Patrick Burke,
O.Carm.
Teresa was now
over twenty years in religious life and aged over forty. She had come
through periods of very ill health and now was well. But she wasn’t happy
about her spiritual life, always struggling to improve herself. In her
Autobiography she admits that her intellect was so poor that it could never,
never imagine heavenly and sublime things”. She says: “I had such little
ability to represent things with my intellect that if I hadn’t seen the
things, my imagination was not of use to me.” It seems she had no
photographic mind. Then something special happened to her. One day as she
entered the oratory, she saw a statue of the wounded Christ, the Ecce Homo
of the Passion. It struck her forcefully. “I was utterly distressed in
seeing Him that way for it vividly represented what He suffered for us. I
felt so keenly how ungrateful I was for those wounds that I thought my heart
would break. I threw myself at his feet with the greatest outpouring of
tears” (Life 9, 1). Her reaction to seeing this statue may have been
the result of a growing awareness of her need to do something about her
prayer. “Since I could not reason this out, I strove to picture Christ
within me.” She found more comfort in the garden scene of Gethsemane where
Jesus was more alone and afflicted. There she strove to be His companion, a
person in need -so that He had to accept her. She thought of the sweat and
agony and desired “to wipe away the sweat He so painfully experienced.” Yet
she admits: “There were many distractions that tormented me.”
She explains that
her method of praying requires less dependence on reflection; yet it makes
more progress, because “it advances in love”. It deepened her relationship
with the suffering Christ. Those who follow this way, she says, “will find
that a book can be a help for recollecting oneself quickly.” It was during
this period of renewed spirituality that she got a copy of the Confessions
of St. Augustine, probably the translation published in Salamanca in 1554.
She was very fond of the great Saint, especially because he had been a
sinner whom the Lord had healed. What he had done for Augustine He could do
for her. One thing left her inconsolable:
Sinners like
Augustine, the Lord had called only once and they did not fall again,
whereas “in my case, I had failed so often that I was worn out.” As
she read the Confessions, she prayed more to St. Augustine for help for
herself. When she came to the account of his conversion and of the voice in
the garden, it seemed to her that “it was I the Lord called. I remained for
a long time totally dissolved in tears, feeling within myself utter distress
and weariness” (Life 9, 8). She seemed to drain herself of her past, the
times when she was weak, vain, when her love was fragile, her service
mediocre. What happened seemed to be a decisive step towards the Lord. It
was like a drastic conversion with effects in her external life; community
room chats and pastimes immediately decreased; her prayer became more
constant and her solitude increased.
Here was the
beginning of the transformation that changed an ordinary nun into the
contemplative that has become a Doctor of the Church. From then on Teresa
felt that the Lord was Preparing her for exceptional graces, granting her
great favors, especially in the life of prayer, without any merits on her
part. In Chapter 10 of her Life she begins to tell about the favors she
received in prayer. Sometimes as she pictured Christ within her “in order to
place myself in His presence”, she experienced “the presence of God
unexpectedly so that I could not doubt that He was within me or I totally
immersed in Him”. She says that they call such an experience “mystical
theology” (Life 10, 1), a term she probably found in Osuna’s Alphabet. The
soul is suspended in such a way that it seems to be completely outside
itself. What she means is that the will loves but the intellect or memory or
understanding do not function. Yet it does understand what God represents to
it.
Where theology is
accepted as a “knowledge of God”, speculative if it is a knowing
obtained by reasoning and argument, mystical if it is a knowing
obtained in the soul by God’s own action, it is taught only by God. Teresa
is saying that she acquires the knowledge merely by being receptive rather
than active or by reasoning. She acknowledges that “everything is given by
God”; but you can help God as it were, “by considering our lowliness and the
ingratitude we have shown towards God, the many things He did for us, His
Passion with such terrible sorrows. If some love accompanies this activity
the heart is touched with tenderness” (Life 10, 2). Teresa is explaining the
graces the Lord had begun to give her in prayer.
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