on the threshold of the fifth centenary of her birth, Fr Vincent O’Hara OCD says we can learn much from the saint’s remarkable spirituality
The coming year will be an opportunity to dip into St Teresa of Avila’s remarkable teaching on spirituality, and especially her teaching on prayer – so sublime and practical that it led to her being declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970.
Teresa was a woman of exceptional human qualities – warm, intelligent, witty, charming, adventurous, articulate and humorous too. We are familiar with her celebrated saying: “God deliver us from sour-faced saints!” The homeliness of her rapport with the Lord is reflected in her assertion that “He walks among the pots and pans”.
Towards the end of her time in boarding school, she began to see that being a nun was the most wholesome way for her to go, though convent life was far from attractive. She puts it rather starkly: “I began to understand the truth I knew in childhood (the nothingness of all things, the vanity of the world, and how it would soon come to an end) and to fear that if I were to die I would go to hell. And although my will did not completely incline to being a nun, I saw that the religious life was the best and safest state, and so little by little I decided to force myself to accept it” (The Book of her Life 3, 5).
She was so determined to follow this route, she didn’t tell her father at all, but escaped one night to the nearby Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Avila. And while no doubt there was prayer and commitment in this convent, it was at the same time a far cry from the simplicity and silence and fervour envisaged by the primitive Carmelite Rule, to which Teresa was to make her profession a short time later.
Incarnation
There were up to 200 nuns in the Incarnation, from different sections of society, and they were in the convent from mixed motivation.
While Teresa had scope for prayer in her new surroundings, she also had plenty of scope for the flowering of her personality and her natural qualities. The convent was a hub of social life, and the parlours were the busiest part of the convent, and the lively and vivacious Teresa was very much in demand.
Some of this was wholesome enough, for many people came to her with problems and she was obviously good at helping them. But in her heart of hearts she knew that wasn’t what she was there for.
She began to skimp on her prayer, which was at the heart of the Carmelite Rule, and she found herself torn in two different directions. She describes this in vivid detail in her autobiography: “I began to go from pastime to pastime, from vanity to vanity, so that I was then ashamed to return to the search for God by means of a friendship as special as is that found in the intimate exchange of prayer” (Life 7, 1).
For Teresa, prayer was about commitment to Jesus as a friend and it could not be separated from the rest of one’s life. So when her life and lifestyle did not reflect that commitment, she struggled mightily in prayer.
At times her autobiography reads like St Augustine’s Confessions: “I voyaged on this tempestuous sea for almost 20 years with these fallings and risings” (Life 8, 2).
Finally, after years of dithering, she got the grace and the backbone to do something about it. It was triggered by conversations with some young, likeminded nuns who had also joined the convent of the Incarnation. They decided to branch out on their own and start a new convent.
The new little community that Teresa set up in Spartan conditions in St Joseph’s, Avila, was characterised by simplicity and fierce commitment to the task in hand, living the purity of the original Carmelite Rule, distilling the heart of the hermit life as it was originally lived on Mount Carmel but adding the vital dimension of strong community life, resembling the early Christian community and the ‘little flock’ of Christ.
Prayer and community life were the twin pillars of this new venture, the two going hand in hand.
Teresa enjoyed five years of peace and serenity in her new convent, and she would have been content to stay there. But God had other plans.
The General of the order visited St Joseph’s and liked what he saw, and he asked her to start similar convents elsewhere.
Not only that, but he wanted her to inject a spirit of renewal into the Carmelite friars as well, and she was helped in this by her soul-friend, St John of the Cross.
So the last 15 years of her life were spent travelling the length and breadth of Spain, in bad health, in hazardous and difficult conditions, until by the end of her life there were 17 new convents, as well as several new monasteries for the friars.
She undertook all this with total trust in Providence, often starting out with nothing. But she would always say that all the trials were worthwhile, once the Blessed Sacrament was installed in the new convent, and the conditions were in place for the daily and assiduous practice of prayer.
From then on, Teresa’s life’s work centred around prayer, and encouraging people to pray.
Prayer is what she talks about most of all, in all of and the next.
Among the many benefits that a life of prayer brings is the serenity and peace articulated so memorably in what is called St Teresa’s Bookmark:
Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things pass away.
God alone remains.
Patience wins all things.
The one who has God needs nothing else.
God alone suffices.