Part
1: Teresa of Avila: a saint who is
so like us
All believers
are invited to become saints, but the idea seems scary to people who are quite
content going to church on Sundays, period. Whatever we ordinary mortals have
learned from our colonized past we seem to think saints are people who were
brought up with eyes cast downward and mumbling prayers non-stop. We like
to equate sanctity with sinlessness, forgetting the forgiveness part of being
Christian. A saying in Pilipino, “hindi makabasag-pinggan”—a quality of
one so pious that even breaking a dish would constitute a mortal sin—aptly
describes our perception of saints, thus when the homilist asks “Who among you
wants to be a saint?” nobody raises a hand.
One saint the laypeople can easily relate to is St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of
the Church. The word “human” suits her to a T. She was born in
1515, in Avila, Spain, at a time when women were raised to become perfect
homemakers, but she grew (up) to be a passionate and Christ-centered reformer
of the Carmelite Order. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI himself on several
occasions would hail St. Teresa of Avila as the perfect model for the Catholic
Church’s efforts towards the New Evangelization. Teresa wrote Way of Perfection, but would shamelessly
admit in detail why she was far from perfect.
People who have difficulty praying may be surprised to find encouragement from
this great Saint and Teacher of Prayer. Although famous for her extraordinary
faith experiences and her writings on mystical prayer and the spiritual, St.
Teresa of Avila spent 18 years struggling to pray. She would write:
“I was more occupied in wishing my hour of prayer were over, and in listening
whenever the clock struck, than in thinking of things that were good. Again and
again I would rather have done any severe penance that might have been given me
than practice recollection as a preliminary to prayer. Whenever I entered the
oratory I used to feel so depressed that I had to summon up all my courage to
make myself pray at all.”
Parents today might be delighted to know that their “makulit” children may be
so like the young girl Teresa whose rich imagination would sometimes upset her
elders. Before she even turned seven, Teresa was curious to see God.
She had heard from pious elders that martyrs go to heaven and therefore see
God, and one way to become a martyr was to be beheaded by the Moors. So
she prevailed upon her younger brother Rodrigo to join her in her childish
quest for martyrdom—they ran away from home to go to the land of the Moors to
offer their necks. Missing the children, their mother mobilized a search
party; an uncle found Teresa and Rodrigo just outside Avila’s walls and herded
them back to their anxious parents. With her plan of martyrdom thwarted,
Teresa settled for a less drastic way to see God: she again engaged her
brother, this time to become “hermits” instead. They gathered stones in
the garden and piled them up to build quaint “hermitages” where they could be
with God all they wanted.
As a teenager, Teresa was very much like our teenagers today. Her mother
died when she was barely 14; despite her sorrow over her great loss, Teresa
grew into a charming teenager with a magnetic personality. At 15, she was vivacious,
pretty, fond of clothes, jewelry and perfume. She devoured romantic
novels of knights and chivalry—so like many young women today who follow telenovelas
and Twilight novels with gusto.
She liked people who liked her, one of them an older female cousin who was fond
of gossip and vanities. This cousin’s influence would sooner than later
get Teresa involved in a flirtation which sent the town abuzz with gossip, and
caused her father sleepless nights. Convinced that the budding woman would
not be safe without some female watchdog tethered to her, her father sent
Teresa off to a nearby Augustinian convent that ran a kind of finishing school
where young women of her class were being educated—on social graces, home arts,
and things like embroidery, cooking, child care, etc.—and really being prepared
for a devout domestic life. Teresa feared marriage, but as she would
later write, she also asked God not to make her a nun.
Part
2: A heart torn between God and
the world
It
seems unthinkable that one who would become the first woman Doctor of the
Church had so dreaded becoming a nun, but Teresa herself wrote thus in her
autobiography, Life: “…I
had no desire to be a nun, and I asked God not to give me this vocation;
although I also feared marriage… I looked more to pleasing my sensuality and
vanity than to what was good for my soul. These good thoughts about being a nun
sometimes came to me, and then would go away; and I could not be persuaded to
be one.”
Her
agony over marriage-versus-nunnery was such that Teresa succumbed to a mysterious illness, one of the many
that would cling to her throughout her life. Confronting
herself, she wrote, “I was engaged in this battle within myself for three
months, forcing myself with this reasoning: that the trials and hardships of
being a nun could not be greater than those of purgatory and that I had really
merited hell; that it would not be so great a thing while alive to live as
though in purgatory; and that afterward I would go directly to heaven, for that
was my desire. And in this business of choosing a state, it seems to me I was
moved more by servile fear than by love.”
Long
story short, she decided on her vocation, choosing religious life over
marriage, and sought her father’s permission. But Don Alonso, who before had sent her to a convent to tame
her wild side, was now strongly opposed to Teresa’s entering the cloister. As
before, Teresa was resolute—she confided her desire to another brother,
Antonio, and one November night secretly left home with him as escort to enter the Carmelite convent of The
Incarnation in Avila.
A
religious habit and life within the high walls do not guarantee sanctity. It should console us ordinary people
living in the 21st century—when all the comforts of life and unprecedented technological
advances conspire to rub God out of our consciousness—that a future saint
nearly 500 years ago was undergoing the same predicament as we are in our
interior life today.
In
St. Teresa’s Life, the autobiography
she wrote in obedience to her superiors, the contemporary man might find
someone to resonate with, as did the German philosopher Edith Stein, who
considered herself an atheist but after reading Life overnight declared that the Catholic faith was true. Life
paved the way to Stein’s conversion to Catholicism and her entry into the Order
of Discalced Carmelites. As a
Carmelite nun she willingly marched to her death in the gas chambers of
Auschwitz for the sake of her people, the Jews. Beatified in 1987 and canonized in 1998, Edith Stein is now
known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a true “daughter” of the Great
Teresa.
Stein’s
atheism must have crumbled under the weight of St. Teresa of Avila’s admission
of the deterioration of her prayer life: “I
thus began to go from pastime to pastime, from vanity to vanity . . . . And I
was aided in this vanity by the fact that as the sins increased I began to lose
joy in virtuous things and my taste for them. . . . This was the most terrible
trick the devil could play on me, under the guise of humility: that seeing
myself so corrupted I began to fear the practice of prayer… It seems I desired to harmonize these two
contraries—so inimical to one another—such as are the spiritual life and
sensory joys, pleasures, and pastimes…
I should say that it is one of the most painful lives, I think, that one
can imagine; for neither did I enjoy God nor did I find happiness in the
world. When I was experiencing the
enjoyments of the world, I felt sorrow when I recalled what I owed to God. When I was with God, my attachments to
the world disturbed me. This is a
war so troublesome that I don’t know how I was able to suffer it even a month,
much less for so many years . . . For more than eighteen of the twenty-eight years
since I began prayer, I suffered this battle and conflict between friendship
with God and friendship with the world.”
Part 3: Teresa de Avila and the gaze of faith
A missionary priest frequenting Quiapo
church would observe that Filipinos are “natural contemplatives.” He was impressed by the sight of
ordinary people in Quiapo church “who would just sit there and stare at the
crucifix for hours.” He would say:
“It’s amazing that a middle aged man wearing a T-shirt, shorts and rubber
slippers—like the sidewalk vendors around the church—would devote so much time
doing nothing before the image of the suffering Christ.”
St.
Teresa of Avila (whose religious name is Teresa of Jesus) is not that
well-known to Filipinos, thus it would be presumptuous to say that the Quiapo
devotees observed by the missionary priest must be imitators of the great saint
from Avila. Whether it is
coincidence or grace at work here, it is heartening to know that such devotees
are on the right track as far as this Doctor of the Church teaches to those at
the earliest stages of their prayer life.
Filipinos,
often praised by foreign visitors and tourists for their friendliness, would
naturally take to Teresa of Avila’s idea that “Mental prayer … is nothing else than an
intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone
with Him who we know loves us.”
Aware that some minds could be so distracted when trying to pray, she
writes, “I am not asking you now to think of Him, or to form numerous
conceptions of Him, or to make subtle meditations with your understanding. I am asking you only to look at
Him. For who can prevent you from
turning the eyes of your soul … upon this Lord?
“Believe
me, you should stay with so good a Friend for as long as you can before you
leave Him. If you become
accustomed to having Him at your side, as if He sees that you love Him to be
there, and are always trying to please Him, you will never be able, as we put
it, to send Him away.”
In
our world today when people’s hunger for social approval and friendship makes
them satisfied to be surrounded by (and proud of) hundreds of Facebook friends, Teresa of Avila
assures us that in Jesus we have a Friend who will never “unfriend” us in spite
of our unfaithfulness. And we
don’t even have to try too hard to befriend Him and keep Him company, as she
says, “If you are happy, look upon your risen Lord. If you are suffering trials, or are sad, look upon Him on
His way to the Garden. Love to speak
to Him, not using forms of prayer, but words issuing from the compassion of
your heart.”
For
St. Teresa, keeping the Lord’s company is almost like having Jesus the man
around in the flesh. The humanity
of Christ, in fact, is a fundamental tenet in her teachings—a mystery which
Teresa had grasped first-hand. In
1554 she was to have a spiritual experience she would call her “conversion” for
the deep mark it would leave on her life—she was 39 then, and her “soul was now
grown weary” due to the “miserable habits it had contracted.” She would write, “It came to pass
one day, when I went into the oratory, that I saw a picture (the Ecce Homo) which they had put by there,
and which had been procured for a certain feast observed in the house. It was a
representation of Christ most grievously wounded, and so devotional, that the
very sight of it, when I saw it, moved me—so well did it show forth that which
He suffered for us. So keenly did I feel the evil return I had made for those
wounds, that I thought my heart was breaking. I threw myself on the ground beside it, my tears flowing
plenteously, and implored Him to strengthen me once for all, so that I might
never offend Him any more… It
seems to me that I said to Him then that I would not rise up till He granted my
petition.” The experience made her
“very distrustful of myself, placing all my confidence in God.”
Pope
Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his presentation on the Doctors of the Church
in February 2011 said, “St. Teresa of Jesus is a true teacher of Christian
life for the faithful of every time. In our society, which all too often lacks
spiritual values, St. Teresa teaches us to be unflagging witnesses of God, of
his presence and of his action.
She teaches us truly to feel this thirst for God that exists in the
depths of our hearts, this desire to see God, to seek God, to be in
conversation with Him and to be His friends. This is the friendship we all need that we must seek anew,
day after day.”
Might
this be the kind of “friendship” the devotees in Quiapo church hunger for when
they rub and kiss the foot of the suffering Nazarene, or when they sit for
hours on end staring at the statue of the Crucified Christ? Are the Filipinos truly “natural
contemplatives”? Who knows? Suffice it to say that a “profoundly
contemplative and effectively active” unschooled woman from Avila who would
become a Doctor of the Church would now—almost 500 years after her birth—serve
to encourage simple believers by her example. She merely asks us to “look at Him”—and that gaze of faith
will lead to the grace of friendship with the One who we know loves us very
much.
