Join us in the Novena to St. Teresa of Jesus

It is time for our Novena to St. Teresa of Jesus, our Order’s Foundress and our Carmel’s patroness!  We missed posting the first day of the Novena which was yesterday, October 7th, and are barely going to make it today for day two. Sorry for that!  St. Teresa won’t mind if you pray the Novena a couple days after her feast day on October 15th!  What’s important is that we get to know this great saint and doctor of the Church and experience her as spiritual guide, friend and intercessor.

So, for now, let’s get to know her a little. We start with her background prior to entering religious life. We will share more about her life in future posts during these days of prayer.

Who is St. Teresa of Jesus?

For more than four hundred years, St. Teresa of Avila has been the great spiritual guide, the master-teacher of prayer.  With remarkable honesty and clarity, she has described her experience of discovering the rich presence of God in her life.  Her legacy to the Church, however, is more than a record of her own experiences.  St. Teresa has left us an invitation and a guide to share her experience of the deep presence of God in our lives.

Teresa of Avila is sometimes referred to as “the great Teresa” or “big Teresa”, to distinguish her from another Carmelite, St. Therese of Lisieux, known as the Little Flower.  Teresa of Avila was a Spanish nun of the sixteenth century.  Her full name was Dõna Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda.  In religion, her name was Teresa of Jesus.

Family and Childhood

She was born March 28, 1515, in or near the walled city of Avila.  She was the third of nine children of Beatrice de Ahumada and Alonso de Cepeda.  Her family was of the middle aristocracy, and there is good evidence that her grandfather, Don Juan Sanchez de Toledo, was a Jewish convert who had lapsed and then repented, doing the customary penance required by the Inquisition.  It is likely that her father, too, was Jewish.

The home that Teresa grew up in was deeply religious, and her spiritual awareness was awakened early.  Her father was quite strict and autocratic, and Teresa relates that her mother had to read the romantic novels she enjoyed in secret, as did Teresa.  As a child, she had a natural bent for real prayer, for a personal relationship and deep contact with God.  She remembers playing as a hermit in the back yard, and she often read to her father from spiritual books.

She read the lives of the martyrs, when she was just seven, and decided that martyrdom was “a very cheap price to pay for entry into God’s presence”. So she convinced her brother Rodrigo to go with her to the south of Spain, “off to the land of the Moors, begging our way for the love of God, so that they might behead us there”.  When intercepted by an uncle, who asked what they were about, she replied, “I want to see God and to see him we must die”.  It was Teresa’s mother, however, who died when the child was thirteen.  In desolation, she asked the Virgin Mary to be her mother.

Troublesome Teen?

Teresa the teenager was a beautiful, charming girl.  She says that “God gave me the grace of pleasing”.  After her mother’s death, she says, she became swept up in “girlish vanities”.  With her cousins, she was excited about clothes, hairstyles, perfumes and gems.  She judges this period very harshly in her autobiography, remembering them as the “most worldly, wicked period of my life”.

Her father evidenced his concern for Teresa by enrolling her, when she was sixteen, in the boarding school at the Augustinian convent of Our Lady of Grace.  At first, Teresa was miserable, seeing this sudden relegation to the convent as a punishment for her frivolities.  Soon, however, she found herself very happy.  A new friendship with Sister Maria de Briceňo, a woman of genuine sanctity, led to a rediscovery of spiritual things.  Teresa listened eagerly and came to admire these simple, dedicated nuns greatly.  “I was weary now of wrong doing,” she wrote.  Her religious vocation took root during the eighteen months she spent at Our Lady of Grace, but illness forced her to leave the convent school and return home.

Her Vocation Journey Begins

Part of the time spent recovering proved very beneficial.  She spent some weeks with her uncle, Don Pedro de Cepeda, a devout widower.  Daily, she read aloud to him from his spiritual books and was deeply moved by them, especially by the letters of St. Jerome.  “The truths dimly sensed when a child were once more borne in upon me–that all things were nothing, that the world’s vanities would soon pass away.”  During this convalescence, her desire to become a nun became firm.

Drawn more by fear for the salvation of her soul than love of God, Teresa made her decision to join the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Avila, where a close friend had taken the veil.  Her father refused his permission and asked that she wait until his death.  Teresa believed that such a delay would destroy her good desires, so she had to steal away one morning, with the help of one of her brothers, to enter the Incarnation convent.  It was November 2, 1535. Teresa tells us she was filled with anguish on leaving home and felt her “very bones being wrenched apart”.

__________________________________________________________________

Pray the Novena Prayer and check back later to see what happens next!