Saint Teresa of Avila Archives

Little bit of heaven!

“Where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.” Matthew 18:20. This past week during prayer group the truth of this verse was most evident. Our group usually has 4-5 women who show up every Friday at 8 am. We either discuss a book, pray the Rosary or Chaplet of Divine Mercy or discuss a reflection for the day. Only two of us were available this week but we agreed to meet anyway. The funny thing is that we never agreed on what we would do, so we both showed up with something to discuss. I don’t think either of us were “married” to the idea that we had to discuss what we prepared. I think we were both open to let the Spirit lead and boy did it ever!

My prayer “partner” this week shared a book she was reading on the topic of St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castles. We had just enough time to discuss the intro to the book which summarized St. Teresa’s take on the 7 Castles of the soul. All I can say is WOW! I immediately came home and ordered the book for my kindle and also dusted off some CDs on the topic which I had purchased during a retreat I attended several years ago. God is good! We sat for an hour dissecting each paragraph of the intro and I think we both walked away with a deeper understanding of what St. Teresa was getting at.

After reading about one particular “castle” of the soul, I got the sense that St. Teresa was describing one’s ability to live in constant awareness. This reminded me of something I read in another book about living in the moment and developing a sense of awareness. The book described awareness as the ability to look at something without judgment and thereby see it much clearer. For example: if you look at a tree without thinking about its color, height, type, etc. – the tree itself becomes clearer in your vision, it seems closer. It’s beauty literally jumps out at you.

I continued to ponder my group discussion throughout the day, especially the idea of awareness. I realized the same rule of non-judgment we are urged to apply to inanimate objects also applies to people. If we look at people without judgment, they too can become much clearer. What does that mean? We see them for what they really are – children of God, souls on a journey. When our ability to see them becomes clearer, they become more beautiful in our sight. When they become more beautiful in our sight, our capacity to love them increases. We grow closer to them and to God and we journey deeper into the interior castle.

St. Teresa of Avila is a Catholic saint but her book on the interior castles is not just for Catholics. It’s focus is on the growth and transformation of the soul and not on Catholic theology. I highly recommend this book to everyone but especially to those who truly believe they’ve “arrived.” Upon reading this book you will soon learn you are not where you thought you were in terms of your spirituality and your relationship to God.

Of course, my God never lets a day go by without providing some spiritual reading that coincides with what I am currently meditating on. Once again, here is what I got this morning from Richard Rohr’s website:

I believe that God gives us our soul- our deepest identity, our True Self, our unique blueprint – already at our very conception. Our unique little bit of heaven is installed by the Manufacturer at its beginning! We are given a span of years to discover it, to choose it, and to live our own unique destiny to the full. The discovery of our own soul is frankly what we are here for.

Your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. We do not “make” or “create” our souls. We only awaken them, allow them, and live out of their deepest messages. Normally, we need to unlearn a lot of false messages – given by family, religion, and culture – in order to get back to that foundational life which is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it “conversion” or “repentance.”

As a young friar, I remember being very confused about Jesus beginning his preaching with the word “change” (Mark 1:15, Matthew 3:2). What was I supposed to change from? I was a good Catholic, a Franciscan, soon to be a priest, and trying to keep my vows. I assumed he meant it for other “bad” people. But those roles and identities were still all “forms,” not necessarily the substance of my soul. I hope you get the point. The false self is all the more delusional the more it appears to be “good.”

Saint Teresa’s description of the final castle sounds like what Rohr describes as “our unique little bit of heaven.” Are we willing to work on dying (to self) to get there? Isn’t that what we are here for? Step inside! God bless you!

If we really knew…..

During my morning prayer yesterday, I came across this reflection taken from Way of Perfection by Saint Teresa of Avila. I couldn’t resist sharing. Enjoy!

When asking a favor of some person of importance would anyone be so ill-mannered and thoughtless as not first to consider how best to address him in order to make a good impression and give him no cause for offense? Surely he would think over his petition carefully and his reason for making it, especially if it were for something specific and important as our good Jesus tells us our petitions should be. It seems to me that this point deserves serious attention. My Lord, could you not have included all in one word by saying: “Father, give us whatever is good for us”? After all, to one who understands everything so perfectly, what need is there to say more?

O Eternal Wisdom, between you and your Father that was enough; that was how you prayed in the garden. You expressed your desire and fear but surrendered yourself to his will. But as for us, my Lord, you know that we are less submissive to the will of your Father and need to mention each thing separately in order to stop and think whether it would be good for us, and otherwise not ask for it. You see, the gift our Lord intends for us may be by far the best, but if it is not what we wanted we are quite capable of flinging it back in his face. That is the kind of people we are; ready cash is the only wealth we understand.

Therefore, the good Jesus bids us repeat these words, this prayer for his kingdom to come in us: Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. See how wise our Master is! But what do we mean when we pray for this kingdom? That is what I am going to consider now, for it is important that we should understand it.

Our good Jesus placed these two petitions side by side because he realized that in our inadequacy we could never fittingly hallow, praise, exalt or glorify this holy name of the eternal Father unless he enabled us to do so by giving us his kingdom here on earth. But since we must know what we are asking for and how important it is to pray for it without ceasing and to do everything in our power to please him who is to give it to us, I should now like to give you my own thoughts on the matter.

Of the many joys that are found in the kingdom of heaven, the greatest seems to me to be the sense of tranquility and well-being that we shall experience when we are free from all concern for earthly things. Glad because others are glad and for ever at peace, we shall have the deep satisfaction of seeing that by all creatures the Lord is honored and praised, and his name blessed. No one ever offends him, for there everyone loves him. Loving him is the soul’s one concern. Indeed it cannot help but love him, for it knows him. Here below our love must necessarily fall short of that perfection and constancy, but even so how different it would be, how much more like heaven, if we really knew our Lord!