Teresa of Avila: Session 4

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 Centuries of Avila, to help us deepen our experience of and response to God's presence in our lives. Focusing our attention now in this session on the fifth mansion, or the fifth dwelling place of the soul.

And she begins to to help us begin to understand this heightened state of realized intimacy with God by contrasting it to the fourth mansion. We're distinguishing it from the fourth mansion. And so she says in the first chapter, do not think that this is a state like the last, namely like the fourth mansion we've just explored, in which we dream. I say dream because the soul seems to be as it were drowsy, so that it neither seems asleep nor feels awake. Here, that is here now in this fifth mansion, we are all asleep and fast asleep to the things of the world and to ourselves. In fact, for the short time that the condition lasts, the soul is without consciousness and has no power to think, even though it may desire to do so. There is no need now for the soul to devise any method of suspending the thought. Even in loving, if we are able to love, it cannot understand how or what it is that it loves or what it would desire. In fact, it has completely died to the world so that it may live more fully in God. This is a delectable death, snatching of the soul from all the activities from which it can perform while it is in the body, a death full of delight. For in order to come closer to God, the soul appears to have withdrawn so far from the body that I do not know if it has still life enough to be able to breathe. I've just been thinking about this, and I believe it has not, or at least if it still breathes, it does so without realizing it. The mind would like to occupy itself wholly in understanding something of which it feels, and it has not the strength to do this. It becomes so dumbfounded that even if any consciousness remains to it, neither hands nor feet can move. As we commonly say of a person who has fallen into a swoon, it might be taken for dead. Oh, the secrets of God, I should never weary of trying to describe them to you. As I thought I could do so successfully, I did not mind if I write any amount of nonsense, provided that just once in a way, I can write sense so that we may give great praise to the Lord. I say that there are no questions here of dreaming, whereas in the mansion I have just described, that is again the fourth mansion, the soul is doubtful as to what has really happened until it has had a good deal of experience of it. It wonders if the whole thing was an imagination, if it had been asleep, if the favor was a gift from God, or if the devil had transformed it into an angel of light. It retains a thousand suspicions and it is well that it should. For as I said, we can sometimes be deceived in this respect, even by our own nature. For although there is less opportunity for the poisonous creatures to enter, there are a few lizards, very agile, see, who hide themselves here. So I'd like to reflect on this opening passage.

See, I think it helps for a minute to see the trajectory that she's kind of tracing out here, from a state where we didn't even know we had a soul, so kind of thrown into the external events and circumstances and struggles and all that of our life, to finding our way into the first mansion, where for the first time God becomes personally meaningful to us, where God's relationship with us becomes personally a matter of our concern, a matter of knowing this is where we are to find the meaning to our life. But our heart is divided. We're still conflicted by the tollmult, so we pray, but it's hard to find the time to pray and so on. We go deeper into the second mansion, and the struggle is heightened by realizing we're traumatically bonded to these compromises, to giving ourselves over to this love that completely gives itself over to us. And we struggle with that and wrestle with that and work through that. Which brings us into the third mansion, as we evolved towards the state of psychological, spiritual maturity in this state.