Patrick Burke, O.Carm
‘The
soul can place itself in the presence of Christ and grow accustomed to being
inflamed with love for His sacred humanity.”
(Life, 12, 2)
St
Teresa in The Way of Perfection (40, 3), treating of the petition of
the Our Father “Deliver us from evil”, says that “those who truly love God,
love every good, desire every good, favor every good, praise every good.
They always join, favor and defend good people. They have no love for
anything but truth and whatever is worthy of love. Do you think it is
possible for a person who really loves God to love vanities? No, indeed, he
cannot; nor can he love riches or worldly things, or delights or honors or
strife or envy. All of this is so because he seeks only to please the
Beloved.” This truth, the result of Teresa’s sensitivity to the sufferings
of Jesus for us and of her fidelity to the practice of reflecting on the
gospel events, enabled her to make her own contribution, to put her own
special stamp, on Christian spirituality. Her concern was primarily to help
people grow in the friendship of God; and she strove to discover how best
Jesus Christ, God made man, was to be communicated and integrated in the
lives of Christians of her time. She was a product of her world, Spain of
the 16th century, when books and even instruction on religion were limited.
Her family background as well as the existing institutions of Church and
State were to cause her much anxiety and at times pain.
After
entering the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation at Avila and receiving
the habit in 1536, she had years of great physical sickness. At the
beginning of this period, she had made great progress in prayer and at times
experienced extraordinary intimacy with the Lord, what she believed to be
“union” with God. The weakness and depression that was associated with her
illnesses took a toll on her prayer life and for a period of years she
abandoned private prayer almost completely. It was ten years later - in 1554
- that she experienced a “conversion”. She was entering the chapel one day
and was confronted, as it were, by the “Ecce Homo” statue of the Suffering
Christ, which had been borrowed for a special celebration in the Convent.
Teresa writes (in Life 9,1): “It represented the much wounded Christ
and was very devotional, so that beholding it I was utterly distressed in
seeing Him that way, for it well represented what He suffered for us. I felt
so keenly aware of how poorly I thanked Him for those wounds that, it seems
to me, my heart broke. Beseeching Him to strengthen me once and for all that
I might not offend Him, I threw myself down before Him with the greatest
outpouring of tears.”
After
that experience, Teresa became more sensitive to God’s eternal plan of
consuming the evil of the world’s sin in the fire of suffering love which is
seen in the terrible passion of the Son, always intent on the eternal good
in which the world too should participate. Teresa was to learn more about
the mystery of the Cross. She wrote: “If you are experiencing trials or are
sad, behold Him on the way to the garden: what great affliction He bore in
His soul; for having become suffering itself, He tells us about it and
complains of it. Or behold Him bound to the column, filled with pain, with
all His flesh torn in pieces for the great love He bears you; so much
suffering, persecuted by some, spit on by others, denied by His friends,
abandoned by them, with no one to defend Him, frozen from the cold, left so
alone that you can console each other. Or behold Him burdened with the
cross, for they didn’t even let Him take a breath.” (W.P.26, 5).
Teresa portrays Christ as our primary teacher and by identifying His prayer
with ours, as He did in giving us the Lord’s Prayer, He teaches us still and
continues the work of the Word-made-flesh into the very heart of our world.
She writes: “And when I say, ‘Our Father’, it will be an act of love to
understand who this Father of ours is and who the Master is who taught us
this prayer.” (Ibid. 24, 2). Furthermore God wants us to remember Him
often when we say this prayer, even though because of our weakness we do not
do so.
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