An image of St Teresa from an interesting contemporary artist in New Mexico Patricia Hostetter-Lopez

She (Teresa of Avila) makes clear in what sense she uses the word prayer. “I could not,” she writes, “shut myself up within myself, in which consisted my whole way of prayer.” To pray (she stresses this repeatedly) is to withdraw into oneself, like the tortoise or the hedgehog. It is to find God hidden in the innermost part of the soul, like the succulent kernel concealed among the layers in the middle of the plamito or dwarf palm. She develops this idea in the ‘Interior Castle’ in which she writes of God as a King whose council chamber is in the center of the palace. This conception of prayer first came to her when she read the ‘Third Spiritual Alphabet’ of Francisco de Osuna which was given her by her uncle Don Pedro de Cepeda when she visited him on her way to Becedas to be treated by the curandera. Her copy of this book may be seen in the sacristy of Saint Joseph’s convent, Avila, along with a drum and pipes that she used to play at recreation—also one of her letters that has been decorated with bright, painted birds. It is a small volume, much scored, with yellowed leaves and heavy type. In the margins, to draw attention to passages of importance, there are signs that include a heart, a cross, and a pointing hand. I had reason to remember this book when, as I was traveling one day to Granada to Seville, the bus drew up in a street of dazzlingly white houses. It was Osuna, where the author of the ‘Third Spiritual Alphabet’ was born. White walls and iron balconies came up to the windows of the bus. Ahead I saw more white walls and golden pantile roofs and overhead the glaring blue of the sky. Francisco de Osuna, who like Ignatius Loyola was a soldier as well as a mystic, was at Tripoli when the Spaniards took the town in 1510. He writes of prayer in the language of human love which he describes as “a ladder which the feet of the wise mount to God.” Prayer is nothing else than a conversation, as Teresa was later to put it, between two persons who love each other. Moreover to love God is within the scope of all for it is dependent not on activity but on the will. “All,” he writes, “cannot fast or wear rough clothing, labor or journey. But if you say you cannot love, I do not believe you.” -‘A Journey in Spain: Saint Teresa’ by Elizabeth Hamilton

Her (St Teresa of Avila) sense of guilt, exaggerated by the conflicts of adolescence, followed her into later life. It shows itself in a diffidence that at first sight seems surprising in one who was otherwise courageous and enterprising. “I am always timorous when I have to make a decision about anything—I immediately think I’m going to do everything wrong,” she writes from the Incarnation when she is Prioress in 1573. Often when she has achieved something in the face of difficulty and opposition, she suffers a reaction, begins to question the wisdom of what she has done. This happened after the founding of Saint Joseph’s, and again at Medina del Campo. This weakness in Teresa is a very human one. It is a reminder, too, that those whom the Church has raised to her altars as great servants of God, heroic in courage and singleness of heart, are yet persons like ourselves. The saints will not please the cold perfectionist nor the stoic. They are not superman, flawless, nor beings changed once and for all by a lightning conversion. Saint Paul’s conversion appears to have been a lightning one, if any was. Yet in the years that followed he was buffeted by an angel of Satan, nor is there any reason to suppose that he ceased to be buffeted to the end.

A person suffering from a sense of guilt can be cured, or at least made better, through treatment from a psychologist; or through a change from unfavorable environment to favorable. In either case the part played by encouragement is all important. Teresa, though in her spiritual and active life she had much to discourage her, found encouragement, too. When all were against her, thinking her a madwoman and deluded by the devil, Peter of Alcantara encouraged her. Possibly that strange character, as remote from our understanding as one of the desert hermits and the last person one would expect to take up a woman’s cause, was himself encouraged by the young Teresa who, so she tells us, took an interest in his affairs. She was encouraged, too, by the Dominican, Vicente Barron, Don Alonso’s confessor and afterwards her own, who, when she had given up prayer, saved her from the sloth of false humility, making her understand, what she was later to pass on to others, that to pray is always good nor is any soul, however evil, excluded from the love of God. –‘A Journey in Spain: Saint Teresa’ Elizabeth Hamilton