SPIRITUAL CLASSICS

St Teresa of Avila and "The Interior Castle "

(Mural in Elizabeth Kirche, Marburg. C16 Anon)

St Teresa of Avila, sometimes called Teresa of Jesus, was a Spanish nun of the Carmelite Order who lived from 1515 to 1592, and is not to be confused with St Teresa of Lisieux, a nineteenth century French nun of the same order, also known as St Teresa of the Infant Jesus and the Holy Face. But before I get on to our Teresa, I'd like to use a couple of Bible stories by way of introduction.

First, the story of Martha and Mary from the gospels, which Margaret referred to last week. You will recall the tale in which Jesus visits the house of Mary and Martha; Mary sits at Christ's feet and listens to his words, while Martha deals with the more practical aspects of basic hospitality. Martha complains that Mary has left her to get on with all the chores; Jesus commends Mary's choice and rebukes Martha for all her worrying. "Mary has chosen the better part," he says.

(Jan Vermeer, "Christ in the House of Martha & Mary," c 1654-55)

The story is often used to illustrate the contrast between the active spirituality of Martha and the contemplative spirituality of Mary, the latter always being seen as superior. I have always felt this to be a little harsh and more than a little impractical. Alongside this biblical praise lavished on the contemplative way there is also, from the same source, the parable of the sheep and the goats, where judgement is based on the quality of the active life. "When I was hungry, you fed me; when I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink," and so on. No mention of elaborate mystical experiences! To look forward to next week as well as looking back to last week, there would, I suspect, be rather less of Mother Julian's Norwich writings to read had some practical person not regularly passed food and water through the aperture into her cell.

(Joachim Beuckelaer, 1570, "The Four Elements: Fire - A kitchen scene with Christ in the House of Martha & Mary in the Background," National Gallery - busier, Christ is in another room at top left)

Teresa urges a sense of balance in our Christian lives, despite being such an important figure in the history of contemplative prayer. In her book, "The Interior Castle," to which I shall return shortly, she writes, "Your foundation must not consist of prayer and contemplation alone: unless you acquire the virtues and practise them, you will always be dwarfs." (VII.4.13) Integration of action and contemplation is the key: integration of both the practical and the spiritual. Teresa writes specifically of the M and M story: "Both Martha and Mary must entertain our Lord and keep him as their guest, nor must they be so inhospitable as to offer him no food. How can Mary do this while she sits at his feet, if her sister does not help her?" (VII.4.17)

(Peter Paul Rubens, 1615)

In his book on Teresa in the Outstanding Christian Thinkers series, Rowan Williams expands on this: "Mary alone cannot be a complete or perfect soul because we never free ourselves from temporal human responsibility while we live in time. Mary presupposes Martha: the mature contemplative is someone who has learned Martha's way, and the attempt to be Mary without this learning process is a mark of immaturity." (p160) That's one of the few passages in a book by the learned archbishop that makes any sense to most mere mortals!

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Teresa was this hugely important figure in the mystical tradition, yet she was also firmly rooted in reality. She encouraged people in the life of contemplative prayer, but never lost touch with the active life, and travelled all over Spain being very practical and founding convents in which the contemplative life could be practised.

And my second story, this time from the Old Testament. In I Kings 18, the tale is told of a great contest between Elijah, the prophet of God, and the pagan prophets of Baal. Elijah wants to persuade the people of Israel to forsake the pagan god and return to the worship of the God of their forebears alone. "How long will you go limping with two different opinions?" he says, "If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him." He issues a challenge, that both he and the 400 prophets of Baal will slaughter a bull, and place it on a pile of firewood. Each team will then call on its god to send down fire to consume the sacrificial offering. The prophets of Baal go first, but to no avail: they call on their god but the beef isn't even cooked "rare." Elijah mocks them, "Cry aloud!" he says, "Perhaps he's meditating, or on a journey; perhaps he's asleep and must be awakened." More ravings ensue, but nothing gets barbequed. "They raved on and on," says scripture, "But there was no voice, no answer, no response."

Not one for an easy life, Elijah thrice pours four jars of water over his sirloin sacrifice. He calls on his God and divine fire descends from heaven, consuming not only beef, but also the wood, the stones, the dust and even the water. Elijah wins and celebrates in good Old Testament style with the slaughter of all Baal's prophets.

(An interesting woodcut from the Zurich Bible. It uses the story as an allegory of the battle between Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church at the Reformation. The papist prophets of Baal swing good catholic censers in the background!)

Mount Carmel, the setting of this great story, high above the modern port of Haifa , became a holy place for the people of Israel , and later for Christians and Muslims as well. At the dawn of the sixth century, a church was built there, and a monastery founded by Greek monks. In the Middle Ages the mount became famous as the home of the Carmelite Order, founded by the hermit, St Berthold, in 1154. Legend says that they followed an unbroken lineage of hermits on the mountain right back to the days of Elijah. After the failure of the crusades in the Holy Land, the order migrated to Europe in the thirteenth century. An Order of Carmelite Sisters was founded in the Low Countries in 1452 and they spread rapidly through France , Spain and Italy ; there was even an early house in Kent .

During the sixteenth century, discipline among both friars and nuns had become very relaxed. Teresa entered a Carmelite convent in Avila in 1535. In 1560, after receiving her first ecstatic vision of Christ, she initiated a great reform in which a more primitive rule was restored in many Carmelite houses; she also added to the rule to foster the contemplative life. Her disciple, St John of the Cross, the other great figure in the sixteenth century Spanish mystical tradition, carried out the same reforms among the friars. Those who adopted the reforms were called "discalced," which means without shoes (they wore only soft felt slippers or sandals) to distinguish them from the unreformed "calced" Carmelites; being discalced was a symbol of a more austere way of life.

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(Icon by Lynne Taggart)

Teresa and John faced much violent opposition to their work, not least from the Spanish Inquisition and the calced Carmelites, and John suffered imprisonment and torture. Teresa founded a reformed convent in Avila in 1562, where she wrote her spiritual autobiography and a book for her nuns called "The Way of Perfection." From 1567 until her death she travelled around, founding seventeen new discalced houses, and amongst all this active labour she wrote "Foundations," "The Interior Castle" and several smaller books. Teresa was canonized 40 years after her death, and the church hid well, until 1948, the fact that her grandfather had been Jewish, and persecuted by the Inquisition, strangely, not a popular ancestry for saints, despite the fact that it was the faith of Moses, Elijah and Jesus himself.

Teresa and John's most enduring contribution is the ordering, classifying and analysis of the various stages in the life of prayer, and the clarifying of the distinction between meditation and true contemplation, the desire for nothing more than God, which needs no intermediary aids.

(John Singer Sargent, 1856 - 1925, date unknown)

Elijah was an important figure for the Carmelite mystics, just as Moses and his misty mountain encounters was for the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing," last week's spiritual classic. But in Teresa and John there is rather less about concealing cloud and more about revealing fire and light. Not inappropriately, in the Transfiguration story, it is both Old Testament characters who stand alongside the radiant, glorified Christ, the object of our contemplation.

"The Interior Castle " was written as a manual of spiritual direction for Teresa's nuns to follow. Teresa wrote it at the suggestion of her confessor, to replace her autobiography, which had been seized by the Inquisition. It emphasises simplicity in prayer, rather than technique or method. It is based on a vision Teresa received in which she saw the human soul in the form of a castle made of a single diamond suffused with the light of Christ, containing many rooms or "mansions," a clear reference to John 13: "In my father's house are many mansions." The walls of the castle are the body and its functions; the seven inner rooms are aspects of the soul; and the centre of the soul is the dwelling place of Christ and his light.

Thus, Teresa encourages us to make an inner journey to find God at the very centre of our being, rather than an external God in a distant heavenly realm. The encounter she describes with the divine is an intimate rather than a transcendent relationship. "Prayer," she wrote, "Is a close sharing between friends - to be alone with him who we know loves us." The Inquisition was unhappy with this sort of language and ideas.

(C20 Icon, artist unknown)

She describes three essential stages in the journey of contemplative prayer:

•  Awakening, Purification and Purgation

•  Illumination by the Holy Spirit &

•  Union with God

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Teresa herself reached this final stage in 1572 and described it as her spiritual marriage. She takes us on a journey through the three stages and the seven inner rooms towards union with Christ at the centre of the soul.

The first stage of the journey, represented by the first three inner rooms, requires much work in prayer, rooted in self-knowledge, humility and a painful encounter with rejected and repressed aspects of ourselves that is stirred into consciousness by this process. St John of the Cross called this "the dark night of the soul." Prayer, at this stage, engages the mind: it is the "Prayer of Recollection." This stage calls us to deeper awareness of our sinfulness and need of repentance. We are called to acknowledge the dark things within ourselves, rather than casting all the blame on to an externalized devil character. The purification may be a terrible experience, but it is God's way of preparing us for the rest of the journey. This is about loving the most unlovable parts of ourselves, and seeking out the things of which we are most ashamed.

Teresa described how she came to write the Interior Castle to a friend, the priest Diego de Yepes. Some years later he recounted this to another priest in a letter. The letter tells also of the terrors of the first stage of the journey in the first mansion.

"God showed Teresa a most beautiful crystal globe, made in the shape of a castle, and containing seven mansions, in the seventh and innermost of which was the King in glory, in the greatest splendour, illumining and beautifying them all. The nearer one got to the centre, the stronger was the light, outside the palace limits everything was foul, dark and infested with adders, vipers and other venomous creatures. While she was wondering at this beauty, which by God's grace can dwell in the human soul, the light suddenly vanished. Although the King of Glory did not leave the mansions, the crystal globe was plunged into darkness, became as black as coal and emitted an insufferable odour, and the venomous creatures outside the palace boundaries were permitted to enter the castle."

All the work of the first stage leads to illumination by the Holy Spirit and an awareness of the activity of God in our souls. At this stage, prayer becomes less active and is simpler: Teresa calls it the "Prayer of Quiet," characterised by stillness, solitude and surrender.

The last three rooms and the final stage deal with progressively deeper forms of union with Christ, analogous to a marriage between Christ and the human soul. Teresa uses the striking image of the silkworm in a cocoon, transformed by Christ into a butterfly, in the fifth mansion. In this stage we meet the "Prayer of Union," a profound silence and complete surrender to the Holy Spirit.

At the end of the process, the activity of the Trinity in our lives is "transparent," says Teresa, even outside the contemplative life. That is to say that the divine is clearly seen even in our active endeavours. Mary and Martha are held in balance.

Despite the book's presentation of a journey through seven rooms to the centre, the stages are not really hierarchical or linear, just aspects of the spiritual journey. For example, a moment of divine union can come at any stage, even before purgation, and there may be additional purgations even at an advanced stage of the journey.

Teresa's writings abound in symbolism and imagery - the language of our inner spiritual and psychological life. These symbols help us to make a connection between the conscious and unconscious aspects of the human psyche. I have referred to the butterfly, and St John's dark night; there is also the symbol of the fire of love, and the image of the bride and bridegroom taken from the biblical "Song of Songs." The soul is the bride of Christ, the bridegroom; there is a profound love affair between the soul and Christ, a transforming union.

An oft-used metaphor in spiritual writing, not only Teresa's, is that of the cultivation of a garden (the garden representing the human soul). For Teresa, the plants in the garden are the virtues, cultivated by ourselves as tenants, and the water that sustains those plants is the experience of God in prayer and contemplation. Teresa describes four sources of water, each one progressively easier in its operation. Water drawn from a well demands much effort and corresponds to the first stage of the journey. The second stage is characterised by water lifted by a water wheel, requiring less human effort, and then water from a stream or a spring. Finally, in the last stage, there is rain from the heavens, a mystical grace from God and the best method for watering a garden, requiring no effort on our part at all.

Teresa is famous for her ecstatic visions, but, with characteristic humility, she saw these as distractions and not essential to a life of holiness - some consolation to those of us untroubled by such luxuries. Bernini's stunning sculpture, "The Ecstasy of St Teresa of Avila " in the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome captures something of the powerful emotion of her experience of spiritual marriage and mystical union with Christ.

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Teresa describes the vision in her autobiography:

"I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form. This I am not accustomed to see, except very rarely. He was not large, but small of stature, and very beautiful. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's 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 for 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. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet, which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of his goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying." (XXIX.17)

(Icon by Robert Lentz)

This is not the rather bland "joy" word, beloved of evangelicals; this is true ecstasy.

In "The World of Bernini," Robert Wallace says: "The saint ecstatically sinks back on a cloud, her eyes nearly shut, her lips parted in a soft moan." The art critic knows what's going on, even if the theologian baulks at it. [NB: The Bernini sculpture has been criticized as a very male depiction of the saint and her ecstasy.]

God, asserts Teresa, is to be found, most chiefly, within us, so prayer is a movement towards Christ at the centre, deep within our souls: this is good, solid incarnational theology. The great images of "The Interior Castle" help us to make the connection with this hidden, unknown centre of our being.

Why does all this seem important to me; why do I think it has any application in our contemporary world?

First, it is a realistic and profoundly sensible model of spirituality that balances the active and the contemplative and does not exalt one above the other. Prayer should lead to action, and action should be informed by prayer. This is a life that can be lived even outside the sacred confines of a convent or a monastery.

Secondly, it is a spiritual tradition that fits beautifully with my own particular interest in Jung, the analytical psychologist, and his model of the human psyche and soul. He, too, speaks of an inner journey. He, too, recognises that an early stage of the journey is an encounter with the dark things within us: he calls them the Shadow. He, too, speaks of an encounter with a Christ-like figure, the Self, at the centre of the soul. My interest in Teresa, which is not yet a year old, arose from a talk given by a Jungian analyst, who is now my spiritual director, and who has written a modern commentary on "The Interior Castle," and to whom I owe much already.

Thirdly, we live in an age with a great thirst for mystical experience that is, generally, not being met by the Church because we have lost sight of the contemplative, mystical tradition in our obsession with the wholly mundane, and so people look elsewhere for their mysteries. Alongside our very proper and necessary concern for the pressing global issues of our day, we should not be afraid to advocate a contemplative moment or two. Recovering this tradition gives us something spectacular with which to quench a contemporary thirst.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Teresa of Avila, "The Interior Castle "(ed Halcyon Backhouse, Hodder & Stoughton , 1988)

Rowan Williams, "Teresa of Avila " (Continuum, 1991)

Julienne McLean, "Towards Mystical Union" ( St Paul 's Publishing, 2003)

John Macquarrie, "Two Worlds are Ours" (SCM Press, 2004)

Robert Wallace, "The World of Bernini" (Time Life Education, 1970)

TIME OF QUIET

A reading from Isaiah:

Let the wilderness and the dry land exult,

Let the desert rejoice and bloom,

Let it bring forth flowers like the jonquil!

Let it rejoice and sing for joy!

Strengthen all those who are weary;

Say to all: "Courage, do not be afraid.

Look, your God is coming to save you!"

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

The ears of the deaf unsealed.

Those who are tied down shall dance freely;

Those without voice sing for joy,

For water gushes in the desert,

Streams in the wasteland,

The scorched earth becomes a lake

The parched land springs of water.

And from the autobiography of St Teresa of Avila :

Let us look upon ourselves as making a garden, wherein our Lord may take his delight, in a soil where God himself has rooted up the weeds, and set good plants in their place.

Let us see how this garden is to be watered, that we may understand what we have to do:

It seems to me that the garden may be watered in four ways: by water taken out of a well, which is very laborious; or with water raised by a water-wheel and buckets, drawn by a windlass, I have drawn it this way sometimes, it is a less troublesome way than the first, and it gives more water; or, by a stream or brook, whereby the garden is watered in a much better way, for the soil is more thoroughly saturated, and there is no necessity to water it so often, and the labour of the gardener is much less; or by showers of rain, when our Lord himself waters it, without labour on our part and this way is incomparably better than all the others of which I have spoken.

I hope, by the help of this comparison, to explain the four degrees of prayer to which our Lord, of his goodness, has occasionally raised my soul.

A Prayer of St Teresa:

Let nothing trouble you,

Let nothing frighten you,

Everything is fleeting,

God alone is unchanging.

Patience will obtain everything.

The one who possesses God

Wants for nothing.

God alone suffices.

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The Revd Dr Mark Powell

© St Peter's Church, Ealing, 2006

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