Oh, then, my daughters! Let us hasten to perform this task and spin this cocoon. Let us renounce our self-love, and self-will, and our attachment to earthly things. Let us practice penance, prayer, mortification, obedience, and all the other good works that you know of. Let us do what we have been taught; and we have been instructed about what our duty is. Let the silkworm die—let it die, as in fact it does when it has completed the work which it was created to do. Then we shall see God and shall ourselves be as completely hidden in His greatness as is this little worm in its cocoon. Note that, when I speak of seeing God, I am referring to the way in which, as I have said, He allows Himself to be apprehended in this kind of union.10
The silkworm stops spinning when it realizes it can fly. Emerging from the cocoon is a beautiful moth. In the same way, knowing that creatures cannot give us rest, we realize that a life worth living is found in the Creator rather than in creatures. The appeal to find comfort and joy in the things of the earth loses its luster. We are no longer silkworms; we are moths. When we are detached from immature relationships and possessions, transformation occurs.
In the final and seventh mansion, Teresa ends a section like this: “I am laughing at myself over these comparisons for they do not satisfy me, but I don’t know any others. You may think what you want; what I have said is true.”11 Basically, Teresa summarizes the final mansions with these words: “You have to be there to know what I mean.” While this may leave some readers wanting more, that’s the point, in a way. For those who have developed close intimacy with God, words begin to fail. You have to be there to see. One finds mystery and awe, not explanations.
This pilgrimage into the soul is not a search for some authentic self, either. Self-awareness is how we begin the journey.12 This awareness leads to divine absorption rather than self-absorption. True awareness is found in relation to God and thus requires humility and repentance. Teresa writes, “Mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.”13 The personal, inward experience drives us upward.
PRAY AND WORK
The intimacy that drives us upward also leads us outward. For Teresa, prayer leads to humility and then to service. One of Teresa’s unique contributions is her idea of how the contemplative life necessarily leads people to love others. Earlier monastic writers tried to find characteristics of visionary experiences that would help them tell whether visions had to do with God. But not so with Teresa. Her intent is not to analyze the experience itself but to focus on the outcome of the experience—namely, one’s behavior toward God and neighbor. She urges, “Let us desire and be occupied in prayer not for the sake of our enjoyment but so as to have this strength to serve.”14 If the experience fails to make a person more Christlike, then it fails to be a vision from God and is worthy of doubt.
Important to note is the centrality of honor in Teresa’s society.15 It would be natural for her to seek such honor; however, she is scathing in her critique of honor. She sees honor not as rooted in inherited status or in one’s works. As she consistently notes, however, honor is interior. Once someone travels through the mansions and realizes the divine diamond within, they have every motive to treat others with honor and respect. God has made us his friends; therefore, we make friends with others, even if their class or spiritual maturity is different from ours. Teresa advocates for a countercultural love that sees the proper goal of spiritual maturity as love.
Such love is driven by humility. Teresa is worth quoting at length:
While we are on this earth nothing is more important than humility. So I repeat that it is good, indeed very good, to try to enter the room where self-knowledge is dealt with rather than fly off to other rooms. This is the right road, and if we can journey along a safe and level path, why should we want wings to fly? Rather let’s strive to make more progress in self-knowledge, for in my opinion we shall never completely know ourselves if we don’t strive to know God. By gazing at His grandeur, we get in touch with our own lowliness; by looking at His purity, we shall see our own filth; by pondering His humility, we shall see how far we are from being humble.16
Teresa is adamant that we never deserve such visions and experiences. Growing in the mansions is not an expectation. Rather, we need to be obedient to what we receive. She clarifies, “Thus, the soul doesn’t think about receiving more but about how to serve for what it has received.”17 In making this comment, Teresa urges us to a practical contemplation.
In Luke 10:25–37, Jesus tells a parable about a good Samaritan. We briefly looked at the parable in chapter 4. Eternal life is about loving our neighbor. This is what monastic spirituality has called the active life. Right after the Samaritan parable is a story about Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38–42).
Martha is being a good neighbor. She is attending to the household needs by offering hospitality. Mary, however, is attending to Jesus himself. Mary is identified by many writers as embodying the passive or contemplative life. Then Martha goes to Jesus and basically asks him, “Aren’t you going to tell Mary to help?” Jesus answers, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41–42). In the Christian tradition the active and passive lives can often be seen in conflict with one another. From Jesus’s words, it seems that the contemplative is the better lot.
The contemplative Teresa, however, suggests an organic link between mysticism and asceticism, passive and active life. You can’t have one without the other. There is no mysticism without asceticism, or for the sake of this story, there is no Mary without Martha. In one letter, she writes to novices in the monastery who are seeking to be Marys rather than Marthas. “But my daughters, good heavens! Do not be disconsolate when obedience leads you to be concerned with external, worldly matters; understand that, if your task is in the kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots and pans, helping you in all things spiritual and temporal.”18 The contemplative life wasn’t cause to leave the concerns of the world. It was cause to enter them more deeply, knowing that those were where God was already at work—“among the pots and the pans.”
Traveling through the seven mansions is never the main point of life. Remember, there’s only so much we can control, and we can never think we deserve greater revelations from God. The point is to be faithful with what has been revealed. The genuine experience of God makes the will of God easier to know and do, yet the experience is not necessary for obedience. Through trials and pain and through spiritual conversations, a person can choose God’s will over their own, even without the aid of revelations. We’re all called to be Martha, even if we never have the contemplative experience of Mary. The most important thing is to submit to the will of God, which is love.19 To end The Interior Castle, Teresa commends building castles not in the air—some ethereal, prayerful, purely spiritual state—or on the greatness of our works but on “the love with which they [the works] are done.”20 Goodness and beauty aren’t in competition. Rather, goodness prepares the way for a beautiful life of seeking the Beautiful One.
PRACTICES
CENTERING PRAYER
As discussed regarding the Jesus Prayer or returning to a word, the purpose of centering prayer is to be conscious of God’s love in the present moment. Rather than saying words, centering prayer is what I have called a “sanctified shutting up.” It’s a passive way to pray, not to the total exclusion of words or petitions but as a deepening of them. It’s a habit that helps us slow down and attend to God in the moment, to encounter him in silence.
SILENCE AND SOLITUDE
A goal of the beauty tradition is to be able to attend to God in the busy and noisy world, but we need some training in order to do that. Being quiet and alone helps us go deeper into our own souls, and as we saw with Teresa, this deepening also helps us discover God in the interior castle.
LECTIO DIVINA
Translated as “divine reading,” lectio divina is an ancient way to read Scripture. Instead of focusing on the right answer or meaning, it helps us listen to the Spirit as we read. It’s less about getting a theological insight and more about mining one’s soul before the face of God. As Thomas Keating insists, “It is the savoring of the text, a leisurely lingering in divine revelation.”21 I appreciate this way of reading, as it exposes readers: you can’t hide or pretend with lectio divina; you’re confronted. What is the Holy Spirit saying to you today?
SABBATH
As Abraham Heschel notes, the first thing called holy in the Bible is time.22 The Bible, he argues, is more concerned with time than with places. Practicing restful delight on the Sabbath trains us to be rather than to do, to be present rather than consume. Sabbath cultivates in us a contemplative spirit by habituating us to the holiness of time.
RESOURCES
Fujimura, Makoto. Art and Faith: A Theology of Making. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1961.
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
1. Williams, Teresa of Avila, 51.
2. Teresa refers to Augustine’s Confessions and says that she saw herself in Augustine’s story. Teresa, Life of Saint Teresa of Avila 9.7–8.
3. Teresa, Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, 96. I’m indebted to my friend Rebekah Linton, who pointed me to this passage.
4. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, 283.
5. Sullivan, Transformed by Love, 33.
6. Williams, Teresa of Avila, 149.
7. Sullivan, Transformed by Love, 30.
8. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle 2.1.8 (Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, 43).
9. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle 3.2.12 (Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, 74).
10. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle 5.2.8 (Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, 148).
11. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle 7.2.11 (Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, 379).
