Each October 15th remembered in the Church Saint Teresa of Jesus (1515-1582), Carmelite nun, reformer of her order, founder of 16 convents, writer, mystic, teacher of prayer. In 1970, Paul VI, recognizes her as the first woman, Doctor of the Church. This title is very important because it has only been awarded to 4 women (Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Therese of the Child Jesus and Hildegard of Bingen, in front of more than 30 men) but, above all, because this proclamation supposes recognizing that it can be a teacher of faith for all the People of God.
Saint Teresa of Jesus knew how to teach about the life of prayer with the beautiful image of “The Dwellings or Interior Castle” and also with the garden irrigated by water in four different ways. -which she recognizes as the four degrees of prayer-. In both cases, the prayer does not suppose a conventional prayer of repeating words, without knowing what is being said, or of asking for favors, turning God into a dispenser of miracles, but in a dialogue “with whom we know loves us”even more so, with Jesus himself, as human as the Jesus of history, with whom she can converse and experience that “God alone is sufficient”.
But that simple doctrine about prayer as dialogue, as meeting, as personal knowledge, as mutual donation, some try to identify it with more Eastern-style meditation practices -valid for those who find in it self-control and emptying of all distractions- but that have nothing to do with Teresa’s teaching. The four degrees of prayer are not an ascending scale that the person can reach through breathing practices or other types of bodily asceticism., nor are dwellings a straight line of rooms that you go up step by step. In both cases, Teresa warns that everything is divine grace and the person does not stop experiencing his humanity with the lack of love that he lives -and that is the humility that springs from the self-knowledge that prayer gives- and neither can he, on his own merits, achieve the grace of watering the garden without the least effort on your part, because the encounter with God is pure grace, pure gift, pure gift.
For Teresa, prayer does not remain in the act of praying itself, but in the fruits that it produces in the person.: “prayer is not so much thinking a lot, but loving a lot”, hence he told the nuns that, “what would lead them to love the most, that’s what they should do”. Another way of explaining it was to say that “God was among the pouts.” That is to say, prayer is not only the explicit moment in which the person prepares to pray, but all of life must be prayer, including the smallest, most basic, most everyday things.
Teresa is also amazed that in times when access to the Bible was practically impossible, and even less so for women, she took advantage of the spirituality books that she could read to have contact with the passages of the Gospels that she found there.. She, without having too much training, is capable of going to the sources of revelation and nourishing herself from them. Of course, given the difficulty of getting much closer to the sacred text, she also understands that the same Jesus with whom she talks in prayer is the “living word” which you can access. And, effectively, the Christocentricity of her experience of faith leads her to say that “Teresa is from Jesus and Jesus from Teresa”, using his own words instead of those of Paul in the letter to the Galatians: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (2, 20).
Finally, Teresa shows that feminism It is not a thing of some misfit women -as some catalog it in the present-, but it is a movement that, without having had that name in previous times, if it denounces the discrimination that women have suffered and the way in which their rights are denied. Saint Teresa expressed it thus complaining to Jesus about the clergy of her time: “I trust, my Lord, in these servants of yours who are here, who I see and know do not want anything else nor do they intend it but to please you (…). Well, you are not, my Creator, ungrateful for me to think that you will give them less than what they ask of you, but much more, because you did not hate women when you walked through the world, but instead you always favored them with mercy and found in them so much love and more faith than in men (…) Is it not enough Lord, that the world has us cornered (…) that we do not do anything that is worth anything for you in public, nor do we dare to speak of some truths that we cry in secret, so that are you not going to hear such a fair request? I do not believe it, Lord, of your goodness and justice, that you are a just judge and not like the judges of the world, that as children of Adam and, in short, all men, there is no woman’s virtue that they do not suspect (… ) because I see the times in such a way that there is no reason to discard virtuous and strong spirits, even if they are from women”. Teresa lives in the context where women’s things are not valued and are discarded, but she cannot imagine, in any way, that God behaves the same as the judges of this world, whom with fine irony she describes as “sons of Adam and, finally, all men”. This paragraph was deleted from the original manuscript and discovered relatively recently, because in its time censorship could not allow such a direct accusation, just as today it is not easily accepted, preferring to discredit any voice that rises up denouncing this patriarchal world in which we still live.
Celebrating Saint Teresa is not only remembering her memory but receiving her legacy and putting it into practice. Effectively, in these tough times, like the ones she livedit is still urgent that women of faith work for the fundamental equality of women and men in society and in the church and to live a transforming spirituality, out of fidelity to the kingdom of God announced by Jesus, where prayer is a source of life and commitment and, at no time, alienating and disregarding the world we live in.
(Photo taken:
Saint Teresa: woman, wanderer, restless, doctor of the Church…