The Legacy of St. Teresa
As we continue with our Novena to St. Teresa of Jesus we now turn to reflect on the great legacy St. Teresa has left to the Church. Her many natural gifts blossomed into a supernatural life of prayer and contemplation. Now countless other souls can benefit from wisdom!
The lives of the saints are God’s special gift to his pilgrim people. Each saint is a very special interpretation of the original revelation of God, Jesus Christ. Although each saint is a unique person living in different circumstances, together, they present the whole Church with a living Gospel.
A Very Human Model of Holiness
Teresa of Jesus became a marvelous instrument in God’s hands because she was a person with a passionate intensity and an immense capacity for life. In fact, much of her pain and frustration arose from her great desire to live life. Initially, her life was a searching for growth as a human person. But her human affections and interests needed to be integrated with the search for intimacy with God, which she experienced in contemplative prayer. This was the struggle of the first half of her adult life.
Teresa is so real to us because she chose to share her struggle so honestly. She had to discover through her own lived experience that there is no contradiction between being fully human and being holy. God has created us for himself. Without God, we are travelers without a compass. God is the transforming reality who alone can transform us.
Once Teresa learned to surrender, she became more alive than ever. Her soul had been touched by God, and she could no longer be satisfied except by God. She discovered the most marvelous of truths: that God desires to be close to each of us. Her complete surrender to him freed her from selfishness and self-seeking. Moreover, her love for God filled her with a deeper compassion and love for herself and others.
Her Charism as Teacher of Prayer
St. Teresa is a gift of God to his Church. Because she struggled for years herself, because she could share her own ambivalence, reluctance, and insecurity with her prayer, she has become a great teacher of prayer for all practitioners, and especially for those struggling for more–for complete surrender to God.
In her writings, she relates her own experience in all simplicity, allowing it to become her reader’s experience. She teaches prayer step by step, gradually revealing the marvelous ways in which God draws the soul to union with himself.
Teresa’s ability to teach was a charism, a pure gift. Her wisdom was of mystical origin, but she had experiential knowledge of the things about which she wrote. “For a long time God was teaching me, yet I could find no way of telling others what I learned–this caused me great distress. I spoke with many spiritual persons who tried to explain to me what God was giving me, so that I could speak about it; yet so stupid was I that it did me little or no good.”
It was by gift, by Divine charism, that Teresa was to become a great teacher of prayer. “What the poor soul could not accomplish, even by laboring and tiring the understanding for twenty years, the Divine Gardener achieved in a single moment.” Teresa found that she could understand and discourse about the highest matters clearly and easily. She knew Christ as the source of all her wisdom, as her “living book”.
So it is that the modern world, so deprived of God, is blessed with the testimony of this remarkable woman. Teresa tells us simply and clearly that she has seen God, that she has experienced Christ. She testified convincingly that she has felt the Divine life within her and that the same God is present for all of us to know, to converse with, and to love forever.
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Check back soon for the final portion of this sharing on our Holy Mother and Foundress St. Teresa of Jesus! And don’t forget to continue praying the Novena!
