Teresa of Avila: Session 2

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

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

SPEAKER_1 (0:14)

Thanks.

James Finley (0:23)

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together, Turning to the Christian Mystic St. Teresa of Avila for trustworthy guidance and deepening our experience of and response to God's presence in our lives. In this session, we'll be reflecting on her, the way she tries to understand the second mansion of the soul, how we can discern that we have entered, found our way into the second mansion of the soul. And there's just one chapter in the second mansion. And on the third paragraph of this chapter, she begins this way. These souls, that is these souls that have entered the second mansion, can understand the Lord when he calls them. For as they gradually get nearer to the place where his majesty dwells, he becomes a very good neighbor to them. And such are his mercy and goodness, that even when we are engaged in our worldly pastimes, and businesses and pleasures and haggling, even when we are falling into sin and rising from them again, in spite of all that, this Lord of ours is so anxious, we should desire him and strive after his companionship, that he calls us ceaselessly, time after time, to approach him.

And this voice is so sweet to us, Jesus. I'd like to begin by reflecting on this.

She's inviting us, I think, to discern something that begins to occur within us in our ongoing efforts to live in the First Mansion. And as you recall, the First Mansion of the soul consists of the ways that our relationship with God begins to become more real and important to us in a deeply personal way for us. And move by the desire to stabilize ourselves in this relationship with God, or in God's ceaseless relationship with us, sustaining us day by day. We begin to commit ourselves to a daily practice of prayer, and to move in closer to this sense of God's presence in our life. And we discover it's not easy, that the centrifugal force of life's demands and complexities still tend to have a grip on us. And even when we do go to pray, it's hard to be faithful to prayer, and in a consistent way it's hard to find the time to do it, and so on. And then when we do pray, our distractions follow us into the prayer itself, our preoccupations keep showing up in the prayer. She encourages us not to be discouraged by that, but to start over again, over and over again, asking for God's help, renewing our desire to return to prayer, to be present to God in prayer, and so on. And in the midst of that sincere effort, we realize that something starts to happen to us. And it's so subtle, we might not notice it at first. But we notice, though, let's say we're reading the Gospels as our prayer, as our lexio, that when we read something that Jesus says in the Gospels, it isn't just as in the first mansion where we sit that that's beautiful, where we try to take in the lesson of that or what we can learn from that. But rather, we get the sense that the deathless presence of Jesus is personally speaking to us, saying those words to us personally within ourselves as we hear those words. So too in reading the Psalms or all of scripture or in reading any spiritual book or any writing or any words of anyone that conveys to us the presence of God, it conveys it in a more intimate personal way in which we begin to sense something we might say the rhythms of God's voice or the cadences of God's voice and the rhythm and cadences of the words of our prayerful reading and reflection, she says.

Furthermore, not only is there's a subtle deepening of this newly sensed presence of God, but also it starts showing up throughout the day. In the midst of the day's haggling, she says, we're driving along at rush hour or in the midst of whatever. And as if out of the corner of our eye, there's little glimpses, little moments of encounters with people, which are tends to flash forth, a sense of God letting us know of His presence right there in that encounter, in that moment, in that event, in that simple activity like this.

And even in our sins, that is even when we stumble and fall, in ways of not being faithful or true to the love that we're called to be true to in our life and faith. We sense it even there. We sense God's tender mercy, loving us in the shortcoming, loving us in our faltering ways. And so this is all very personal, of course, but little by little in all kinds of ways, there's more of a kind of growing kind of atmospheric underlying sensitivities that kind of meekly shines out through the details of even what it is to wake up in the morning or to drift off to sleep at night. Just life, just life. There is this sense, subtle, subtle, subtle. In the midst of the ongoing struggles, the midst of the ongoing distractions, the midst of all of it, it starts to be infused by this quality of this presence of God.