THE MYSTICAL JOURNEY THAT REVOLUTIONIZED CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY-3

Teresa’s Constant Plea: Self-knowledge and Humility

Teresa opens The Interior Castle with a description of the beauty and wonder of the human person. The basis of this great marvel is the presence of God. The human person is not only made in the image of God. This loving God is present at the deepest center of every human being. The destiny of each and every human being from the moment of conception is union with this God of love revealed in Jesus Christ.

Alongside this marvel of divine presence and human destiny, each person shares the destructive and pervasive consequences of Original Sin. This leads to the human battle of good and evil, sin and grace, the weeds and the wheat that dominates our lives and all of human history.

From time to time, Teresa lays out this dominance of sin that is the ugly condition of all of us. However, she puts more emphasis on the beauty and wonder of our heritage as children of this loving God.

When Teresa repeats her relentless call for self-knowledge and humility, she is deeply conscious of the battle within the human heart. However, she is always leaning to the gracious gift of God’s ever-present call to life, love and new life.

This great Carmelite Saint never tires of proclaiming the absolute importance of self-knowledge. She points out its significance even in the early material of the first Dwelling Places, in fact it is a major theme of this first section of the Interior Castle. Likewise, she is ever singing the beauty and importance of humility that she understood as living out the the truth of our relationships with God: “Once I was pondering why our Lord was so fond of this virtue of humility, and this thought came to me – in my opinion not as a result of reflection but suddenly: it is because God is supreme Truth; and to be humble is to walk in truth for it is a very deep truth that of ourselves we have nothing good but only misery and nothingness. Whoever does not understand this walks in falsehood.” (IC 6.10.7)

Teresa says shortly afterwords: “While we are on this earth nothing is more important to us than humility.” (IC II-9)

She continues proclaiming the wonders and importance of self-knowledge and humility empathizing that we will never truly know ourselves without true knowledge of God.

Our sinful condition creates a relentless pull to center on ourselves as the final measure of reality. Our independence is what truly matters. This self-centeredness is the central consequence of our heritage from Adam and Eve. The Christian life, the call to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, is a movement away from this self-absorption.

The gospels are full of teachings by Jesus that make this truth of self -knowledge very immediate and concrete. In Mark we read: “If anyone wants to be first, he must make himself last of all.” (Mk 9:35) Matthew tells us: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 10:39) Again, John says: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” (Jn 12:24) Finally, Matthew adds: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” (Mt 16:24)

This struggle for self-knowledge and humility is at the heart of the ever-present tension of good and evil that is the heavy burden of the human heart. As a result, all of life both on the personal and social level is caught up in this perpetual battle. The heart is always on the edge of human ambivalence which is in a constant search to water down the gospel of Jesus Christ to make life more comfortable. Teresa’s consistent plea is for us to keep our eyes and heart on Jesus.

Teresa resolved this very harsh reality as a sinner standing before God in this way. She found the answer in a simple gesture. She grew in a deeper awareness of her personal brokenness while at the same time, she had an even stronger embrace of God’s limitless and always available mercy. She saw herself as a world class sinner but a sinner who was loved and forgiven. This led her to declare often, “The story of my life is the story of God’s mercy.”

By this she means that when she had arrived at the deepest and clearest moment of her life, her “Lord, save me!” moment, she learned what it meant to be a creature. She embraced the fact of her reality as creature because for her it meant she was cradled in the loving hands of a gracious Creator revealed in her great friend and Savior, Jesus Christ. The ultimate reality is that God is good not that we are good. In the end, God’s limitless mercy is her victory.

Teresa understood self-knowledge as our relationship with God. To truly know ourselves, we must accept our creaturehood in all its limits, most especially our mortality. This is to recognize our total and absolute dependence on God. This should make us share Teresa’s insight that our life may be the story of God’s mercy.

Humility’s role is to help us live out the truth of our awareness of self-knowledge. It directs us on the journey away from the False Self and its message of lies and distortions. It shows the way to the True Self which draws us into the Mystery of Love. It guides us into a gospel-rooted lifestyle of love and service. It goes beyond seeing the goodness and mercy of God to accepting it and letting it direct our lives as children of God.

Read More

THE MYSTICAL JOURNEY THAT REVOLUTIONIZED CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY-2

God Is Our True Destiny 

This the second of a series of blogs on some major themes of The Interior Castle.

When Teresa was a child, she was taught about the utter importance of saving her soul. This meant avoiding hell. So, she convinced her brother that they should go to the land of the Moors and die as martyrs and go straight to heaven. They only had gone short distance from their home when they began to re-think the issue and return home. It was Teresa’s first experience with ambivalence, selling God short with the very human practice of compromise.

It was a hard and long journey for Teresa to embrace the true freedom to let go and let God. This happened when she eventually realized that union with God was her true and singular destiny. Finally realizing in the depth of her heart that God was the goal, she began to filter everything in her life through this overwhelming truth. She began to see her life and all of reality with an extraordinary unity. Her values changed and her life now had an outstanding harmony. This opened her up for God as all-loving and all merciful.

It was in this time of full spiritual maturity that she wrote The Interior Castle, the journey through the stages of progress to the center and final calling of the Castle, to be in union with God.

In this painful pursuit of God that she describes so beautifully in her text, Teresa discovered several truly important details about her destiny. These insights gave her a clear sense of direction. Growing wisdom allowed her to see that union with God was the final and ultimate calling of her life. Therefore, everything else needed to be measured in light of this goal. Death is simply a step on this journey.

In the following reflections on the themes of The Interior Castle, there are many truly significant truths about the spiritual life. Self-knowledge, humility, prayer and service are all critical to this journey to God. However, none is more important for Teresa than the energizing and unifying goal of union with God. This is the spiritual life, in the final analysis

Teresa sets the stage for the journey to seek God with the image of the Castle. We need to recall that for Teresa, the Castle is a symbol for the human person. The path is to God at the center of our being.

We can see that the over-all message of The Interior Castle in the following points:

1. The goal is union with God. This will take place in this life by purification and transformation in one’s journey to the center, where God dwells. Failing that, we will pass through purgatory after this life has ended. Either way, we end up united with God. However, the method and time are our choice.
2. The journey to the center, where God awaits, unfolds in our ever-deeper awareness and acceptance of God’s love and mercy.
3. The way forward in the experience of God is a process of letting go of our selfishness. In that process there is a relentless exposure of the depth and breadth of our self-absorption. Teresa is clear that only God can both expose and transform the deeper levels of self-love.
4. She presents a vision for our journey to the center but little is said about methods of prayer emphasizing the unique and constant call to be open to the Spirit on the journey.

In the end, it is all about love and service for our sisters and brothers which we embrace by participating in the coming of God’s kingdom of justice and peace and the integrity of creation.

The other themes so prominent in the Interior Castle are rooted and emerge from the clear goal awaiting at the center of the Castle: union with God.

The text reveals a long passage which is the spiritual life. Prayer is the only sure entry into the Castle. Teresa calls this beginning of a relationship with God as becoming “the servants of love”. However, it soon becomes apparent that prayer demands the twofold gift of self-knowledge and humility. Likewise, the growth in prayer needs the support of Teresa’s Program of integrating and practicing the three qualities of humility, detachment and fraternal charity.

Even with these gifts of deep personal generosity, it is only God’s action that will provide the final purification and transformation that prepares us for the new life of being one with God.

In all of this, Teresa gives us a beautiful and ever-so-useful road map to the life-giving experience of the Divine Presence. This is the gospel truth of the way, the life and the truth. It all grows out of the clear destination of union with God.

Read More

THE MYSTICAL JOURNEY THAT REVOLUTIONIZED CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY-1

The Interior Castle: Teresa of Avila’s Major Text

This the first of a series of blogs on some major themes of The Interior Castle.

The Interior Castle was the most important and influential of all of Teresa’s writings. As a Doctor of the Church, we are assured that her message is profoundly rooted in the gospel of Jesus. The original audience of the text was a small group of nuns in the early days of her reform. Today it is a major classic in Christian spirituality. It has been published in dozens of languages. It has been a consequential contributor to our understanding of the many levels of experiencing God in our long and rich tradition of Christian spirituality.

Teresa wrote her classic text from the graced gift of her experience of pursuing God and receiving God in her life. She wrote from her experience as a woman which was very rare in her day. It was an era marked by truly powerful patterns of a destructive and truly ugly sexism that saturated all levels of society. Her style of insightful writing is very different but complementary to the very analytical and theological writing of John of the Cross. Both are fundamentally poetic and deeply insightful in their message to walk with Jesus.

Teresa’s message was simple but revolutionary. For her, God is the Creator, all loving and all merciful. She is the creature, sinful but loved and forgiven. As a sinner she was caught in the unrelenting pull toward creatures and away from God. She saw herself immersed in the persistent appeal to choose the lesser gods and their deceptive illusions of happiness. However, in Jesus, she understood that she lived in a sea of loving mercy. Her life was a constant movement to choose the gift of love and mercy over the deceiving attraction to the creature comfort and control that led to self-absorption and isolation.

Teresa wrote with passion, clarity and intensity about this eternal struggle to free her heart to love God alone and turn away from the deceiving power of self-love.

In this painful pursuit of God, she discovered several truly important items that opened up and facilitated her understanding and commitment to her true destiny.










Gradually, she saw with new and deeper insight that union with God was the final and ultimate calling of her life. Everything else needed to be measured in light of this goal. Death is simply a step on this journey.

Other significant factors on the passage are self-knowledge, God’s will, prayer, fraternal charity and service. Teresa adds her Program which is the development of the three virtues of humility, detachment and charity. These clear the mind and heart to seek God in all the actions of one’s life.

Teresa shows the importance of all these spiritual themes in her classic text, The Interior Castle. This text has a simple organizational arrangement. There are seven levels or steps leading to the final destiny, union with God. These different stages are called Dwelling Places from the gospel use of the term by Jesus. Each describes the individual’s path of growth on the spiritual journey. The first three quickly describe the beginning of our movement out of ourselves and towards God. Teresa is in a hurry to get to her special message of how God acts in our spiritual life. In the first three, human effort is the key. In the last four it is God’s action that predominates. The fourth Dwelling Places is like a bridge to this divinely driven activity called contemplation.

I hope to present a series of reflections on these themes in the following blogs on The Interior Castle. The first will be on the importance of our clear destiny to be one with God.

My fondest hope is that these reflections will be a helpful enlightenment about the need for a truly gospel-driven spirituality that will help us walk with Jesus in a love that continues to grow in depth and intensity. As always, the growth of deep personal payer will be a driving force in this search.

Read More