Mirabai Starr - Saint Teresa of Avila: Devotions, Prayers & Living Wisdom

La Madre Teresa was rushing through the convent on some errand she could scarcely remember. She was distracted. There was a festival coming up, and since she was prioress, she found herself, as usual, responsible for all the administrative details. Oh, that was it: the statue! The Poor Clares had loaned the Sisters of St. Josephs a statue of Christ scourged at the pillar. Teresa needed to find it and get it properly situated in the chapel.

There it waspropped against a wall in the hallway like a common broom. Irritated, Teresa bent to pick it up.

And then, as she was leaning down toward the image of her Lord, he was suddenly leaning upward toward her.

She stepped back, struck by the animation in his expression. His face was simultaneously wrenched by the anguish of injustice and radiant with compassion for all living beings. The sweet suffering mouth! The rivulets of blood! The love-longing in his eyes!

Before she realized what had struck her, Teresa was prostrate on the floor, gasping for breath. Oh, my Beloved, she moaned. I am so sorry I have neglected you all these years. Look at all you have endured for love of me, and I have never really loved you back.

She began to cry. I do love you, my Lord! I will never stop loving you. Please give me the strength and courage to devote myself entirely to you. The tears came in a mighty food. She wept and gasped for air, and wept again. She, who, for almost twenty years, had watched the other nuns with a mixture of envy and contempt as they wept their way through their prayers while she was incapable of squeezing out a single holy tear, now could not stop crying.

I will not move from this spot until you give me what I want, Lord! she demanded. The first of many demands. The first of many direct encounters with her difficult, devoted, long-suffering, good-humored Beloved.

When at last she rose from her immovable spot, her own face was radiant with satisfaction. The hollow vessel her tears had carved in her heart was overflowing with love. More abundant love than she could have asked for, more enlivening and intoxicating and unshakable love.

As the floodgates few open, the visions, too, began pouring through. And the divine voices. And the unrelenting, inconvenient, all-too-public raptures and ecstasies. These mystical states did not go unnoticed by the Spanish Inquisition, and, although Teresa was repeatedly denounced, they never managed to prove her a heretic. In fact, almost every man who investigated the unconventional nun ended up falling at her feet.

Saint Teresa of Avila was born Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada in 1515, during the height of the Inquisition in Spain. She was the granddaughter of a converso, a Jew forced to convert to Christianity on pain of death. These thinly disguised Jewish roots, combined with the fact that she was a woman, made Teresa an unlikely candidate for a saint, let alone a reformer of an entire branch of the Catholic Church.