Saturday, October 15, 2022
Memorial of Saint Teresa, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Do not worry
Do not worry about what you are to say. For the Holy Spirit will teach you at that moment what you should say.
We are called to personal relationship with Jesus. John in the first verse of his first chapter says, “In the beginning was the Word (in Greek, logos). The Encyclopedia Britannica defines logos as word, reason, or plan.
We are studying the book of John in our Empty Nesters Sunday school class. Discovering this multitude of possible meanings, we took a quick jump to seeing that personal relationship with Jesus includes a personal relationship with the “Plan.”
In this case, the “plan” is for the Holy Spirit to teach you at that moment what you should say.
The plan does not preclude our own preparation, but what we do is not the be-all-and-end-all. I can relax after I make my plans, because I am in personal relationship with a plan much more far-reaching.
Teresa of Avila died today in 1582, at long last from a life-long illness. She trusted God’s plan far more than her own, and indeed, her own usually came apart at the seams.
Saint Teresa lived a rich, adventurous, mystical, practical life. She met secretly with another mystical giant, John of the Cross, for spiritual direction. She started Carmelite convents all over Spain, whose members committed to a much stricter (“discalsed” or barefoot) way of life. Over and over she encountered sometimes violent opposition. Always God gave her time to spend with him.
How could any of her plans been worth the paper they were written on? But God’s plan was priceless.
In her Autobiography, Teresa writes of this plan, as much as she had been shown, as one of ascent to God by four “devotions.” Wikipedia’s article describes these:
- Devotion of the heart. Mental prayer and contemplation on the passion of Christ.
- Devotion of peace. I surrender my human will to God, through an awareness granted by God, and experience quietude, peace, inaction.
- Devotion of union, essentially an ecstatic state of absorption into God. Along with my will, my reason is also surrendered to God.
- Devotion of Ecstasy, where consciousness of being in the body disappears. Sensory faculties cease to operate. Memory and imagination, along with my will and reason, become absorbed in God. Pain, unconsciousness, apparent strangulation, long periods of levitating, and deep tears characterize this culmination of mystical experience.
Teresa described all of this in her book, and all of it was observed by others in her life.
May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope, what are the riches of glory, what is the surpassing greatness of his power, and what is the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.
(Ephesians 1, Psalm 8, John 15, Luke 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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