St. Teresa’s Life Continued
TERESA IN THE CONVENT OF THE INCARNATION
The distress that Teresa felt on leaving home quickly passed, and her father almost immediately accepted her decision. She was very happy in the convent and knew that her decision was the right one. Later, she would write, “At the time, my entrance into this new life gave me a joy so great that it has never failed me to this day”.
The Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Avila, founded in 1479, was the largest in Spain, with more than 140 nuns. Teresa called it “a secure state” and “a house in which there were many servants of God from whom I might take example”. Teresa was very happy here and discovered that what began as fear soon turned to love and a sense of God’s presence. Her early years here were marked by a “first fervor”. Recalling this time, she tells us: “God transformed the dryness of my soul into very great tenderness”. If at times her proud spirit was irked by humiliation, she could rise above it: “I found delight with everything to do with religious life”.
Teresa began to experience life as no longer a matter of forcing herself forward by sheer willpower, but rather of being gently drawn onward by a love she felt within her. She speaks of a new joy in being free from such things as self-indulgence. She volunteered to care for a nun suffering from terrible ulcers and saw it as a grace. She prayed that she would be able to imitate the remarkable Christian patience of this sister.
Shortly after her profession, in 1538, Teresa became seriously ill. Different medical diagnoses have been suggested by biographers: heart trouble, epilepsy, tuberculosis, ulcers. A more recent suggestion identifies her illness as “Maltese fever”, a disease caused by non-pasteurized milk. The recurrent symptoms, which would plague Teresa for the rest of her life, included fever, vomiting, and fainting.
When she failed to respond to medical treatment at the convent, her father took her, as a last resort, to Becedas to seek the help of a woman healer famous throughout Castile. But her health did not improve. Things actually went from bad to worse, so that, by the end of the treatment, Teresa lay in a coma for four days, and preparations were made for her funeral. Her eyes were sealed with wax in preparation for her burial, and only the insistence of her father that she was not dead prevented her from being buried.
Later, Teresa would attribute her recovery to the intervention of St. Joseph. Her great devotion to him would last her whole lifetime. Teresa’s recovery would be slow and painful, and she would never again enjoy complete good health. She remained paralyzed in her legs for three years. Finally, she would write, “I started to crawl on all fours, and I praised God for it”.
THE EIGHTEEN-YEAR STRUGGLE
The years 1538-1556, which were years of great struggle for Teresa, began with a search for a cure. During the first year, she spent some time with her uncle Pedro, who introduced her to a book on mystical prayer, Francis of Osuna’s The Third Spiritual Alphabet. “I did not know how to proceed in prayer or how to become recollected, and so I took much pleasure in it and decided to follow that path with all my strength.” It would be her principal guide in the ways of prayer for the next twenty years. What the book did was throw light on Teresa’s own prayer experience.
As a child, she had prayed naturally. When she entered the Convent of the Incarnation, her own spontaneous style of prayer was disrupted by artificial and arbitrary forms of meditation that were foisted upon her. Osuna’s book encouraged Teresa to return to her original direct approach to Christ in her own form of prayer, to rediscover the real presence of Christ within her. Maintaining this contact with Christ became the struggle of the next eighteen years.
Part of Teresa’s problem was a desire to be appreciated by others. This contributed to a long period of mediocrity in her spiritual life, although she never stopped praying and even enjoyed transitory mystical experiences. Mediocrity was not laxity; it was more like treading water, holding her own, but not going anywhere spiritually. Human affections and interests crowded out her search for intimacy with God. She refers to this time in her life as a period of “total vainglory”.
A constant stream of visitors sought Teresa’s advice. Her natural charm made her a celebrity inside and outside the convent. She had disciples who admired her insights and valued her teachings on mental prayer, but her own prayer life was often disrupted and left her feeling distressed and restless. When she was at prayer, she would sometimes listen for the clock to strike, wanting only that the hour of prayer end. She was powerfully attracted to God, but she could not break away from the distractions that so occupied her time. In the end, she took no joy in God and no pleasure in the world. “In the midst of worldly satisfaction”, she wrote, “the thought of what I owed God distressed me, and my worldly affections made me restless when I was with God”.
She came to another turning point in 1543, when her father died. She cared for him in his last illness and felt intense grief: “I felt as if my soul was being torn from my body when I saw him nearing his end”. At this time, she was able to confide in her father’s confessor, Vicente Barron, a Dominican from the monastery of Santo Tomas. She told him of her troubled soul and received his encouragement. He convinced her that she must always give mental prayer the first place in her life.
Despite feelings of emptiness and dryness, she kept praying, but her spiritual state was intolerable to her, so Teresa began to break off the useless friendships and interests that had proved such a great distraction to her. Nevertheless, it would be another ten-year struggle to dislodge the egoism that was blocking her spiritual growth.
It would not be until 1554 that Teresa would begin to experience what she called her “second conversion”. Two remarkable prayer experiences marked this change in her life. The first began in prayer before an image of the suffering Christ, covered with horribly bleeding wounds. For Teresa, it was an overwhelming encounter with Christ in person. She writes: “I was utterly distressed in seeing him that way. I felt so keenly aware of how poorly I thanked him for those wounds that, it seems to me, my heart broke. Beseeching him to strengthen me once and for all that I might not offend him, I threw myself down before him with the greatest outpouring of tears. I was very, very distrustful of myself and placed all my trust in God. I think I then said that I would not rise from there until he granted me what I was begging him for. I believe this was certainly beneficial to me because from that time on, I was improving.”
Following this encounter with the suffering Christ, Teresa came upon a Spanish translation of the Confessions of St. Augustine. She identified her own long and bitter struggle with the stages of Augustine’s conversion. It moved her to discover that Augustine had at one time been a great sinner, as she believed herself to be. “When I began to read the Confessions, I seemed to see myself there too, and when I came to his conversion and read how he heard the voice in the garden, I felt in my heart that it was just as if the Lord was speaking to me. For a long time I dissolved into tears, absorbed in great inner anguish and distress.”
The face of the wounded Christ and the burning words of St. Augustine struck her with such force that there was no room left in her for earthly things. From this period on, her allegiance would grow, to become absolute and uncontested. “There began to grow in me a desire to spend more time with him and to turn away my eyes from all occasions of sin; and once they had gone, I would forthwith return to loving him again.” Teresa spent two years consolidating her “second conversion”. By 1556, she was on the threshold of her mystical life.
For the next six years at the convent of the Incarnation, her spiritual growth proceeded peacefully and effectively. She advanced in prayer, receiving new graces centered on the humanity of Christ. She would never again take her eyes off Jesus. Her intense love for Christ helped her rectify incorrect human affections and purified her love. No longer could she allow her self-interest to come before God, yet her human loves became much deeper and she was able to express them in a new way.
Teresa’s life was now dominated by her mystical union with Christ. She would continue to grow in that union. This was but the beginning of a period of spiritual growth that would culminate in the mystical “marriage” which she entered into while under the spiritual care of St. John of the Cross in 1572, at the convent of the Incarnation. Extraordinary graces would follow for the rest of her life.
The profound mystical evolution in Teresa’s life is another story, beyond the scope of this program. That evolution occurred because Teresa was able to open herself totally to God’s grace. She became filled with the conviction that God alone suffices.
