The First Dwelling Places
It is hard to overestimate the importance of understanding the role of the castle-symbol in Teresa’s text, The Interior Castle. The castle signifies the human person. As the person enters into oneself, it is the beginning of spirituality, human interiority. It is essential to understand, even in a minimal way, where all this is headed. The human person is made to be one with God. Teresa describes this destiny as moving into the center of the castle where God resides. God is the calling of all human beings. All of Teresa’s teachings flow from this foundational truth.Using the symbol of the castle, Teresa lays out the purpose of human existence. We need to pass through the purifying and transforming experience of the seven dwelling places to complete this passage into the mystery of God in love. This refocusing is a movement from ourselves as the center to God as the center.
We are invited to enter the castle, which is ourselves. The journey is a gradual process of enlightenment that refocuses the basic direction of our life. Our lack of knowledge of spiritual things does not matter. God’s grace has a way of shattering both our ignorance and resistance. This divine initiative seeks to restore the freedom and joy of Paradise. The human heart remains restless and searching. The return to that original unity with God at the center of all reality is the only source of true peace.
In describing this search, Teresa is unrelenting in emphasizing self-knowledge. We can only truly know ourselves in relation to God. While self-knowledge is important in all dwelling places, it is preeminent in the first dwelling places. The journey will not begin without it. Self-knowledge opens up our destiny. It becomes the measuring stick, the base of true values foundational to life’s real goal. This is why self-knowledge is so important. It is the expression of our reality. In our relationship to God, we are the totally dependent creature. God is the all-powerful Creator. We are the sinner. God is the merciful and loving savior.
Through self-knowledge, we learn of God’s intimate presence to all life. The mystery of God unfolds from within our person. All the external events of life open to the activity of God calling every person to the fullness of life. Teresa’s self-understanding is imbedded in four realities: her person, God, prayer and life. All are all intermingled. This Journey inwards begins with the seminal insights about these elements. They are the opening to the first dwelling places.
The first dwelling places, like all the other six dwelling places, is rooted in the never-changing call of God’s love. The problem particular to the first dwelling places is that the individual is entrenched in the superficial things of life. Over-involvement in worldly affairs and pleasures is the dominating norm of behavior. Addiction and attachment join ambition and other forms of self-indulgence and self-promotion to blind the person to God’s presence.
Regardless of the person’s awareness, God is always present to the individual in an abiding offer of love. A glimmer of the transcendent opens the window for just a small sliver of light. However this breakthrough occurs, the acceptance of this call is the entry into the castle. The journey begins. This is the major action of the first dwelling places. Without this first step, nothing happens. This first dwelling places conversion is the first of many conversions along the way. Each conversion is an ever-deepening falling in love with God.
The continuing growth of self-knowledge magnifies that first sense of transcendence, the opening to the infinite. This first feeble awareness of God opens the way. This experience leads to the question, “Who am I in relation to God?” This breakthrough is based on two repeating experiences of the heart. First, there is a sense of futility. Eventually, a basic unsatisfied hunger in the heart leads to the question, “Is this all there is?” Secondly, there is a yearning in the heart for the real, for something more authentic.
Teresa describes it this way.
“It is a shame and unfortunate that through our own fault we don’t understand ourselves or know who we are. Wouldn’t it show great ignorance if someone when asked who he was didn’t know, and didn’t know his father or mother or from what country he came? Well now, if this would be so extremely stupid, we are incomparably more so when we do not strive to know who we are, but limit ourselves to considering only roughly these bodies. Because we have heart and because faith tells us we have souls. But we seldom consider the precious things that can be found in this soul, or who dwells within it, or its high value. Consequently, little effort is made to preserve its beauty.” (IC 1.2)
Teresa insists that prayer is the way forward in all the dwelling places. The unique problem in the first dwelling places is the wearisome commitment to honor, possessions and business affairs along with the other deceptive attractions of the world. This is a true obstacle course for the fragile prayer. It is both unfamiliar and shallow in its early stages. It is similar to a swimmer gasping for air to avoid asphyxia. Yet, this is the critical first step on a long journey.
Ultimately, Jesus begins to come into the consciousness of the individual. Like the mustard seed, the Jesus awareness continues to grow and expand. The individual slowly begins to see that Jesus is truly the way, the life and the truth on the journey inward.
One leaves the first dwelling places by breaking loose of the crippling and paralyzing worldly attachments. Prayer empowers this initial freedom that is always partial and incomplete. Even though one moves on to the next dwelling places, the pull of worldly attachments is a true drag on the momentum forward. The individual brings a great deal of destructive baggage from their former lifestyle into the second dwelling places.
One final note here at the beginning will add to our understanding of Teresa’s message in her classic text. The fundamental description of growth is the journey inward through the path of each of the seven dwelling places. However, Teresa has another insight that is central to her message. Throughout The Interior Castle, Teresa uses the symbols of the castle, Christ and spiritual marriage to highlight three critical manifestations of growth on the way to the center of the person where God dwells. This teaching is an important part of her message. Teresa points to three special events that are elements of progress, three foundational advances on the journey home. In this first step, the person, in some way, realizes they are made in the image of God. This reflects the critical role of self-knowledge that begins in the first dwelling places. One slowly understands that the goal is to live in God. This profound truth is at the edge of awareness in the first dwelling place. It is like the light sneaking through all the blockage at the end of a tunnel immersed in darkness. True progress makes it glow brighter and brighter.
A second experience of growth is described in the fifth dwelling places. The person nurtures a strong relationship with Christ. Entry into the castle leads to some minimal contact with Jesus. This relationship grows steadily in the movement to the fifth dwelling places where it is a central activity revealed in the transformation of the ugly worm to the beautiful butterfly. This reveals the configuration of the person in the image of Christ.
The completion of the growth process is the mystical union with God in the seventh dwelling places. This is the spiritual marriage. Each of these stages of growth has special relevance on the pilgrimage to God that is The Interior Castle.
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