In their totality of pursuit, saints have the happy but rare gift of combining in their persons qualities that seem to be opposed to one another. Fanatics may have one natural virtue to an eminent degree, but they lack its balance the opposite. Mediocre people have no outstanding qualities, and so there is nothing to balance. The activist may think himself the cutting edge of the future, but if he is not a mystic, he is frightfully narrow–and part of the narrowness is that he may not possess even a small suspicion of his myopia. St Teresa was magnanimous: she sought in lived the whole picture. On the one hand she did an amazing amount of work both in the monastery and on the road, and yet on the other hand she loved long periods of prayerful solitude. Rare indeed is the man or woman who, as Vatican II puts it, is “eager to act and yet devoted to contemplation”. Teresa was wholeheartedly both. She likewise combined a tender love for her family and would not waste time in idle talk with them. She could say as her father neared death that “it seemed my soul was being wrenched from me, for I loved him dearly”. She so loved him and the others in her family that she would not lead them into the guilt of idle chatter for which we shall give a count on judgment day–which is to say that she really loved her relatives as very few people do. Her balance was likewise evident in her ability to combine a great deal of asceticism and penance in her personal life with a willing and appreciative reception of comfort from dear friends. To Gratian she wrote that “I was thinking of what a comfort it would be to me if my daughter Maria de San Jose were here: she write so well, and she is so clever and gay, that she could do something to lighten my burdens”. During her many travels, Teresa saw to it that her companions on the road with combine times of silent prayer and the cover carts with periods of healthy fun and conversation. Seldom does one meet an individual who is unashamedly ascetic and yet warmly appreciative of human comfort, who can enliven a conversation with wit and joy and then can turn to a long solitude of deep prayer afterward. For most of us it is at best a question of one or the other, not both. A saint is indeed a rare work of divine art. –Father Thomas Dubay, S.M. “Fire Within: St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the Gospel”