Acceptance
Teresa of Avila is unwavering and straightforward: prayer is the key to our Pilgrimage to God. She is also unequivocal in her assertion that the importance of prayer, in all its stages, including contemplation, is a means to an end. The goal of all prayer is to lead us to love God and to love for our brothers and sisters.Teresa offers a program to help us to pray so we can love. The central insight of the program is acceptance of our human reality at every level of life. Teresa understood the need to accept reality as it is and not as something for us to control. In accepting reality, we are open to the pull of God’s call even if it seems contrary to our plans and interests. She learned to interpret reality by the measure of how it brought her closer to God and not as a source of her comfort, prestige and power.
In the three virtues of humility, detachment and charity Teresa saw the way forward to acceptance of self, of others, and of God. This openness to reality leads us face our ambivalence, confusion and brokenness. This acceptance is nurtured in the virtues of humility which is the acceptance of God, detachment as self-acceptance and finally acceptance of others in fraternal charity. Letting go and letting God in openness to our life situation is a centerpiece of Teresa’s program.
This acceptance is the way we overcome one of the outstanding obstacles to in our quest for God. This is ambivalence. We see the spiritual journey as important but it has to work in the context of our clear personal commitments. We are not anxious to shatter our schedule, to give up too much time, change our priorities and, especially, address our relationships, good and bad.
The Three Virtues
For Teresa, prayer is always an encounter with God who will transform and purify us. This is the only way to unity. To strengthen this prayer, Teresa insists on an agenda based on humility, detachment, and charity. These virtues have a dynamic relationship with prayer. The virtues bring an order into our disordered life. This new composure helps our prayer. At the same time, prayer helps us to grow in the acceptance that nourishes these life-giving virtues.
Humility
For Teresa, humility is not about a loss of self-esteem. This is a false and destructive misrepresentation of humility. Such a state is disturbing and conflicted. Teresa, on the contrary, says, “Humility does not disturb or disquiet however great it may be; it comes with peace, delight, and calm…this humility expands the soul and enables it to serve God more” (Way of Perfection. 10.2).
Humility for Teresa is the truth. By this she means that we acknowledge our fundamental relationship in reality. God is the Creator and we are the creature. God is the loving and merciful Creator and Savior. We are the sinful creature, loved and forgiven. Humility lets us embrace the truth of this certainty.
When we accept this truth about ourselves, we are on the road to freedom. We slowly begin to see more clearly who God is. This is the truth that creates our humility. We see ourselves more honestly with the gift of this virtue. Humility opens us up to the necessary personal conversion in our self-understanding. It lets us grasp the wonder of God calling us into the Mystery of Love even in our broken state.
Detachment
By detachment Teresa means that we must put all things in their proper perspective. We need to relate to all things in a way that helps us to grow closer to God. A personal relationship, a hobby, our cell phone, our car and so on will either enrich or diminish our relationship with God. Our sinful nature always struggles with inclination to let things short-circuit our pursuit of God. The human heart, devoid of prayer, is an idol-making machine. Our idols are always a distortion putting us at the center. Detachment exposes this lie and brings transparency to our deceptive hearts.
Only when things are seen in the right light, with a detached heart, does one realize the way to God. Otherwise, things are used only to prop up our selfish agenda. They are, then, contrary to our goal: to seek God.
Love for Our Neighbor
Charity is the proper acceptance of others. Love for our sisters and brothers is the index of our spiritual growth. For Teresa, the authenticity of our spiritual journey is measured by the quality of our interpersonal relations with others. This neighborly love is essential to the movement towards the center where God awaits.
The call to communal love is the most problematic stumbling block on our Pilgrimage to God. Our selfishness has incredible powers to twist things in justifying our judgmental self-righteousness. Teresa understood this well.
In her instruction to the sisters in her religious community she said:
“Beg our Lord to give you this perfect love of neighbor. Let his Majesty have a free hand, for He will give you more than you know how to desire because you are striving and making every effort to do what you can about this love, and force your will to do the will of your Sister in everything.” (IC 5.3.12).
Teresa has a simple example of how deep this practice is in ordinary life. She says if there is a person we find difficult, we should go out of our way to support and help that person. If that individual receives praise, we ought to rejoice as if the praise is for us.
There is no way I could be able to do that for many of my brothers and sisters whom I know I do not love as I should, to put it charitably. This is the same for most of us. We have a long way to go. There is a lot of ego that must be set aside. Of course, the ego stubbornly resists this. It is obvious that few of us will ever fully imitate Jesus on the cross, “Father forgive them for they do not know what they do” (Lk. 23:34).
Mutual Support
The dilemma is that we need prayer to grow in humility, detachment and charity. Our commitment to pray then is a dynamic relation between the virtues changing how we live and, in turn, how we pray to strengthen these very same virtues. There is a mutual growth cycle. It deepens both the prayer and the virtues on the way to final goal of personal integration.
This integration leads to the action of God in contemplation that roots out the final tenacious remnants of egoism and self-centeredness. This is the purification that precedes transformation. The embedded forces of self-righteousness and judgmental attitude give way to the purifying love of God. We can go just so far by ourselves. God alone can “close the deal” on the love that unveils the fullness of the original unity in final destiny of being one with God.
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