This girl Teresa and that boy John

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Memorial of Saint Teresa of Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the Church

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

This girl Teresa and that boy John

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery. Mark my words!

Who was this amazing woman Teresa of Avila, who spent her life in Spain reforming Carmelite convents, mostly by beginning new ones with willing women who called themselves the Discalced Sisters, reformed and showing it by walking barefoot like the monks and hermits who long had dwelt on Mount Carmel in the Promised Land, the Holy Land?

Teresa was just the woman to lead them into holiness. She discovered God at all hours of the day and night, enduring visions and tremors and liftings up off the bed and all that sort of thing. She was indeed a mystic. Teresa wrote The Interior Castle about the levels of relationship available to us with God. She did not try to do these things on her own, but when they happened to her she did not push them aside, she didn’t pooh-pooh God, nor call him mistakenly the devil, as so many of her religious companions were tempted to do. As a co-creator she worked to not get ahead of God.

Although, sometimes she did.

For those times she found a confessor and fellow reformer named John of the Cross, who spent months imprisoned in a convent cell on the side of a cliff, where he wrote what many consider the most beautiful Spanish poems in history. John was Teresa’s spiritual director, her confessor, and her collaborator. He reformed the men while she reformed the women. They made a great team. None of the authorities liked them much, but they were popular with their people.

Through the Spirit by faith we await the hope of righteousness. In Christ Jesus nothing counts for anything but only faith working through love.

They each were gifted with God’s patience to overcome their own anxious desire to see things set right. Teresa was weak and a partial invalid all her life. John couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and the authorities tried again and again to shut it for him. His exploration of what he called the “dark night of the spirit,” which sometimes took him into the “dark night of the soul,” led him through emotional and spiritual caves of utter blackness, where only dark trust guided him sometimes forward, sometimes back in the midst of whispers, the source of which he often could not discern. Is that you, God? Get behind me, Satan. Woe is me, Lord, I am undone! Take my life and let it be.

Let your mercy come to me, O Lord, take not the word of truth from my mouth. Let me walk in liberty, let me delight in your commands. For you have set my heart free.

Teresa died into the arms of God. Her reputed last words were “O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another.” She was 67.

John spent his last months in great pain, brought on by a skin infection and subsequent sepsis. Years before he endured cruel floggings on the bare skin of his back, ordered by his monastery’s superiors when he refused to stop trying to reform them. Listening to his brothers as they read from the Song of Songs, he died. “Into your hands, O Lord …” were John’s last words. He was 49.

I don’t read Spanish, but even in English John’s love poem to God warms and then cuts my heart: 

One dark night,

fired with love’s urgent longings

– ah the sheer grace! –

I went out unseen,

my house being now all stilled.

 

In darkness and secure,

by the secret ladder, disguised,

– ah the sheer grace! –

in darkness and concealment,

my house being now all stilled.

 

On that glad night,

in secret, for no one saw me,

nor did I look at anything,

with no other light or guide

than the one that burned in my heart.

 

This guided me

more surely than the light of noon

to where he was awaiting me

– him I knew so well –

there in a place where no one appeared.

 

Oh guiding night!

O night more lovely than the dawn!

O night that has united

the Lover with his beloved,

transforming the beloved in her Lover.

 

Upon my flowering breast

which I kept wholly for him alone,

there he lay sleeping,

and I caressing him

there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

 

When the breeze blew from the turret,

as I parted his hair,

it wounded my neck

with its gentle hand,

suspending all my senses.

 

I abandoned and forgot myself,

laying my face on my Beloved;

all things ceased; I went out from myself,

leaving my cares

forgotten among the lilies.

 (Galatians 5, Psalm 119, Hebrews 4, Luke 11)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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