Thank you for posting this!! St Teresa is my favorite saint; she always speaks to me, whenever I read her words, there is something that blesses me greatly.
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St. Teresa sure had a gift for putting what could be stated with considerable complexity into the most simple of terms!!!..and she wrote it is obvious with considerable trepidation on a few fronts…she was absolutely profound in common sense, insight and downright practicability with considerable astuteness as many of her little anecdotes (for one) from her own life in her writings do display…her own journey to the heights of the mystical was long and often arduous though she does have a tendancy to mention these difficulties almost in passing and more due to her own humility I think than anything - she gathers 14years into a passing comment and also her own Dark Night in one sentence if memory serves in the opening lines of the Sixth (or Fifth
) Mansion of The Interior Castle…she was also focused and very keen for her nuns to understand the contemplation/mystical way as a way in contemplative living and life and not
the way - and as she does state this particular way in spirituality can be fraught with many difficulties and confusions -even easy deceptions by Satan or one’s own imaginatory powers…in her times there was much focus and attention in religious houses on unusual mystical type phenomena, at times to profit, and at equal times to deceptions and she was very much aware of this…much of this was coming to the attention of the then very active Inquisition as did her own writings…and she was able, under advice, to avoid her
Interior Castle text being confiscated, I have read, by The Inquisition by keeping it in the third person.
By the very same token she was also very keen and focused that those nuns in her foundations that were travelling the mystical way of contemplation would have good insight into many factors of this way and should not be centred on the incidental at the cost of the integral nature of the mystical…
Over and above all that which is quite complex after all, she can speak to those of us who are quite simple in both spirituality and perhaps even understanding…
She is and was a spiritual genius of some note(gift of Grace)… - which she does not need me at all to note it is well underscored by her being raised to the altars of The Church and as a Doctor of The Church and followed a few centuries later by her Carmelite spiritual daughter who was indeed marked by childlike simplicity - St. Therese of Lisieux, whose life in Carmel was not marked by observable phenomena of mystical type unsual phenomena, rather to the contrary, and St. Therese also a spiritual genius of note, raised likewise by The Church, hence not needing my commentary
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…which continually does gush forward everywhere and gift of an all pervasive, too little disciplined, fault
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Blessings and my regards…Barb
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