Thursday, 10/15/15
Teresa was born on
1515 while Luther was still Catholic, and she died eight years after the
conclusion of the Council of Trent. The Inquisition had suspected her
grandfather of being Jewish, and that had her father, after buying a knighthood,
striving to be seen as a model of strict Catholicism. That strict life was hard
on her mother who was a closet reader of romances, and that good woman, finding
Teresa to be the most sympathetic of her ten children, brought her into the
conspiracy of hiding the romances from her stern husband. That mother died when
Teresa was fifteen, and her father, unhappy over Teresa’s liking for boys and
fine clothes, put her in a Carmelite convent.
While she was at first
unhappy with convent life, she came to realize it was less confining than life
with her father. But in time she found herself locked in a struggle with
inclinations toward sinfulness. That ended with her deciding that staying in
the convent was the best protection from her wayward nature. With that decision
made, she took up the task of learning how to meditate on God. Writing about
those years, Teresa said, “I tried as hard as I could to keep Jesus Christ
present within me, but my imagination was dull, and I had no talent for coming
up with Theological thoughts.”
She had a bout of
malaria in her twenties, and it led to a paralysis and a coma that had her out
of her senses for three days. When she came to, she heard the nuns talking
about how they had dug a grave for her. With her health back, she joined in the
aimlessness of young women who were making the best of having been put away in
convents.
Teresa was forty
before she met up with a priest who gave her a scolding for her laxity, and
that forced her to determine to make the best of praying. Forcing herself to
spend a full hour at mental prayer, she would spend that hour holding up an
hourglass, shaking it to get the sand to run through quickly.
But, having stuck with
her determination, she began having what she called “spiritual delights.” They were
experiences of God’s presence. Our Lady of Victories Church in Rome houses a
great Bernini statue of Teresa, laid low with an angel driving an arrow of love
into her heart.
The unusual favors God granted Teresa
became so obvious that people turned her over to the Inquisition, but its learned
fathers found no hint of heresy in Teresa. Emperor Charles V, wanting to put
the matter to rest, sent St. Francis Borgia to question her closely; and that
future General of the Jesuits, came away with his own spiritual life lifted to
a higher plane.
Teresa spent her last
twenty years founding convents where silence and poverty were strictly
enforced. Teresa so much delighted in being with God that she wanted to be away
from the chatter that interfered with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment