Teresa of Avila

The Resurrection and Prayer

I

In Teresa’s writing there is practically no mention of the resurrection. She places her focus dramatically and consistently on the crucified Christ. This disregard of the resurrection prevailed in much of our Christian history.

Vatican II and the consequent Liturgical Renewal have taught us to center on the Pascal Mystery which sees the death and resurrection as one saving act. This has led to a much greater emphasis on the often undervalued event of the risen Christ.

However, there is one element of Teresa’s teachings that ties in nicely with this new prominence of the resurrection. Teresa drew attention to the purpose of our life as union with God. This led to a powerful sense of transcendence in all of her teachings. Using the inspiration of this fundamental insight, she came to measure the value of the events in her life against the background of transcendence


The renewal of the Resurrection today is great gift. We are invited into a deeper appreciation of the risen life and its call to measure all present reality against this call to transcendence. We are invited to be an Alleluia people. We are asked to see death as a transition to our final goal, the fullness of life for all eternity. That new life begins now when we walk in love. Love transcends death.

The beauty of this final destiny is seldom used as the measuring stick for our daily life. The spirit of prayer was pervasive for Teresa despite the great burdens she carried because of the pettiness of politicians and church leaders. Frequent community opposition to her new convents and red tape and hidden political agendas seemed the norm rather than the exception. Added to mix was a big dose of racism and classism on her journey to God. She faced the good and bad with a deep sense of peace believing everything was helping her to move forward in her pursuit of God.

She even faced death with this deep sense of peace. Few of us will respond with an Alleluia when the doctor tells us our cancer is hopelessly terminal. Kubler-Ross, with its gradual entrance into the mystery of death, is the more likely guide. Teresa skipped steps one to four and embraced God’s will with the surrender of a joyful Alleluia.

Teresa had arrived at a point in life where all events, the good and the bad, blessings and trials, were measured against the final backdrop of eternity’s gift of full union with God. This was a radical breakthrough. This was the source of her patience and saintly freedom. This understanding let her live the mystery of the resurrection in the flow of events in her daily life.

On this point, Teresa was emphatic. We are made to be one with God. It happens by purification and transformation. We can do it in this life by total faithfulness to the Gospel message or do in the next through the purifying process of purgatory.

Prayer was the main source of insight and energy for Teresa in this pursuit of God. She arrived at this clarity and strength after a long battle with mediocrity. It took her almost two decades to get to the point where only God was sufficient. She finally was able to put herself, the world and God in the right order. Humility, detachment and charity were the driving forces that led her to peace in her single-minded pursuit of God.

II

The process of encountering God’s word involves three steps. We need to hear the word. We need to understand the word. We need to live the word. In Teresa’s battle with mediocrity, this three-step process of bringing God’s word into her life was a treacherous obstacle course. The struggle was with self-knowledge. The light of God’s word let her see that true awareness of herself was essential to spiritual growth. As she says in The Interior Castle, “Oh, but if it is in the room of self-knowledge! How necessary this room is – see that you understand me – even for those whom the Lord has brought into the very dwelling place, where he abides, for never however exalted the soul may be, is anything else fitting for it, nor could it be even were the soul to so desire. For humility, like the bee making honey in the beehive, is always at work. Without it, everything goes wrong.” (IC 2.8)

III

Teresa began to see that the task of deep, personal prayer was to expose and destroy the world of self-deception, illusions and a sense of self-grandiosity that sees the individual at the center.

Teresa was on a journey that involved many conversions. These personal passages of transformation gradually expanded her self-knowledge. With this gift of growing self-knowledge she began to see reality as it is rather than as she wanted it to be. In this growing acceptance, she matured in openness to the pull of God’s call no matter how it seemed contrary to her plans and interests. In the social sphere she broke free of the honor system that dominated Spanish society. She cut through the inflexibility of social divisions that controlled the Spain of her day.

In this continual commitment to deep, personal prayer Teresa carried her growing self-knowledge to a singular governing insight that became the foundation of all reality for her. This saintly Carmelite grew to comprehend that only by recognizing our weakness and sinfulness are we able to grasp the depth of the mystery of God.

“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.” (IC 1.9)

Only by owning our utter poverty can we get a meaningful perspective of our relation to God. Teresa grew into the simple, overwhelming truth: God is the creator, we are the creature. God is the loving and merciful creator and savior. We are the broken and sinful creature, loved and forgiven. God’s love is without condition and God’s mercy is without limits. As the sinful creature, we are bathed in this love and mercy. All this flows from the goodness of God.

“But his Majesty well knows that I can boast only of his mercy, and since I cannot cease being what I have been, I have no other remedy than to approach his mercy and to trust in the merits of His Son and of the Virgin, his Mother, whose habit I wear so unworthily.” (IC 3.3)

Jesus is the full manifestation of this love and mercy. The privileged avenue to this mystery is deep, personal prayer. Like Teresa, we should pray that we understand that the story of our life is the story of God’s mercy.

Working out this insight of God as the center, Teresa learned to interpret reality by one simple rule. All is good if it brought her closer to God. All is bad if it did not bring her closer to God. She moved steadily away from experiencing life and her activities as a source of comfort, prestige and power. Success and failure were not her operating norms. This helped her to embrace the upside/down world of Jesus in the Gospels. This is what she meant by calling us to “Get Real.” Life and our experience either move us more into the mystery of God or they do not. Getting Real means measuring our experiences, our values, and our activities against the horizon of God.

This is why prayer was the central value of Teresa in focusing this goal in her life. Her program of humility, detachment and charity is all about helping in the journey of prayer in the pursuit of God.

So while Teresa very seldom verbalized the resurrection, she lived it. She truly was a person of the Alleluia. She definitely looked upon death as a passage to the next transition on the journey to God. She measured all the events of her life against the horizon of eternity revealed in the risen Christ.

Deep, personal prayer was her constant companion on the journey. Prayer is a means to an end: finding and loving God in our life as it opens to eternity.