Teresa of Avila: Session 3

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time here together, turning to the Christian mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, as she guides us in a journey to our own soul, as a way to help us deepen our experience of and response to God's presence in our lives.

We began with Teresa, with the first mansion of the soul, and continued on in the next session into the second mansion. And she continues on in the same way in the third mansion, in which these first three mansions are the phases of cultivating psychological, spiritual maturity.

And now in this session, I want to begin the fourth mansion, in which she's attempting to help us to discern or to understand the stirrings of what you call special favors, or the stirrings of a more unitive, contemplative or mystical dimensions of experiencing and responding to God's presence. And she does this by comparing spiritual experiences as their experience in the first three mansions. You might say ego, consciousness, illumine by faith. As those same experiences are realized in a qualitatively new way in the first stirrings of the mystical in the fourth mansion. In this first contrast, she compares the soul to a basin filling with water. So the soul is like into a basin and God's presence flowing into us is like into water flowing into our soul, into this basin of our soul. And compares that to the basin of our soul experience as God's presence flowing into us in this new mystical way. So Teresa writes, These two large basins can be filled with water in different ways. The water in the one comes from a long distance by means of numerous conduits and through human skill. But the other has been constructed at the very source of the water and fills without making any effort or making any noise. If the flow of the water is abundant, as in the case we are speaking of, a great stream still runs from it after it's been filled. No skill is necessary here and no conduits have to be made, for the water is flowing all the time.

To the other fountain, this water that comes directly from its source, which is the beginning of the mystical, the focus of the Fourth Mansion. To this other fountain, the water comes directly from its source, which is God. And when it is His Majesty's will and He is pleased to grant us some supernatural favor, it's coming as accompanied by the greatest peace and quietness and sweetness within ourselves. I cannot say where it arises or how. And that content and delight are not felt as earthly delights are felt in the heart. I mean not at the outset. For later the basin becomes completely filled and then this water begins to overflow all the mansions and faculties until it reaches the body. For this reason I say, this mansion, it has its origins in God and ends in ourself. But whereas in the first mansion, with God's grace it begins with us and reaches out to God. So I'd like to begin there by reflecting on this.

I think she's speaking here, to imagine we're sitting in prayer and in devotional sincerity with our Lectio Divina, taking in God's word and our discursive meditation, this kind of loving exchange between ourself and God, and in the prayer of the heart, asking for the grace to be faithful to this love and to this presence in our daily life.

And so in this sense, we have this sense of praying to God, our Father who art in heaven, or calling out to God, like, hear my prayer. And also, we pray to God in some senses being beyond us, is coming to us through conduits, formed by the means of seeking God. Means of meditation, means of prayer, meanings of devotion, means of service. And these conduits formed by these means requires effort on our part. It requires a kind of the grace desire to be faithful to these efforts that embody the means through which we experience the presence of God flowing into us, into our lives.

And she says as we're sitting in prayer, that's how we experience our prayers, that we're sitting there in this effort to be faithful to meditation, to not be done in by distractions, to just whatever's going on in our meditation practice. And she says in the very midst of it, something else starts to happen. And at first, it might be so subtle, you don't notice it at first. It might be quite dramatic. But it's often very, very subtle and delicate. And there is a sense, first of all, you don't sense anymore that God's presence is flowing into you from afar. But rather, the basin of your soul is filling with the grace of God from some deep interior hidden place deep within yourself.