Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 7

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

th733-07

Teresa of Avila

Lesson Transcript

Now we’re going to look at the prayer life of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. As I’ve said, sometimes it helps us to set up in vivid portraiture the prayer life of an individual when we also bear it in mind with the prayer life of some other companion in the same culture. And that’s why we’re choosing Teresa and her disciple was John of the Cross. And as we prepare ourselves for this lecture, our hymn to start with is a hymn that you might be surprised to associate with Teresa:

All creatures of our God and King,

Lift up your voice and with us sing,

Alleluia! Alleluia!

Thou burning sun with golden beam,

Thou silver moon with softer gleam,

O praise Him, O praise Him,

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Of course, this is the echo of Francis of Assisi. This is the canticle that he composed to the son, or in the context of creation, all praising God. And the reason why we use that Franciscan hymn is because the whole spirituality of the 16th century was all aflame by the influence of the Franciscans. We’ll say more about that in the course of the lecture, but this is why it’s so appropriate for us to use that hymn for our purposes as we prepare to think about Teresa.

One other thing that we may say in our preparatory thinking about Teresa is that we’ve seen how significantly our prayer life is influenced by the family traumas of our inner life. We think of how significant was the death of Monica for Augustine. We see how significant was the death of Anselm’s mother that took place before he set out on his pilgrimage to become a monk. We see it in the death of Bernard’s mother, who then released him after her death to become a monk. These family stories and the traumas of these family stories are always very significant in the development of our spiritual life. And so Teresa’s mother died when she was 16. It was a profound period of change for Teresa. And then we think of C.S. Lewis in our generation, that it was the death of his mother when he was only nine years old that really was a trauma that affected the whole of his life and the rest of the period of his identity. And so this is a reflection that we should have that our prayer life needs to be so related to the whole narrative of where we’ve come from.

[00:03:38]

The 16th century was both turbulent in the longings for reform and also it became the golden age of Spanish humanism. It was the scene of rivalry between the Spanish monarchs and the Papacy and yet at the same time it was the age when after the fall of Grenada there was this whole new quest to have pure blood in the lineage of being a Spaniard. So it’s an age of great conflict. Great conflicts were going on underneath and it’s in this period then of conflict that we find this remarkable woman that, in her position as a reformer of the Carmelite Order, the order to pray, that she is so remarkable. As I mentioned elsewhere, the Carmelite Order was developed in Palestine in the 12th and early 13th century as one of the features of the Crusades because on Mount Carmel there was established on the site where, of course, Elijah had his experience of God, of how God answers prayer in the situation of Elijah. So in commemoration of that, the Carmelite Order was to celebrate that this archetype of prayer in the Old Testament is the kind of archetype that we need for prayer in the 12th and 13th century.

An order that therefore is devoted only to prayer; it’s ironic that the order had ceased all notion of prayer by the 16th century. And of course, what made it worse was that women were dissuaded, in fact, they were suspect if the Inquisition heard that they were praying because the emotions of women were so distrusted in the chauvinism of the times that for the idea of a woman to pray was like being a witch. She was bound to be doing something that was heretical. And so you can understand how crazy we can be in the way that we have blind spots about our own culture that seemed perfectly normal at the time, but would seem such an extraordinary contradiction for later periods to reflect on. So one of the things that we do learn from history is that we’ve had so many blind spots about so many absurd things and how God in spite of all of that can still use us for His own glory and honour.

By the way, I should tell you that the dates of Teresa are 1515–1582. And so when she was 16 and her mother died and she was cut loose as a young teenager, she was considered as to being unsafe for the predators outside and so to go into a convent was to save her from an early pregnancy. She had no idea what convent life was all about. She had had a rather frivolous mother, who had not been a good example to her, for she loved novelettes and romances and these turned the head of Teresa as a teenager herself. And so she herself became a nun. And even her father didn’t know that later she was to take the habit secretly when she was 21, but it was all to escape and have her own freedom as a young woman.

[00:08:14]

She was very worldly. She was feisty. But she had no idea that the convent is a place where you pray. How totally different times had changed from the monastic life that we’ve talked about in its beginnings in the 5th and 6th centuries and then later developed so wonderfully in the Cistercian movement. And so what made her feel so guilty was that every time she had to go into her own cell when the chapel bell rang for prayer, was she had no idea what to do with her time. And so when the chapel bell rang for the quiet time that they should have for their own private devotions, she kept looking at the ceiling, she kept looking through the windows and she was feeling she was totally fraudulent. It was all a fraud as far as she was concerned. And so Teresa’s first experience of entering into a so-called spiritual life of devotion was entering into a life of fraudulence. How in the world can you be fraudulent and take on an order to pledge yourself to pray and you haven’t a clue how you can do it? It’s so ironic.

And when her poor father died when she was still in this dryness of life without any real understanding of prayer. He said my dear, I’m afraid to die, but you are an expert in prayer, will you intercede for me with God? Please come and see me and pray with me before I die. And again, in being fraudulent, hypocritically she said oh father, how can you expect me as your daughter to teach you anything? You know so much more than I do. All this feigned humility on her part was saying I daren’t tell dad what a fraud I am and how I’ve wasted these years in this way of life. So perhaps for many of us what happens is that our spiritual life is so much under a cloak because we grew up to have our quiet time and nobody knows what happened in our quiet time. And certainly, nobody knew what Teresa was so despairing about, but for her it was sheer emptiness.

[00:11.07]

And you can’t live as a fraud. This way of life has its tensions upon you and, as I’ve said in another course about the life of Teresa, her whole family background was fraudulent because they were Jews and they were under the cloak of being Christians. And so her grandfather was fraudulent, her father was fraudulent, the whole of her heritage was fraudulent because they were hiding behind the cloak of being Christians when they really had a Jewish inheritance. This was too much for her. She began to have illnesses. We could call them today psychosomatic because she was under such stress and she nearly died. And it was during a period when she was near death’s door that she had a vision of Christ. He came. He visited her to express his love for her. And of course, when you’ve had a mystical experience, there’s no way you can ever deny the importance of it. You’re like Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road: Lord, what will you have me to do?

I don’t often share it, but I had a mystical experience in 1962, in January of 1962, and I knew that it wasn’t anything that I should speculate about or talk about, which I never did. But it was just saying Lord, I’m ready to do whatever you want me to do. There’s no other possibility than to be transformed by that experience. And so one of the wonderful phrases that we find that Teresa uses as a key to her prayer life later on is when there’s nothing left but God, then it is you find that it’s only God you need. Let me repeat that. When there’s nothing left but God, then it is you find that it’s only God you need. There was nothing left. She was about to die. And it was in that utter helplessness that she encountered the love of Jesus for the first time in her life.

One of the things that’s happening, of course, in our culture, our therapeutic culture, is that we go to the therapist when we have emotional problems. And she herself went through something like 25 different spiritual directors. Some were totally wacky and false and others were genuine and you have to zigzag between who is really going to help you and somebody who’s really quite fraudulent and misunderstanding of your condition. And so when she looked back on her life, she reckoned it was only one or two that really changed her life. The rest were a total let-down. And in addition to her confessors, she went to a whole series of other spiritual directors, who were more specialised. Again, she found the majority of them let her down.

[00:14:56]

One of the problems that the Catholic Church has had is with the confessional. And so many people today have been hugely stumbled because the confessor that they confess to was a rogue. And what a tragedy it is that this has happened in the life of the institutional church. The one good man that she did meet and spent a whole day with was Pedro de Alcantara. Just one day in his presence turned her life around. She just needed one godly person to redirect her whole life. And so one of the passions that you may have when you’re deprived of something is that you take up that ministry yourself and that’s what she did. She herself became a marvellous director of souls for many of her nuns as well as many men as well. And so her letters, which were written and collected from 1541 to her death, are a wonderful example of not only her practical business life and controlling so many of these convents, but very strongly the spiritual direction that she was giving to others.

[00:16:30]

Of course, one of the difficulties for her in her own spiritual development was that she was a woman in 16th century Spain and no woman was supposed to have any significant thoughts of her own about the Christian faith. She was allowed to recite prayers, but she was not allowed to consider that she could be prayerful herself. In that culture, there was a fear of the spontaneity of a woman’s prayer life. It might bring heresy into the life of the community. And so one of the reasons why a woman like Teresa was subject to so many confessors and so many spiritual directors was because in the male chauvinism of the times it wasn’t thought a woman knew how to communicate with God. Can you imagine that? And so there was always the shadow of the Inquisition hanging over her. There was always the feeling that there was going to be an arrest and that she’d be accused of heresy. And of course, especially if you’ve had a mystical experience or a series of experiences then that was very dubious.

I remember when I first confessed to a friend that I had had a mystical experience and he said Jim, tread very softly in that territory if I were you. Evangelicals still were not prepared to realise that you could meet God in a special way. So we’re still wacky in the way we sometimes think of our spiritual life. And so Teresa was subject to the kind of shadow in her life of being of being a Christian mystic, somebody who’s experienced the love of God. Often when I spoke about the Christian mystics, my evangelical friends were very chary of this and they asked me what does it mean to be mystical. Well, it simply means that you experience the love of God. And so I remember writing a festschrift essay for Klaus Bockmuehl on why are evangelicals so afraid of the mystical life. It was needed in the period in which I was writing. So it’s not so very far back that we ourselves have had such prejudice against the mystical experience of Christians.

[00:19:10]

So when she started writing her letters in 1541 and then later her spiritual testimonies between 1560 and 81, these are testimonies of how she had to write for various confessors about the state of her soul. And we learn a lot about her from these spiritual testimonies and God uses all that intimacy of what should have been so private for her inner life to now be so publicly referable to our lives as well. And if you really want to understand the pulse beat of her prayer life, read her Life, where she talks about the different stages of prayer that she had struggled to see developed and experienced within herself.

One of the things that Teresa in the age of romance, as it was, is that she was full of imagery and symbolism. And so in the dry meseta of Spain, Central Spain, where you need irrigation to have any real life of green in the dusky steppe-like country, you need water. And the Moors had been superb with their irrigation schemes. And so she talks about the spiritual life as the three waters. There’s the kind of water of prayer when you are bucket by bucket taking the water out of the well and putting it on the ground for your flowerbed, or vegetables. It’s hard work. And so she sees that her petitionary prayer life is very much like taking water out of the well, like the woman in the incident of Jesus that we have in John. And in many parts of Spain you’ll find the heritage that goes back to Roman times of aqueducts. And with the Roman aqueducts, you have the acequias, which are the irrigation channels, from the aqueduct. And so one of my specialties of study was understanding the irrigation system of the East coast of Spain from the time of the Moors and the Arabs. These irrigation systems that are so ancient were effective for the fruitfulness of Spanish agriculture. So again, Teresa uses the theme of the prayer that we associate with the aqueduct. It’s just letting God’s spirit water our souls.

[00:22:13]

And then the third form of prayer is now not only petitionary prayer, or what we might call meditative prayer, but now contemplative prayer. And she associates contemplative prayer when you don’t need an irrigation system at all. There’s been a thunder storm and it’s pouring with rain and the rain is pouring down, drenching the whole of the landscape. It’s not often that you get that, although we have this phrase: the rain in Spain falls often on the plains. And so she sees that this being drenched in one’s soul is the experience of this marvellous awareness of the presence of God just filling your life with His love.

Another of her books The Way of Perfection, which she wrote in 1566, was to give spiritual direction to her nuns. They were in these convents. She had known what it was to get locked up in a convent and not know what to do. So of course, as a spiritual director, The Way of Perfection is teaching them about the life of prayer, teaching them what she, with such difficulty, had to learn for herself. And so The Way of Perfection is not perfection in the Greek sense of perfectionism. She’s talking about perfection as the way of spiritual maturity. She was blessed when she was a young girl to have a friend who was a niece of Luis de Leon. And Luis de Leon, as we’ve mentioned elsewhere, as an Old Testament scholar had learned his Hebrew from the Jews as he himself had a Jewish background. And so to his beloved niece, who’s in a convent and again has to learn how to pray, he suggests that the way she can learn to pray is like Bernard and so he translates the Song of Songs into the vernacular so that his niece can be edified with the true love of God instead of the false loves that a teenager might have. And as a good friend of Teresa, she passed this document secretly on to Teresa.

It’s astonishing to think that the spiritual life of Teresa, as far as her knowledge of the Bible was concerned, was because of the imprisonment of the Vulgate. And of course, women were not taught Latin in those days. Her knowledge of the Bible was simply the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Song of Songs. She didn’t have any other knowledge that would open her to the Bible. She didn’t even have the Psalms, that were in the vernacular of other countries. So she was hugely handicapped in her understanding of the Christian faith. But the Song of Songs blessed her soul. And so she writes in her Meditations on the Song of Songs and, of course, in the midst of that meditation she is so enriched in her life.

[00:26:15]

Another thing that Teresa wrote were her Soliloquies in 1569. These are really an imitation of Augustine and, of course, for a short time in the vernacular there had been translated by the Franciscans Augustine’s Confessions. So while she didn’t have access to the Bible, she did have access to Augustine and she had access then to his Confessions by writing her own Soliloquies. These are her prayers that she addresses to God. And then, of course, like Bernard of Clairvaux, she’s founding new convents all the time. She’s travelling the length and breadth of the meseta of Spain in a mule cart. Her mule cart was her mobile chapel. It was there on these long journeys that she composed a lot of her prayers while she was driving around in this very slow and painful form of transportation. And again, it’s on these journeys that she writes her Foundations from 1573 to towards the end of her life, 1582, describing how God so wonderfully has developed this movement of reform in the founding of these convents. And, of course, she’s Benedictine in understanding that she has to mix the active and the contemplative life. She’d having to deal with all the politics and the ambitions and the suspicions of others about her reform movement, and at the same time to deal with the spiritual and the pastoral concerns in the movement as well.

And then really late in her life, just five years before she died, she wrote The Interior Castle. And one of the most important works you can ever read for understanding intimacy with God is for you to read The Interior Castle. It’s the heart of her understanding. And of course, the heart beat is Augustine: let me know thee, O God; let me know myself. And so when we read The Interior Castle, we’re being introduced into this inner pulse beat of the inner life of Teresa. So what is the castle? Well, it’s certainly a castle in Spain. So of course, Castile and Aragon were full of castles because of the reconquest. But she uses that metaphor to indicate a castle is one’s own soul.

[00:29:19]

And it’s the preciousness that each one of us can have in living with the presence of God. So she sees the castle like a beautiful crystal; a crystal that’s shining in the sun. It’s like a big diamond that is precious beyond all value. And such is the preciousness of each of us to God is how she now sees her life. But it’s also a castle in the sense it’s got lots of rooms. She’s aware of the phrase, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ But these mansions are not the Father’s mansions; they’re Teresa’s mansions. And so Teresa lives, of course, like we do, with a lot of cellarage, with a lot of cupboards of clutter that we want up and close and hide. So the imagery she’s trying to communicate is that God is dwelling in us and in that Christ is the hope of our glory and glorification. But while he dwells within us there’s an awful lot of spring cleaning that He’s got to do with the clutter of our inner lives.

[00:30:43]

What she sees in her picture is that the throne room in the castle is right at the heart of the castle. And the throne room is, of course, the centre where the King of Kings and Lord of Lords is on His throne. But how do we get there? How do we get to the throne room? Well, there are the outer courts. There’s the moat from the outside world. And one of the things you discover when you go into a conventional life, as Teresa discovered, or as the Desert Fathers discovered, is that you bring the outside world inside. And so if you start as being worldly then your life in the convent is worldly, as she knew well. And likewise, if our prayer life is because we live worldly lives, our prayer life will be very worldly too. We think that it’s the environment that will change us. No. It’s our hearts that change the environment. And so just as the Desert Fathers had fled from the wicked cities of Alexandria and then had gone to live in the desert, they were still living in the imagination of the red-light districts of Alexandria, in spite of being in the desert.

And one of the things that we discover, all of us, is that the central problem of our heart is that lust thrives with loneliness. Lust for many of us is an index of loneliness. So if we have good fellowship with other people, especially genuine friends with the opposite sex, we will not be lustful in our inner heart. And so the first series of mansions are the rooms which are the overcrowded area of our natural and even lustful thoughts that need an honesty to face and to desire God rather than any other. So she sees that the first mansions are full of creepy crawlies. All the serpents that thrive in the desert moat are very accessible to the first mansions. It’s the kind of thing that often I’ve found with students when they come to me in the last term before they graduate with their MDiv. Oh please, I’m ashamed to say it, but instead of preparing my sermon on a Sunday, I’m still reading Playboy. How in the world can I have such filthy thinking when I’m supposed to be a pastor? It’s no different from what Teresa experiences. So it’s a very good experience for MDiv students to read Teresa’s Interior Castle.

[00:34:16]

The second series of mansions are when we’re getting cleansed of these things. We’re getting closer to a walk with God, but now we’re beginning to discover that to take the Christian life seriously we have a lot of discomforts. We get frustrated. We get hurt and wounded. We discover it’s no fun to be a Christian. It’s not got the excitement that we thought in our conversion. And so we began to face a deluge of troubles. And that’s what we find, says Teresa, in the second series. And these are still keeping us from the throne room, of course. And then in the third series of mansions, now we are becoming more disciplined. We’re now much more ascetic. Now we’re having a regular time of prayer. We’re beginning to have what Richard Foster encouraged us to have: spiritual disciplines. And it’s good that we have these things. But we find ourselves facing a shocking situation in these third series of mansions. What we think is our goodness is not God’s interpretation of His holiness. I’m a good Christian, you say. Well, when you claim to be a good Christian, you don’t know anything about the holiness of God. Yes, others may admire you because you’re good, but because you’re good you’re not holy. You’re actually more subtly a prisoner of yourself than you ever were in the first series of mansions.

There’s nothing worse than being a pious Christian. Well, you say, wait a minute, what’s this course about? Is it not about piety? And yet you now discover with sobriety that the person who is pious is no different from the eldest son in the father’s house: he’s more lost than the prodigal. One of the people that I would recommend that you have as a guide to explore The Interior Castle is Ruth Burrows, an English Carmelite, and so she knows what she’s talking about having lived the Carmelite life like Teresa. And so I’d recommend two of her books. The first one is called Interior Castle Explored and her second book is called Guidelines for Mystical Prayer. Perhaps the Guidelines is where you might start. But basically, she interprets not mansions now, she’s talking about islands. And so she sees the first three mansions like being on one island and the other four mansions as being on another, different island. You’re really out to sea in the second island.

[00:37:38]

She sees that the first island is honeycombed with caves. It’s all the ways in which in our subtle carnal motives, which are concealed and need rooting out, attitudes that we’ve got to face. And so Ruth Burrows sees that to go from the third to the fourth mansions is fundamentally a radical re-understanding of conversion. And so I have recently been emphasising in my own teaching there’s a difference between conversion and metanoia. Conversion is a turnaround, but it’s still not a radical turnaround. It’s certainly moving towards God and redemption and seeking His mercy that we’re saved. We’ve now become a good Christian perhaps. We’re now serving the Church. But the radical shift to the other island is a metanoia experience, a paradigm shift. And in the process, we go through a sea of chaos. We’re re-interpreting our whole way of life.

And Charles Taylor has used this concept of metanoia in his recent researches as a social philosopher. So he sees that people like Dostoyevsky, when this young revolutionary with his ten companions are in revolt against the tsar and they’re blindfolded ready to be shot with the firing squad. And a horseman gallops up: put down your guns or rifles. These men are to be saved. The tsar has given them a pardon. And it was in that five minutes of waiting for death that Dostoyevsky had his metanoia. Most of us as Christians don’t have that kind of trauma, but that’s what we mean. There’s a paradigm change—utterly different way of life now ensues. And that’s what Ruth Burrows by going from the first island to the second. We’re no longer talking about living a happy Christian life or a consoled Christian life. We’re now talking—not simply as Augustine and Bernard have talked about—of desires for God. Now we’re delighting in God. It’s gustos. Now my life is lived with a joy that reaches me through pain. It’s an awareness that I live transcendently in spite of my sufferings, in spite of all the things that have so frustrated me in the past. And so when she talks about mystical experience, it means that in the fourth mansions Christ is now dwelling in her and the love of Christ is flooding her being. That’s what she means by the drenching of the rain.

[00:41:39]

The fifth mansion is the mansion when having experience this other new way of life and living no longer as self-controlled and self-willed and self-directed, it’s now that my life no longer counts. It’s now not me, but Christ that is the hope of glory. She now discovers an ecstasy of joy that she’s experienced that began in the fourth mansions, but is now giving way to a contentment with a hidden life. In the fifth mansions, your life is hid with Christ in God. And so she echoes the thought of Colossians 3. And as I meditated myself in an essay that expressed very deeply an experience in my life: was I content to live hid with Christ in God? Well, as Paul describes it, there’s no difference between living hid in Christ and actually dying with Christ. And so Colossians 3:1 that says my life is hid with Christ is always already by Colossians 3:3 describing our dying with Christ. You’re dying to your self-significance. You’re dying to what other people think about you. You’re dying to all the people around you might be conceiving about you to be. And so she sees this stage and she uses now a different metaphor and it’s the metaphor of the cocoon.

You know the parable of the little caterpillar, that like all the other caterpillars of the Earth, millions upon millions, they all form a pillar, and they’re climbing over each others’ backs to reach the view at the top. And this little caterpillar determines that it must be a wonderful view at the top of this heaving mass of caterpillars, competitively starts his climbing and puffing and huffing and pushing and elbowing and out-competing and out-rivalling everybody else. But the closer the caterpillar gets to the top, he’s finding there are more caterpillars coming down and they’re mumbling and saying to themselves it’s not worth the view. It’s not worth it. So he begins to think well, I haven’t reached the top. I haven’t seen the view. I suppose I should listen to what these others are saying. So he sneaks down again, feeling totally defeated with himself because he hasn’t reached the top. He sulks. He goes onto the fence and onto the post there he dies. That’s the end of his life. It isn’t. It’s a chrysalis.

[00:45:09]

And so Teresa, although she didn’t know this parable, is exactly using the same metaphor when she tells us that the Christian life is a chrysalis that has to die, but in its death it becomes a butterfly. It flies over the pillar of the heaving caterpillars and has a far more glorious view than the caterpillar ever dreamt of ever having. And so this beautiful picture of the cocoon and butterfly is the analogy she’s now using in the fifth mansions. To use another language that she is also using, it’s now the spiritual betrothal when one’s not only in love with Christ, one is committed to Christ. Christ is the centre of my life. Christ is the love of my life. I’m in passionate love with him.

[00:46:23]

You say how far can you go beyond that? Oh, that’s only the fifth mansion. Then comes the sixth mansion. And this is the longest description of The Interior Castle because what we now need to discover most of all is continual spiritual discernment about all that’s been going on within one’s life. It’s retrospective. And it’s now beginning to experience the wound of love. Of course, we would love to have the life of the angels, but God has given us the life of being human. And the life of being human is to suffer. Angels don’t. So yes, they’re ministering spirits. They’re given wings like the seraphim. And we may think, as we think of Isaiah in the temple where the glory of the presence of God was where the Seraphim are flying with six wings, fantastic—six wings! And Richard of Saint Victor, who’s meditating about the Seraphim in Isaiah 6, is saying fantastic. What can you do with six wings? Think how you can improve your busy Christian life. And Richard, as he sees the holiness of God, he realises what do they use their wings for? With two, they cover their feet. Their activity is no longer needed. With two, they cover their faces in the abandonment of the self. They’re not looking at themselves any longer. It’s only with two they fly. The angelic life for Richard of St Victor was the life that is so impeded of the importance of the self and the reality of the presence of God that it’s all of God.

And so Teresa, although she probably had never read this in the work of Richard of St Victor in the 13th century, Teresa is saying you discover in the six mansions we’re not angels. We’re human.

[00:49:38]

George Herbert, a century later in his wonderful devotions of prayer, says man is such a dumb thing. Let the angels praise you. Give that job to them. And so yes, we experience that though we’ve had a remarkable experience of intimacy with God, each of the mansions is a new level that we’re having with God, but we discover that the wound of love cripples us. Where are you going? I don’t know. What’s going to happen tomorrow? I don’t know. What kind of life is this leading you to have? I don’t know. There’s a state of faith that almost seems a paralysis. And that’s what Teresa finds in the six mansions. But the seventh is when you actually enter into the throne room, right in the centre of your being, where Christ is enthroned as your bridegroom. Now it’s a homecoming to fall into the arms of the beloved in union and fullness of communion. And what happens in the seventh mansions? It’s all praise. It’s all everlasting praise.

Yes, Teresa would tell us that she was very human and that we’re very human. We have enormous obstacles, as she had, to overcome: her femininity in this crazy period. And so one of the most crazy of things is for feminist writers to think of Teresa as an icon of a 21st century woman. She’s not that kind of woman at all! She’s just the opposite. And it’s because it’s not the human spirit that comes out triumphant, it’s the spirit of Jesus that comes out triumphant. In me in my flesh, says Paul, dwells no good thing. It’s the wonderful, wonderful love of the Lord that can so remarkably transform our lives. So just as Anselm would pray to Peter because Peter is the one who knows about our fallenness and our best intentions and how we’ve denied our Lord, so Teresa is really the wonderful saint for all of us who cheers us on when a lot of our life we’ve lived is in frustration and the inadequacy of our prayer life. She knows all about that. She understands our hearts.

[00:52:43]

And so we leave her to now consider John of the Cross. No wonder Teresa has been such a remarkable saint of the Church. No wonder all of us need to have her in our own life.