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St. Teresa of Avila and Prayer

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St. Teresa of Avila and Prayer The Published Articles of Ernest E. Larkin, O.Carm. St. Teresa of Avila And Prayer St. Teresa of Avila and Prayer Prayer is the heart of Teresa of Avila’s experiences are not to be given exaggerated life and teaching, her “way of perfection.” importance. The pearl lies beneath them. For her, prayer is the supreme meaning and Even so marvelous an experience as the value of human existence, since it is the inner infused prayer of union in the “V Mansions,” life that animates the exterior, the journey in which God’s presence is felt within that is the journey into reality. incontrovertibly, finds its greatest value in the Prayer is life before it is an exercise, a fact that it proceeds from the conformity of dimension of being before it is an experience. the human will to God’s will (V M 3:3). In Prayer means to be in touch with the Center of other words progress is measured by the one’s life, who is “the Divine Majesty” quality of one’s life, suggested but not dwelling in his own rooms in the depths of the exhausted by the experiences. This quality of interior castle, the figure for ourselves. This life depends on how thoroughly one has contact deep within where we merge with God become centered in the divine Center. and are transformed into God-centered This essay attempts to present a brief persons makes us the “new creation” of portrait of prayer as centering in Teresa’s Pauline theology and the dwelling place of teaching, especially as found in The Interior God of Johannine writings. Thus our true Castle. We begin with the goal (Part 1), since center is both in us and beyond us, and the this reveals the way (Part 11), and we will transcendence we yearn for is filled by God’s conclude with some reflections on the process. self-communication. Our center lives by the Center, and the result is fullness of life, The Goal perfect contemplation out of which flow The “VII Mansions” exhibit a style of community and ministry. life that externally is a return to the ordinary. We experience resonances of the The center has been reached as a permanent divine Presence within from the beginning and dwelling place, and normalcy has replaced the all through our search for inner meaning and fireworks of the “IV, V, and VI Mansions.” wholeness. These reverberations are There is now a single source of life, and it experiences or clusters of experiences that pulsates in all directions from the depth point constitute the passages along the way to the or summit within. Mystical phenomena, center. According to Teresa’s final including the oblivions of the “IV Mansions” accounting in her masterpiece, The Interior and the suspensions of the “V and VI Castle, there are seven such passages, which Mansions,” have largely disappeared, as have she calls las moradas, dwelling places or the disorienting darkness and debilitating mansions. The goal is the “Seventh suffering which are the purifications of the Mansions,”1 which delineates life in and from “VI Mansions.” Now all is peace and calm, at the Center. The “VII Mansions” describe the least within, even though the yearning to fullness, while preceding mansions depict the suffer with Christ continues and the trials of first steps (1-III MM) or partial and life do not disappear. intermittent experiences of divine union (IV- The difference in the “VII Mansions” VI MM). This union becomes identification is harmony between the inner and outer sides in full consciousness in the spiritual marriage of life. A new identity has been achieved. (VII M). Teresa warns frequently that the Page 402 The Published Articles of Ernest E. Larkin, O.Carm. St. Teresa of Avila And Prayer Polarities and discontinuities between the Geographical language can be human and the divine, between body and soul, misleading here. Neither the “higher part” of between this world and heaven have been the soul nor the spirit are distinct entities or resolved in the unity possible this side of the parts of the soul. They are different levels of beatific vision. This coincidentia oppositorum operation and not different places. Two levels leaves intact whatever is authentically human are contrasted. The soul is functioning in its and brings to a higher synthesis contemplation “higher part” when it is seized by the superior and action, life and ministry, the sacred and Force and left unable to function in other ways the secular, “genuine devotion,” which is for as long as the union lasts as in the V and Teresa’s phrase for the goal of all prayer life VI Mansions. The same soul is acting on the and consists in the determination to do God’s “spirit” level when its deepest potential is will, and human fulfillment. actualized, when it is completely surrendered The “new person” is not a demi-god. and filled with God. The person and God now Teresa was never more human than in these flow together; two loves mesh into one higher reaches of maturity in Christ which indissoluble life. The human being is like a marked the last years of her life. Her earthly drop of water lost in the sea. Teresa and God realism and humor, her ups and downs, her are joined together, not like two wicks giving attractive femininity, even the feminine out one flame, as in the experience of union in “weakness” of a profoundly affectionate the previous two mansions, but like two nature, which found expression in her deeply liquids dissolved into one or like the light in loving relationship with Jerome Gracian, who the room that comes from two windows (VII had come into the Reform in the late years of M 2:4). her life and immediately captured her The difference between the persons imagination and heart, were heightened rather remains, so that the relationship with God is than inhibited by her sanctity. The center always dialogic and not monistic. But the turns out to be, not only the deepest point, but differences are minimized. The “little the most pervasive influence, touching every butterfly,” bright and brilliant as it was from comer of the body-soul composite. It is the gift of union at earlier stages, gives up all everywhere. The medieval axiom puts the its own life and is lost in Christ; “its life,” says truth graphically: “God is a circle, whose Teresa simply, “is now Christ” (VII M 2:5). center is everywhere and whose circumference “The soul,” writes Teresa, who then is nowhere.” What is true of God is true in its corrects herself, “I mean the spirit is made one own way of the image of God who is the with God” (VII M 2:3). The union is no human being. Human beings too have diffuse longer violent, as it were, in brief spurts and centers which are their deepest reality and with the silencing of much of the human touch every area of their activity. psyche, which Teresa calls suspension of the Thus the key to total identification faculties. Here the conversion is so deep that with Christ is the fact that “the essential part all levels of the psyche participate, and the of her soul never moves from that room” (VII change is permanent and non-violent. M 1: 10). Earlier experiences of divine union Henceforth communication is patently from were “short-cuts” (V M 4:4) or temporary the nerve center deep within. Throughout the ecstatic transports (VI M). These experiences journey, the divine initiative is operative in are more sensational but certainly less every salutary step. Now these movements of transforming than the present situation. They grace are part of the human consciousness. occur in the “higher part” of the soul, whereas The daughter knows the King from within, now the contact is in the “spirit” (VII M 1:5). because she is in touch with the hitherto Page 403 The Published Articles of Ernest E. Larkin, O.Carm. St. Teresa of Avila And Prayer unconscious recesses of her own person. The distant comers of the interiority. The abiding harmony and peace come precisely because Presence creates a persistent sense of peace, the ground of the meeting is beyond the whatever the exterior state of affairs. Outer conflict of opposites. The soul has come and inner have become one without home, and by divine gift it is aware of the very annihilating or even eclipsing the lesser. On ground of its being. the contrary, the human has achieved its Even Teresa’s inaugural visions of the ultimate potential: it has become divinized, Sacred Humanity and the Trinity that and this, as contemporary theology announce the spiritual marriage strike her as emphasizes, is its full humanization. totally different from earlier visions. These too are resonances from within, profound, The Way: Teresa’s Program intuitive understandings of the ineffable The Interior Castle is basically a Presence. It is as if the divine self- record of spiritual experiences and their communication has broken all barriers and fallout. Self-knowledge, self-surrender, flooded the human consciousness. humility and love, joy and sorrow as well as Teresa refers to these mansions as properly mystical gifts like loving absorptions God’s very own rooms, another heaven, where in God, visions and locutions fill the castle’s God is all in all (VII M 1:3). Since they are rooms. It is important not to get distracted by also the saint’s dwelling place and the source this richness of experiences or the lessons they of her activity, then the divine has become leave and thereby miss the central thrust of the human and the human divine, without either whole adventure.
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