10. Keating, Intimacy with God, 73.
11. Merton, Course in Christian Mysticism, 63.
12. Laird, Into the Silent Land, 76.
13. Laird, Into the Silent Land, 77, 80, 89.
14. Laird, Into the Silent Land, 106.
15. Williams, Looking East in Winter, 192.
16. The Cloud of Unknowing, 55.
17. Bahnson, “Guardians of Memory.”
18. Williams, Holy Living, 119.
19. Heschel, Between God and Man, 202.
20. Milliner, “Becoming Bourbon.”
21. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul 2.7.8 (Lewis, 97).
22. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 47.
23. Williams, Wrestling with Angels, 14.
24. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 60.
25. Capon, Between Noon and Three, 292.
26. Milliner, “Becoming Bourbon.”
9
Teresa of Ávila
EXPLORING THE INTERIOR CASTLE
I remember making fun of worship music when I was a graduate student. Perhaps because I heard criticisms from a professor or from classmates I wanted to fit in with, I thought individualistic worship songs seemed a bit too intimate. From “In the Garden,” where Jesus “walks with me and talks with me and tells me I am his own,” to “How He Loves,” where David Crowder sings of heaven meeting earth “like a sloppy, wet kiss,” there seemed to be a strain of music that sang of Jesus as if he were a boyfriend. In many of the songs I critiqued, Jesus seemed too personal, too sentimental. I wanted depth.
But based on the above chapters, don’t these songs depict what we want? Shouldn’t we desire such a close and intimate experience of Jesus that it feels like we’re walking hand in hand in the garden? Don’t we want to experience his presence that closely? True, I’m still not comfortable singing about sloppy, wet kisses. But the song has a right desire for intimacy with Jesus. The Song of Solomon is in the Bible, after all. Teresa of Ávila is one who desired such intimacy with Jesus.
THE LIFE OF SAINT TERESA
Teresa of Ávila is a refreshing female voice from a male-dominated medieval world. There aren’t many female spiritual writers from this period for the simple fact that few women were educated or looked to for spiritual guidance. Born in March 1515 to a family of twelve children, she was raised in relative comfort and wealth. Teresa was beautiful and was a bit flirtatious as a young woman, to the consternation of her father. For the dual purpose of punishment and purification, he sent Teresa to a convent with Augustinian nuns for eighteen months. He may have lived to regret that decision. This time away proved to be decisive for Teresa. After returning home she left again in secret, not to rendezvous with a suitor but to enter the cloister. She took the habit in 1536.
Significant in her formation was a sickness in her early adult life. Through questionable medieval medical practice, Teresa entered a coma. For three years her mobility was limited—as was her prayer life. She would go on to say that this sickness affected her in such a way that she was unable to have an active and robust prayer life for ten years due to physical weakness. As was the case for many others, her early suffering shaped her life with God. She underwent her purgation.
Throughout her life she experienced powerful mystical visions with Jesus. While she was confident in her judgments of the true source of these revelations, she wasn’t like a modern-age guru who claims infallibility. She was untrusting of her own experience and needed confessors to assure and stabilize her. For Teresa, intimacy with God was not a loner spirituality. She had several spiritual directors she would meet with to test these visions. Some of the directors doubted that the visions were from God and wondered whether they stemmed from a diabolical source. When she was unsure, she always submitted her experience to the judgment of others. She sought illumination.
In the modern world, nothing trumps an experience. Instead of sola scriptura (deriving doctrine from Scripture alone), the new standard is one’s own experience alone. But for Teresa, even the most intimate sharing between friends was subject to criticism and scrutiny from others. She knew nothing of a “Lone Ranger” Christianity. Teresa of Ávila was a critic of her own experience. She went on to help novices discern whether certain revelations or experiences were divine or diabolical, whether they should explore them or ignore them. She was all too aware of the deceits of the imagination and unreliability of people who wanted to stir up emotion or exploit a divine experience for personal gain.
During Teresa’s life there was another movement that complicated her monastic ministry. Shortly after the Protestant Reformation, the Spanish church became a key scene in the Counter-Reformation, also called the Catholic Reformation. On top of this, the Spanish Inquisition was in force. Because of the influence of Protestants such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, some in the Catholic Church were suspicious of any new movements or individual calls for renewal. Renewal was how Luther’s Reformation started, and Catholics were wary of any potential division. This situation affected Teresa because she was often misunderstood by or even thrown out of the communities she founded. She found herself assaulted with questions while she was trying to help, and these experiences led to deep pain, hurt, and confusion.
This pain was part of the purgation process. She entered dark nights and lonely days. Her will and ego had to be stripped before they could be filled with light. As Rowan Williams notes in his book on Teresa, “Yet she perseveres: finding that what God gives in prayer is quite disproportionate to her felt enthusiasm. God responds, not to the state of her emotions, but to the desire and direction shown in her life overall: to her knowledge of her neediness and fragmentation, not to any eagerness to acquire spiritual experiences.”1 For Teresa, prayer was driven by desire but not dictated by desire. She wanted intense experiences of God, but feelings were not the determining factor in whether a prayer time was valuable. She was driven by her neediness, and through her neediness God healed her.
A main theme emerges from the life of Saint Teresa: God overrules her selfish will. She realized her own fragmented and twisted desires, yet as in the life of Augustine, God used mixed motives and turned them straight. Just as God used Augustine’s twisted ambition, he used Teresa’s urge to be loved and admired.2 God took this desire and turned Teresa toward himself. Being loved by God, she released her desire to be loved or accepted by everyone else, including by those involved in the Inquisition, who doubted her experience. The freedom she gained from being loved by Jesus saved her from any need to demand the respect of others.
DRIVING DESIRES: MOVEMENT WITHIN THE INTERIOR CASTLE
Her soul’s quest started in desire, and her soul’s rest ended with desire. On October 4, Teresa passed away while reciting lines from the Song of Songs and thanking God she was part of the church. Love for Jesus and love for the church were not competing desires for Teresa. Her intimate and individual experience of Christ never led to division from the church at large.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a famous work of sculpture displayed in the Cornaro Chapel in Rome, displays the erotic nature of Teresa’s desire. She looks up as an angel pierces her heart, golden sculpted rays shining upon the scene. Her face is pained, but the expression also could be interpreted as orgasmic or erotic. Teresa uses charged and provocative imagery in her writings that describe the nature of her intimacy with Jesus. In baroque fashion, Bernini’s statue of “ecstasy” is passionate and evocative. The personal love of Jesus was that intense for Teresa. It is easy to see why some authorities of Teresa’s day were uncomfortable! Yet she died quoting the Song of Songs, a book full of erotic imagery that can be read as analogous to God’s love and desire for us.
For Teresa, the first step in prayer is the realization that God is very near and that harm comes from not understanding this continual close presence of God. In meditating on Christ she tempers reflections on the pain and love on display at the cross with the insistence that we should “rather stay there beside Him, with all our thoughts stilled. We should occupy ourselves, if we can, by gazing at Him who is gazing at us, should keep Him company, and talk with Him, and pray to Him, and humble ourselves and delight in Him, and remind ourselves that we do not deserve to be there.”3 What a beautiful description of prayer: gazing at him who is gazing at us. As we saw in chapter 8, attention and contemplation function the same way. Teresa desired this intimacy with and delight in Jesus, the beatific vision that transforms us. Gazing at Jesus results in humility, the first step in becoming like God in theosis.
In her most famous work, The Interior Castle, Teresa compares the soul to a precious jewel, “like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or of a very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms.”4 The work of spiritual formation takes us on a journey within the complex soul. So often, young people want to experience the world outside of themselves through travel and new experiences. To that, Teresa might say, “Try your soul first. There’s plenty there to discover.” The Interior Castle is a practical guide to the way the soul arrives at union with God through cooperation with grace. God was something to discover not outside but within. She writes, “We are to go inward, moving deeper and deeper into stillness and silence. If we travel to the center of the soul, there we encounter God.”5 On this note Rowan Williams proposes, “We enter the castle and, if our eyes are open, what we actually see is God, radiating love from the ‘centre’ which is the centre of our creatureliness. By seeing God we see more clearly what we are—muddled, distracted, frustrated, but in motion towards the love of God.”6 As we’ve seen, this dual knowledge of God and ourselves is a common theme in Christian spirituality. By entering the soul, we see God more clearly. By seeing God more clearly, we understand ourselves more truly.
Teresa goes on to describe the journey into the soul as a passage through seven different mansions. A commentator on Teresa, Shirley Darcus Sullivan, describes the purpose of her work: “Teresa suggests a process of growing more and more aware of what is truly valuable. We move from attachment to lesser ‘goods’ to the highest good, God.”7 Teresa’s process of contemplation is therefore also a process of holy detachment, learning to care about the things that God cares about. The division of the process into mansions is not supposed to provide a means of measuring one’s progress. Rather, the mansions exist for self-reflection and for spiritual directors. The goal is to forget about the self and which mansion one is in. The purpose is the death of the ego (purgation) and ultimate union with God.
The first three mansions are somewhat reachable by human effort and striving. However, the remaining four are passive. They are mystical achievements and are granted by God alone. When starting out, we should expect a certain amount of dryness and a certain number of trials in our spiritual life. This stage can be compared to purgation. We may not experience consolations from God or find that our desires line up with God’s desire. Even if he should offer us eternal delights, what makes us think that our desires would line up with God’s delight? We need to be refined. Teresa advises,
There’s no need for us to be advising Him about what He should give us, for He can rightly tell us that we don’t know what we’re asking for. The whole aim of any person who is beginning prayer—and don’t forget this, because it’s very important—should be that he work and prepare himself with determination and every possible effort to bring his will into conformity with God’s will.8
The key in these early stages is not to give up, even in dryness. Rather, we must be prompt in obedience regardless of feeling or even our own will because, as Teresa observes, “doing our own will is usually what harms us.”9 For Teresa, self-expression is overrated. We resign our will to the will of God, and the death of self-interest increases the pursuit of God. At each mansion there is a desire for more, as there was with Moses. Strivings end, and we begin to love God without self-interest. We grow from one degree of glory to another, never exhausting the intimacy that God gives.
Teresa compares the process of transformation to a silkworm turning into a moth. A silkworm, which she calls fat and ugly, toils and eats until it begins spinning a cocoon and enclosing itself. This is the work of the first three mansions. Our will, like the silkworm, prepares for its own binding and confinement. The work we do results in a rest during which something mysterious happens in the hidden resources of the spiritual cocoon. Teresa references Colossians 3, where Paul writes, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). Death and hiding in Christ is the goal of the interior journey.
