“The Dark Night of the Soul”
St. Teresa is one of the greatest saints in the Catholic Church. Her life and works still resonate in our church after almost 600 years! She was born into a life of turmoil, both personally and globally. In the world, exploration had just begun to boom, and two years after her birth the Protestant Reformation began. Teresa helped to combat Protestantism and reform and restore the Carmelite Order through her words, life, and action.
Childhood
Saint Teresa was born Teresa Sanchez Cepeda Davila y Ahumada on March 28, 1515 in Avila, Castile, Spain. Born to wealthy and noble family, she received a good education, and was quite bright. At age five, she had convinced her brother to go with her to die and become martyrs so they could go straight to Heaven, but they were intercepted by their uncle and were stopped. When she was a teenager, she would be seen as a “typical” teenage girl even for our time. She cared about clothes, boys, and even rebelled against her parents. When she was sixteen, her father Don Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda, a holy and pious, but also very strict man, put her in a convent because she was too out of control. She would later say that she hated it at first, but eventually grew to like the convent because the nuns were less strict than her father and more importantly, she began to grow in love for God. A few years later, when deciding whether or not to enter the convent, she decided to join to grow in holiness and avoid the temptations of sin in the world.
Entering in the convent
Early on in the convent, she had struggles. First, her father, who was very strict, denied her entry into the convent, but her piety finally won her father over, and Teresa was allowed to enter. Next, the temptations of worldly sins that she hoped to escape from did not leave her when she entered. At that time, there were many women in the convent who had no desire or call to a religious vocation, and as a result, some women wore the religious habit with more vanity and even wore jewelry. The struggle for power and money was being played out in the convent. However, Teresa fought back against these temptations early on by practicing mental prayer. As she put it “[I] tried as hard as I could to keep Jesus Christ present within me…My imagination is so dull that I had no talent for imagining or coming up with great theological thoughts.” Some would think that this is when Teresa had her breakthrough with Jesus, but she actually struggled with this prayer for eighteen years.
While in the convent, Teresa fell ill with malaria, and there were even times she was so ill they thought she had died. As a result of her terrible illness, Teresa fell out of prayer and began praying only as a “guise of humility”. Yet, although she thought these prayers were in vain, they were building up to be something amazing. God heard her prayers, even if she thought she was faking them.
Conversion and Ecstasy
At around age forty, a priest convinced Teresa to really try and pray again from the heart. The first few times when she was getting back into prayer she said, "I was more anxious for the hour of prayer to be over than I was to remain there. I don't know what heavy penance I would not have gladly undertaken rather than practice prayer." She was distracted often: "This intellect is so wild that it doesn't seem to be anything else than a frantic madman no one can tie down." Teresa sympathized with those who find difficulty in prayer: "All the trials we endure cannot be compared to these interior battles."
Slowly though, something began to change. Teresa began to feel God’s presence when she would pray. More and more, she began to feel an amazing spiritual delight, and at times be so in tune with God that she would levitate off the ground and would call on the nuns to hold her down. She never exalted these things though, but rather humbled herself because the more in love she was with God the harder it was to fall into the temptation of sin. She said, “The memory of the favor God has granted does more to bring such a person back to God than all the infernal punishments imaginable.”
It was at this point in her life that she saw Jesus come to her in person. Although she could see Him, His presence was invisible to others, so many people thought she was possessed by a demon or that she was doing something evil. Her confessor, a Jesuit priest named Saint Francis Borgia, reassured her that she was not crazy or possessed by a demon. These visions lasted for almost two years straight. In another vision, she saw an angel, specifically a seraph, “in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...” Bernini depicts this vision in his famous work Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, which can be seen at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.
What does “ecstasy” mean? Ecstasy is “the state of being beside oneself through some overpowering experience. As a mystical phenomenon, it includes two elements, one interior and the other exterior. The invisible element consists in the mind being riveted on a religious subject. The corporeal aspect means that the activity of the senses is suspended, so that not only are external sensations unable to influence the soul, but these sensations become very difficult to awaken. Many saints have received ecstasies as a supernatural gift from God.” [1]
Although she experienced ecstasy and closeness to God, she also struggled. At one point, in the midst of her suffering, Jesus told her, "Teresa, that's how I treat my friends" Teresa responded, "No wonder you have so few friends." What real and authentic passion she had towards Jesus to speak to Him as a friend with honesty and even humor.
As mentioned before, the convent that Teresa lived in was full of many nuns that were not serious about holiness. She understood that she needed to make sure the few friends Jesus truly had in the convent stayed there In her view, a few good nuns was better than a whole convent of lukewarm nuns. She, unlike Martin Luther, looked to reform from within, specifically the Carmelite Order.
Carmelite Reforms
Teresa spent the rest of her life forming cloistered convents with the aim of correcting the lax approach of the convents of her time. She lived under a strict rule of poverty, chastity, and obedience. While she faced some opposition early on, Teresa was granted a convent in Avila after receiving approval from her Bishop. Soon after, she was allowed to form two more houses for men who wished to live this new life of reform and received help from St. John of the Cross and Anthony of Jesus. In November of 1568, they founded the first convent of the Discalced Carmelite Brethren in Duruello. Over the next decade, Teresa established more convents in Segovia, Beas de Segura, Seville, and Caravaca de la Cruz. In the three years before her death, she founded five more convents in Northern Andalusia, Palencia, Soria, Burgos, and Granada. In all, Teresa directly founded sixteen of the seventeen new convents and had helped to found as many men cloisters during her work.
Her Death and Canonization
Beginning with her bout with malaria, Teresa fell to constant illness for the rest of her life, and died as a result while traveling from Burgos to Alba de Tormes in 1582. We are unsure of the exact date of when she died because many Catholic nations were switching from Julian calendars to Gregorian calendars at this time. Her last words were, “My Lord, it is time to move on. Well then, may your will be done. O my Lord and my Spouse, the hour that I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another.”
In 1617, Spain had made her their patroness of their country. In 1622, she was canonized by Pope Gregory XV, and on 1970 was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI along with Saint Catherine of Siena, making them the first women to receive this amazing title. Saint Teresa is also known as the Doctor of Prayer, and is patroness of bodily ills, headaches, lacemakers, laceworkers, loss of parents, people in need of grace, people in religious orders, people ridiculed for their piety, sick people, and sickness.
Her writings
St. Teresa has been well known since her death because of her great writings, which stand as some of the most remarkable literature in the Catholic Church, especially in regards to mystical literature. Some of her writings include her autobiography written in 1567, El Camino de Perfeccion, Meditations on Song of Songs, and El Castillo Interior.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_of_%C3%81vila and http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=208
[1] Fr. John Hardon, S.J.; Modern Catholic Dictionary