Teresa of Avila spoke her heart to God in prayer

Teresa of Avila entered the Carmelite convent in 1536 when she was 21 years old. Shortly after taking her final vows two years later, she suffered a number of illnesses and grieved the death of her father.

Also troubling for her was her inability to concentrate during the hours designated for prayer. She writes, “Over a period of years, I was more occupied in wishing my hour of prayer were over, and in listening whenever the clock struck, than in thinking of things that were good.”

At the age of 40, Teresa was assigned a new spiritual adviser who encouraged her to pursue her preference for contemplative prayer during which she would speak to God in her heart using her own words. A year later, she began to have visions of God and other mystical experiences and started the task of founding new communities. There was such a positive change in her outlook and demeanor that her Carmelite superiors asked her to write a book about her method of mental prayer.

Teresa had completed an autobiography, “Life,” in which she wrote honestly about her years of spiritual apathy, aridity in prayer and her sense of being a failure. Shirley du Boulay wrote in her biography of Teresa, “Had we only known her as the recipient of extraordinary experiences, …we would not be able to identify with her so closely, nor would she have touched so many lives.”

Teresa began her new book by explaining her method of mental prayer. She described how to visualize some aspect of Christ’s life, such as His night of prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, and suggested imagining being able to talk to him about how he must feel. Throughout her writing, she often repeated that this type of prayer may not be everyone’s preference and wrote that it was important for each person to use the method of prayer that enabled him or her to grow closer to God.

In the second half of the book, she explained how to pray the Lord’s Prayer in a contemplative manner. Teresa suggested to begin by meditating on as many attributes of an ideal father that one can discern and to realize that you were the beneficiary of these blessings. Think of the times in your life when you felt the intervention of God’s grace in your life. Remember that Christ taught us to say, “our” father and the importance that word carries. He calls us to unite with Him in union with God the father. You are the child that He loved into being.

She continued in this manner through the completion of the prayer and says that it usually took her about one hour to complete the prayer in this way. Teresa titled the manuscript, “Our Father,” but somewhere along the route to publication, it was given the title, “The Way of Perfection.”

Twelve years later, she had a vision that spurred her to write, “The Interior Castle.” The vision was of a magnificent crystal globe that contained seven mansions with each mansion containing several rooms. The seventh mansion was glowing in the center and is where God dwells. There was a mansion above, one below and four around the midpoint of the seventh mansion so that all six had a touching surface directly with God in the center.

Although Teresa doesn’t assign numbers to the positioning of the six mansions, she stated that there were six stages in the spiritual development of an individual but that there was direct access to God from any stage. She said, “This central mansion is the soul’s destination; it is both already there and, yet, still to be consciously discovered.”

The first three stages are an active purification of self, while the last three require a more passive role in allowing God’s grace to draw you toward him. The progression through the stages is by ever-deepening states of prayer and reflection. Teresa advised, “However sublime your contemplation may be, take care both to begin and to end every period of prayer with self-examination.”

The first mansion is the place for growth in self-knowledge and humility, although she said knowledge of self and knowledge of God is indivisible. The second mansion is the place to bring one’s will into conformity with God’s will. Detachment is the lesson to be learned in the third mansion. It is here that Teresa said individuals may feel superior to others for having made the accomplishments thus far, so that it is important to detach from these feelings of superiority of virtue as well as detachment from worldly things.

The fourth mansion is a place of transition where human effort gives way to God’s grace. The restless seeking and searching for God gives way to allowing God to take the initiative in the soul’s progress.

In the fifth mansion the soul is totally abandoned to God. The sixth mansion is where raptures and visions can occur. Teresa explains that in these last three stages, the soul is in various degrees of union with God and that description becomes virtually impossible.

There is no timetable for progression through the mansions and most of us may spend a lifetime in the first stage. That is why it is important to remember that God is directly available at every stage. Even though Teresa was blessed by her strong union with God, her path was not an easy one. There were many challenges in setting up her reform communities and she was twice summoned to appear before the Council of the Inquisition but no heresy was found in her teaching.

Teresa never considered herself an author and often lamented her lack of formal education. She seldom reread or corrected her writing as she mostly wrote late at night by candlelight after completing her day’s work, which often meant long journeys to her communities. She had no desk or chair in her convent cell and did her writing with pen and paper on the window ledge while kneeling on the hard floor. Yet, her books are read in countries around the world and, in Spain, come second only to Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” in popularity.

XDr. Agnes Martinko is a member of St. Edward Church.