Teresa of Avila: Session 5

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. Welcome to our time here together, turning to, for guidance, to the Christian Mystics, Sanctres of Avila, in your classic work, The Interior Castle. And we've come now to the point of this journey into our own soul, into the seventh innermost mansion of this deep union with God. We come to the point of the sixth mansion, which, chapter one, she sets the tone for the whole thing, and kind of singles out the essence of the matter. She writes, Let us now, with the help of the Holy Spirit, come to speak of the sixth mansion, in which the soul has been wounded with love for the spouse, and seeks more opportunity of being alone, trying as far as possible to one in its state, to renounce everything which can disturb it in this, its solitude. That sight of him which it has had, which has had, is so deeply impressed upon it, that its whole desire is to enjoy it once more. Nothing, I must repeat, is seen in this state of prayer, which can be said to be really seen, even by the imagination. I use the word sight because of the comparison that I made. The soul is now completely determined to take no other spouse, but the spouse disregards its yearnings for the conclusion of the betrothal, desiring that they should become still deeper, and that this greatest of all blessings should be won by the soul at some cost to itself. And although everything is but slight in importance by comparison with the greatness of the gain, I assure you, daughters, that if the soul is to bear its trials, it has no less need of the sign and token of this gain which it now holds. Oh, my God, how great are those trials which the soul must suffer both within and without before it enters the seventh mansion. I'd like to reflect on this.

You know, as we go back to the very beginning, the first mansion, and before the first mansion, we can see how the path in a way consists of the impetus or the direction that's set in motion in being wounded with love. Well, that is to say, even before we entered the first mansion, that is, even when we were still lost in the complexities and compromises and struggles of a life completely caught up in the external circumstances and events.

There was an event that happened, or a series of events, in which we began from the seventh mansion, God's quietly reaching out and touching our heart with a sense of discontent, like there's something missing here, like something important. And what's important is this interiority of myself. That what's important is for the first time, God becomes real to me. And by turning towards God and seeking to draw closer to God, I might be grounded in something that's qualitatively deeper than the complexities and the termiles of which I had become so caught up.

And so moved by that, one enters the first mansion and one starts getting one's bearings getting newly acclimated at what it's like to turn to this love that has touched our heart and is drawing us to itself. And there we found also, we're caught up in a divided heart. In a divided heart, we feel that we're wounded with love. That is, we're wounded with the desire for yet greater love not yet realized. And the gift of that wounding of love, of a consummated longing, is the impetus that moves us to move in closer to the second mansion where it deepens and into the third mansion. And so the whole process then is one of being wounded by a love that we glimpsed where we know is there, but we're wounded in that we've not yet realized it. And so we're prompted and moved by love to move towards gaining that love and to be stabilized in it that we might be so transformed by love and find the fulfillment and draw closer to the fulfillment that we long for, such as the nature of the path. Let this...

And in the first three mansions then, we see that really all this takes place, we might think of as a reflective, intentional consciousness. That is, inspired by God, we're moved by our desire to respond to God's grace, through our efforts to be faithful to meditation, to be faithful to prayer, to be faithful to deepening our love for God and deepening our love for our neighbor as efficacious unto holiness. As efficacious unto holiness. And we live this life, this is our life. And so we live by faith, by this obscure certainty in our heart. The measure of this faith is this love. And we live by hope. And the hope is that when we pass through the veil of death, we will pass beyond these mediations of God's presence in our belief, God's presence in our intentions, God's presence in our aspirations, God's presence in our mystery. And we'll move into an unmediated, infinite union with infinite love, in which we'll know God with God's own knowledge of God, which is Christ. And we'll love God with God, go in the love of God, which is the Holy Spirit. And God will be all in all, is our eternal destiny, which is the consummation of God's will for us in creating us in the first place, that we might live in this glory of shared, boundaryless divinity forever. It's our destiny.