Teresa of Avila’s classic, The Interior Castle, is about purification and transformation on the pilgrimage to God. It has an uncanny similarity to the role of purgatory in our salvation. The following five reflections seek to flesh out some positive elements in this connection. In sum, it is our invitation to a deeper and more productive spiritual life.
PART ONE
The Spiritual Life as Purification and Transformation
One of the clear lessons of Teresa of Avila’s classic, The Interior Castle, is this: the true purpose of prayer is not to change God, but to let God change us. Her program of deep personal prayer fosters a spiritual growth that purifies and transforms of the individual. This cleansing within the person is quite similar to what we understand happens in purgatory.
When we pray regularly with deep personal commitment, things happen within us. Purification, and the consequent transformation, produce a new consciousness. We begin to trust with a new sense of spiritual security. Faith leads us to be open to God leading us through the dark paths of life. Our relationships are enriched with a new sense of compassion. Likewise, we become more accepting and gentler with ourselves and with others. Failures become less troubling and even seem as an opening to let God take over. Our moral lapses are acknowledged. We find that we do not need to be in constant pursuit of looking good. All of these changes are gradual and almost always include times of regression and outright failure. The key is perseverance.
As our prayer becomes more authentic, there is a movement toward our true center where God is. This means moving beyond the superficial self, a self that is shaped by the advertising world of never-ending new products to fill the void in a misdirected heart. This is the self propped up by a lifetime pattern of self-absorption. Prayer brings us to an inner passage leading to the true self. This journey inward in prayer offers innumerable blessings, yet, in the early stages, it is always limited and deficient. We gradually come to see how distant we are from our real destiny: union with God.
With growth in this new focus on God in prayer, even deeper-seated changes within us continue to mature. The gospel values of Jesus’ message begin to take root. We begin to see the need for more honesty and authenticity in all our relationships to persons, things and ideas. We find it easier to cast out the log in our eye and to be more accepting of others in all their faults. “Either/or” thinking begins to fade away. The “both/and” view of life blossoms as a real possibility for us. Finally, we steadily begin to experience life as embedded in an overwhelming sense of God’s gracious presence. Prayer opens the road for our return to Paradise. In this movement toward God, Teresa of Avila offers a parallel to Purgatory’s goal of purifying and preparing us. The big difference is that in her strategy all this takes place in this life.
The purpose of this purification, whether in purgatory or in spiritual maturity in this life, is to transform us to be ready for union with God. There is a need to get rid of all false consciousness and self-centeredness along with blindness to God’s love and mercy. In other words, we are becoming a new being in the image of Christ. This happens with a gradual insight and acceptance into the absolute power, beauty and love of God. Likewise, we begin to accept ourselves as sinful, broken persons who live in a sea of God’s mercy. We are both forgiven and loved beyond the wildest measure of our imagination. Teresa’s genius in The Interior Castle offers the road map to show how this happens in the seven stages that she calls dwelling places.
What does this purification look like in the concrete? Here are a few examples. It is a family living in harmony driven by communal self-sacrifice. It is an individual’s and society’s growing awareness of white privilege immersed in a history of racism and total neglect of indigenous peoples. It is a generous openness to rid our culture of the long-standing patterns of sexism and the degradation of women. It is a growing willingness to cast off grudges rooted in history and personal grievance. It is a developing understanding that authentic consumption should not only be limited to personal need. It should include the need of the poor. It is the acceptance of personal responsibility and sacrifice as integral to the solution ending the abuse of God’s Creation.
In Galatians (5:19-23), Paul lays out this process of purification and transformation as a movement from the flesh to the Spirit. “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, strife, jealousy anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing and things like these…By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
