to prove that it is no external and merely legal imputation of justice, but an inner spiritual force transforming the soul to its very depths and its faculties, and fertile in vital phenomena that reflect the inner life of God himself.
And God on his side seconded his faithful and zealous servant. He guided her pen, stimulated her memory, and by inward illuminations helped her to apt expression and enlightening illustration of her thought.
The inner life of Teresa was a victorious refutation of the naturalism that breathes through and in the new religion.
God set her, in the sublimity of her ecstasies, in the supreme grandeur of her perfected soul, over against the miserable human culture to which the rebels to his authority summoned their misguided dupes.
The appeal of St. Teresa’s life had great actuality in the times in which she lived.
The appeal of that life is even more actual today, when we are living in the almost complete eclipse of the supernatural that was the inevitable outcome of the so-called reform.
The darkness of the eclipse lies over the world that has wandered from the orbit of the true faith. Its painful shadow has in some measure fallen even on souls that belong to the true fold.
In too many Catholics, there is but an extremely vague notion of the supernatural, and what is worse, a strong reluctance to dissipate that vagueness and give greater precision to their knowledge of God’s dealings with the human soul.
They are content to make their religion consist in an arid and grudging, and sometimes sullen, effort to shape their conduct to the moral law.
They have no ambition to be enlightened regarding the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit in the interior of the devout soul.
If there be excepted those who consecrate themselves to God in religion, how few there are who aspire to pass beyond the practice of vocal prayer and to venture on the ways of mental prayer.
Jesus has said, “If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). They hear these words, and they give no heed to the invitation implied in them.
They prefer that their relations with the savior should remain formal and respectfully distant.
The close intimacy springing from the loving commerce which St. Teresa taught is something which stirs a vague uneasiness in them rather than makes a strong appeal to them.
By a fear, the causes of which escape their consciousness, they dread enlightenment.
They do not want to know too much about their religion. A secret instinct warns them that to know much is to commit oneself to much, and that close proximity to God has to be paid for by sacrifice.
St. Teresa is untiring in her efforts to dispel these cowardly fears.
She acknowledges that the cultivation of mental prayer in the interior life involves suffering and self-sacrifice. But she is careful to point out, using her own experience as proof, that the reward of perseverance more than repays the effort in this life.
The glory, a favorite word of hers, to which the interior soul is occasionally admitted, reduces to insignificance the pains by which it is purchased. She assures her readers that the happiness which she herself enjoyed, and which she depicted in such appealing language, was within the reach of all who should give themselves to mastering the art of prayer.
The strength of her conviction in this matter was what impelled her to the laborious composition of those great works which have immortalized her name.
She wrote under incredible difficulties, amidst continuous interruptions, and harassed with the unceasing cares caused by her foundations.
It is difficult to read her autobiography and the treatises on prayer she composed especially for her nuns without being moved to take the path to which she pointed.
It has been truly said that it is in terms of the heart that a man is great.
This means the grandeur of soul is marked by the nobility of the objects to which the affections of the soul are given.
But warmth of heart and power of affection do not ennoble of themselves alone. They can do the very opposite.
There is need of a strong and cultivated intelligence if the noble and first rate are to be sharply distinguished from the commonplace and the second rate.
Nobility of affection is dependent on loftiness of view.
The will has to wait on the intelligence. If one is to live highly, one must see truly and grandly.
The great saint of Avila was endowed by nature with a very fine and clear natural intelligence.
The presence of this gift revealed itself from her earliest years.
Born in easy circumstances, she was brought up in the midst of a refinement and culture that made life fair and attractive.
Nonetheless, her youthful mind was able to discriminate the important from the unimportant, the real from the apparent, the lasting from the ephemeral.
She was but seven years old when, weighing the passing show against the reality that endures forever, she decided to forgo all the promise of earth and seek the shortest route to heaven.
She set out for the country of the Moors, there to find martyrdom.
Her childish dream was not realized, at least in the way pursued in her youthful adventure.
But in spite of the transient weaknesses and the relative infidelities of her life, she never wavered in her choice of the eternal against the claims of the temporal, of God against the appeal of the world.
She was and always remained eminently practical, whether dealing with things of little or great import.
She was very business-like in the transaction of such earthly business as her work entailed.
She was equally business-like in the affairs of the spiritual world.
God was her value.
She was prepared to sell all, to sacrifice all, to renounce all, in order to get God.
She allowed no obstacle to stand in the way of her attaining that object.
She would sell her all to get him, recognizing clearly that in this she was bargaining excellently.
During the eighteen years of her early womanhood, she persisted in the pursuit of God in the midst of discouragements which would have blunted the most finely tempered courage.
And she won.
The record of those years as unfolded in her autobiography cannot be read without profound emotion. It completely silences all the arguments prompted by faint-heartedness to prove that the practice of the interior life is the privilege of the few and the specially gifted.
For the difficulties which she confronted and overcame are the very same as those experienced by the most ordinary souls when they set out to cultivate mental prayer.
As a child, St. Teresa wrongly believed that the road to God was short and straight. She then thought, as many a grown-up thinks, that God can be reached and won by an act or gesture of a noble kind and of a religious import.
She, like so many others, paid little heed to the words of Christ telling the apostles that God is gained not by something we do, but by something we become, not by external acts, but by an inner change.
This lesson she was to learn later, when as a girl of seventeen she read for an invalid uncle pages from the writings of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory. As she read, she grasped that God was not outside her, but within her, and was found not by going outward, but by turning inwards.
She understood that to seek him out in the depths of her soul and to find him there in its inmost mansion, there was need of a martyrdom of a kind far different from that which she had set out to seek as a child in the land of the Moors.
The path to God was not the route that led to distant lands and death at the hands of pagans, but the path of recollection, prayer, solitude, and self-sacrifice.
To embrace her God, it was not her body that should perish, but it was the self in her that should die.
For her to see clearly was to act resolutely.
Straight away, she girded herself to the inner martyrdom of profound change.
A life of intense physical suffering followed for Teresa. Her pains of body, severe as they were, were but a faint sign of the anguish she endured in spirit.
Hearing from a learned Dominican what she had already dimly surmised, that her God dwelt in the center of her soul through virtue of sanctifying grace, she learned to enter into this sanctuary and place herself there at his feet in an attitude of humble and loving self-surrender.
With eyes closed to the outer world of things, she contemplated in spirit the man God in his actions, his mysteries, his words, and above all, in his personal dealings with herself.
She exercised herself in loving intercourse with him, as one who loved her and one whom she loved. This, she said, constituted the essence of prayer.
That was her method. It embraced all other methods in itself. It was a very perfect one and most effective.
In the light which it yielded, she became aware that many of her affections, many of her aspirations, many of her acts of zeal were not without alloy. She discerned the base metal of egoism that mingled with the gold of her goodwill and earnestness.
As this light came to her, she became aware that the Lord on his side was intimating to her pressingly, and sometimes menacingly, that he could not accept from her anything short of the utmost.
For her, a divided heart would spell ultimate ruin. Her place in the abode of the lost was shown to her as a place that would inevitably be hers unless she was heroic in giving and deliberately renounced the mediocre.
She was given to understand that her ardent nature, unless it carried her to what was completely right, would drive her to what was thoroughly wrong.
Teresa had for her soul’s sake to decide upon the complete renouncement of a moderately pious life, giving some scope for the indulgence of her tenderness of affection, unless she were prepared to run the risk of eternal damnation.
For long years, her soul was torn in the vicissitudes of this bitter struggle. Her courage, and on her own avowal it was of no mean sort, was tested to the utmost in the struggle.
There were alternations of victory and comparative, though never complete, defeat. She never ceased to advance, though at times the progress was very slow and there seemed to be a falling back.
Finally, Jesus, not she, triumphed. Teresa’s surrender to the action of grace was one day final and without reserve. She had then attained her fortieth year.
From that time onward, the work for which God had been patiently preparing her went on apace. Her progress in union with God was now rapid and without intermission.
She traversed one after the other of the various degrees of the divine union. In the process of gradual deification of her soul, her spirit had to be dipped into the crucible of suffering, heated to an ever-increasing degree of intensity.
Her external labors and sufferings could not be compared in agony with what took place in this interior purification.
But all the time, the bitter pain was offset by a sweetness of a peculiarly piercing kind.
Every fiber of her being that failed in any small measure to vibrate responsively to the touch of the divine spirit in her was purified and refined until it rang utterly true.
Through this bath of purifying suffering, Teresa’s soul was drawn into an ever fuller participation in the life of God until she reached the stage of mystical marriage, and heaven had, as it were, begun for her on earth.
Not wholly so, for the shadows of faith had yet to linger until the moment when, her dove-like soul winging its flight from her virginal body, they were finally dispelled by the rising glory of the vision face to face.
It was in the year 1572, ten years before her death, that were celebrated the mystical espousals of Teresa with her sovereign Lord.
She had attained a dazzling eminence of sanctity.
From that to the end, her soul was in a period of profound inner calm.
Perfect harmony was established in St. Teresa’s powers. Her natural qualities reached their fullest expansion in the most full and free expression, without in the least interfering with or disturbing her spiritual life.
Her great heart, the ardent affection of which she had taken long years to tame, now could pour itself forth unreservedly on all that were drawn into the vortex of her rich life.
Her womanly tenderness had now full play. Having renounced the selfish indulgence of all natural affection for her divine master, she now recovers a hundredfold what she had sacrificed.
She could love without misgiving. She could love ardently. And this love, so far from conflicting with, was but a form of her great love for Jesus.
She experienced the literal truth of the poet’s words, answering to the unspoken plaint that in her earlier years so often exhaled from her fettered heart. “Ah, is thy love indeed a weed, albeit an amaranthine weed, suffering no flowers except its own to mount?” “All which I took from thee I did but take, not for thy harms, but just that thou might’st seek it in my arms. All which thy child’s mistake fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home. Rise, clasp my hand, and come.”
Such was the life of the great Saint Teresa of Avila, one of the most humanly supernatural of the saints, one in whom the gifts of nature and of grace blended so harmoniously.
Long before her death, in spite of cruel suffering, she had entered into a state of quiet beatitude. From the heights to which she had attained, heights scaled by the aid of mental prayer and the sacraments, she dominated the whole world of nature and its attractions. She could enjoy all the perfection and all the beauty that nature offered, but could not be hurt by it.
Having given up earth for God, she recovered it in enhanced beauty.
For her was the master’s promise fulfilled: “Amen I say to you, there is no man who has left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who shall not receive a hundred times as much, now in this time; houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions: and in the world to come life everlasting” (Mark 10:29–30).
As the fulfillment of this promise, the life of St. Teresa is a lesson on the actuality of the gospel.
What happened to her can happen to us. We cannot plead that she had fewer difficulties to master than we have.
If we wish to taste her happiness and share in some small way in her life experience, we have but to tread the path on which she offers herself to us as a guide.
The degree in which we follow her in the ways of mental prayer is the measure of our possession of God here below, and our enjoyment of him hereafter during all eternity.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW