Teresa of Avila lays out a map for seeking God in her classic on the spiritual life, The Interior Castle. She describes seven stages or dwelling places. For most of us, the third dwelling places is most relevant to our search.
The movement from the third dwelling places to the fourth dwelling places in the Interior Castle seems irrelevant to our life today. The reality, however, is different. The stagnation in the third dwelling places is the reason we have so much bickering within Christian groups and among loved ones. It is the root of so much tension in staff meetings and at the dinner table. It is the source of many of our problems in personal relations and the division between groups.
The contemplative switch, this movement from the third dwelling places to the fourth dwelling places, occurs when we experience a deep sense of being loved by God. This helps us accept ourselves in both our brokenness and giftedness. We begin to wait and listen to God. We are more open to be taught by God. The desire to control God continues to lessen. Now our prayer is that God will set us free to love with a pure heart.
in describing this path Teresa offers us a profoundly pastoral and practical message. Her teachings open up great vistas of possible new understanding and reconciliation.
The contemplative switch, moving on up to the fourth dwelling places and the beginning of contemplation, is based on these fundamental teachings of Teresa:
1. Having arrived in the third dwelling places the person is in a good place because of a meaningful moral conversion.
2. The strain at this point in the spiritual journey contrasts God’s call to move on with the person’s desire to settle down and enjoy the progress.
3. The great difficulty is that the flagrant egoism of the previous dwelling places has gone underground. Now it surfaces in the cloak of virtue which feeds one’s self-righteousness and hypocrisy in a way that is destructive and divisive at all levels.
4. This newly hidden selfishness is the dominant obstacle to progress. “To let go and let God” is a long, arduous passage. Teresa wavered around this decision for almost two decades in spite of a faithful prayer life.
Teresa’s teaching on this contemplative switch points to three possibilities:
1. rejection of God’s call which leads to division, hostility and conflict;
2. the call to struggle to move ahead which opens up possibilities of growth and reconciliation;
3. surrender to God’s call leading to the seeds of peace, harmony and justice in contemplation.
In his personal testimonial, The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis gives a vivid description of this failure to “move on up”, forsaking the battle to go beyond the third dwelling places:
“Those who have fallen into this worldliness look on from above and afar, they reject the prophecy of their brothers and sisters, they discredit those who raise questions, they constantly point out the mistakes of others and they are obsessed by appearances. …This is a tremendous corruption disguised as a good. We need to avoid it by making the Church constantly go out from herself, keeping her mission focused on Jesus Christ, and her commitment to the poor. God save us from a worldly Church with superficial spiritual and pastoral trappings. This stifling worldliness can only be healed by breathing in the pure air of the Holy Spirit who frees us from self-centeredness cloaked in an outward religiosity bereft of God.” (#97)
Here are a few concrete examples from parish life of the ego operating in the name of virtue which wreak havoc and division. The same principle is operative in family life, at work and in the larger community.
• a Eucharistic minister who insists on distributing the “bread” and not the “cup”;
• an ethnic group celebrating the unity and love of the Eucharist while intensely angry at another ethnic group of the parish selling used clothes outside during the Mass;
• a pastor who is deaf and blind when dealing with the recommendations of the parish council and economic committee;
• parents who are incapable of receiving any criticism of their child from a teacher;
• the chronic blaming of “those people” for the dirty kitchen even though they have no idea of who last used the facility.
These are just the firecrackers of parish life. The more destructive land mines of ethnic division and power struggles are examples of the many hurtful events constantly challenging unity. Clericalism, the abuse of power of some bishops and the Vatican bureaucracy ‘s hunger to control are among many forces driving the Church away from Gospel values. Pope Francis’ call for a “revolution of tenderness” seems a long way off.
Teresa has this powerful and relevant statement in this crisis of “moving on up” from the third dwelling places to the fourth dwelling places. Teresa describes it this way: “With humility present, this state (third dwelling places) is a most excellent one. If humility is lacking, we will remain here our whole life and with a thousand afflictions and miseries. For since we will not have abandoned ourselves, this state will be very laborious and burdensome. We shall be walking while weighed down with this mud of our human misery, which is not so with those who ascend to the remaining rooms.” (Interior Castle: 3.2.9)
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