Teresa of Avila: Session 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone. And welcome to our time here together. Returning to the Christian mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, to help us to deepen our experience of and response to God's presence in our lives. In the previous session, Kirsten and I engaged in kind of a dialogue, and the context of which I introduced Teresa of Avila, a brief sense of her life, and then this book, The Interior Castle, which we'll be going through here. One of the great classics in Christian mystical literature. So in this session, I want to go over the same text I went to previously in that initial session, but looking at it in a more intimate way. So to read the passage. So this is The Interior Castle, Sanctuaries of Avila, chapter one, first paragraph. The beginning of the second paragraph.

While I was beseeching our Lord today that he would speak through me since I could find nothing to say and had no idea of how to begin to carry out the obligation laid upon me by obedience, a thought occurred to me which I will now set down in order to have some foundation on which to build. I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or a very clear crystal in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions. Now if we think carefully over this, sisters, the soul of the righteous man is nothing but a paradise in which as God tells us, he takes his delight. For what do you think a room will be like which is the delight of a king so mighty, so wise, so pure, and so full of all that is good? I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity. In fact, however acute our intellects may be, they will no more be able to attain to a comprehension of this than to an understanding of God. For as he himself says, he created us in his image and likeness. Now, if this is so, and it is, there's no point in our fatiguing ourselves by attempting to comprehend the beauty of this castle. For though it is his creature, and there is therefore as much difference between it and God as between creature and creator, the very fact that his majesty says it is made in his image means that we can hardly form any conception of the soul's great dignity and beauty. It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame that through our own fault we do not understand ourselves or know who we are. I'd like to reflect on this.

Now, let's say here that we're approaching Teresa for a, she's gonna turn to her for spiritual direction. And we're coming to her saying that we want her to help us to deepen our experience of and response to God's presence in our life.

And we seek her guidance.

And so how do we begin? How does she have us begin? How does she begin with this first paragraph? How does she begin? Like what's going on here in this first paragraph? How's of all the ways to start, what is it that she starts this way? And I think it's this. See, where are we to begin? We're to begin where we are. Where are we? So how we tend to approach this is where we are, is where we are in our experience of ourself. I'm living my life, you're living yours. We're in the midst of a number of situations, some of them painful, some of them wonderful. There's challenges and regrets and struggles and life, life. And also where we are is we're living our life as a man or woman of faith, we have a sense of faith. And in the sense of faith, we're turning to God from this present situation of our busyness and our limitations and our confusion and all the rest of it. And we're seeking how can I enter into a deeper, habitual relationship with God, a deeper sense of God's presence in my life, my presence in God. I want to learn to do that. I want to deepen my spiritual life. And so this is where I begin. I begin from the midst of sensing how challenging this is because I could say, I don't know quite how to do this.

See, how do I go about doing this? Because when I pray, there's questions about distractions and how am I to conduct myself and what do I make of this and what do I make of that? All that. And I think where Teresa's coming from is, she listens to all that and she acknowledges that. But I think what she's doing here, she's suggesting we begin, we suggest although we are there, at a qualitatively deeper level, we're also somewhere else other than that. And that's where she has her start. Because she says, well, let's begin where God tells us that we are in scripture. If we take to heart what God reveals to us about the nature of who we are in our situation, let's start there. And so where are we? Where are we? And so we listen to her then as she says to us, you know, you're seeking union with God, which is a grace to desire this. But it is helpful to know in the light of faith that you and God are already one in the intimate and mysterious sense in which God creating you is God's self-donating love. God makes your very soul, that is your very essence of who you are as a person created by God and the image and likeness of God to be a relational mystery with God, that your very soul, the very mystery of who you are and the very mystery of who God is, are already intertwined in an alchemy of a kind of trans-subjective communion of a oneness. So when Jesus says, I came to you, I have life and have it more abundantly, the life is the one life that is at once God's in our own. That we're in a subsisting relation with God and that subsisting relation is our soul, which is our God-given, godly dignity, is our soul.