Teresa of Avila: Session 6

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time here together seeking spiritual guidance from the Christian Mystic Sanctuaries of Avila. We come now in this session to the seventh and final mansion of the soul.

In the ways that she bears witness to the profound mystical communion with God that is realized in this mansion. And so I thought it would be helpful for us as we come to the end here of our reflections on Teresa to step back, to attempt to kind of take in the spiritual worldview of contemplative Christianity that we saw in Thomas Merton and Jane Wyndham. We do St. John of the Cross next and all these Christian mystics. Because the light of God shining out from this vision illumines the path they mark out for us, along which this unit of mystical state of Christ consciousness, God consciousness is realized. And so in this passage, I'll only be quoting two passages, really, by giving preference to this reflection.

Hopefully that will help you to take in this vision. We need to be, it's so important to be patient with this. Because it takes a while for the breadth or depth or richness of this vision to kind of prayerfully soak into us. So it starts becoming our way of seeing through our own eyes what Christ saw and all that he saw, which is this mystery of incarnate infinity, this mystery of the generosity of God.

And the path then along which his vision is consummated, these mystics are marking out for us.

And so in the light of this attempt here to step back and take in this vision, I want you to join me in going back and reflecting on how Teresa began all of this at the very beginning of finding our way into the first mansion of the soul. And to see there in that first mansion, really the first three mansions, is that the directional flow or the qualitative or tonal quality of the journey had about it the sense of our sincere intentions to respond to the call of God coming to us from the depths of the seventh innermost mansion of the soul that opens out upon God's heaven in us, beyond us, reaching out mysteriously to touch and awaken our hearts in the midst of our confusion, in the midst of our wayward ways. And so being so awakened to the path, to whatever circumstances the awakening came to us, to love the love lost, or suffering, or joy, or creativity, however it touched us, to personally turn towards God, we set out then to seek God, to kind of find our way with God's help, to become ever closer, ever more one with God. And as we engage in this sincerity, for example, committing ourselves to a daily quiet time with God, for Lectio Divina, reflective meditation, and prayer, and then to let that carry over into more Christ-like attitudes as we go through our whole day, we realize that we there meet what she refers to as the reptiles, which are really internalized habits of the mind and heart that compromise or in some ways violate our fidelity to this infinite love of God that's unexplainably faithful to us in the midst of our wayward waves. And so we struggle with this and we work at it, we fall down and get up and start over again. And through that fidelity, through that constancy, we grow in character. We grow in stabilizing the internalized grace, which is lived as our faith, the measure which is love. And in which we look forward to with hope. So we have this faith, we have this love, we have this hope that when we die, we're not annihilated but consummated. It will cross through the veil of death into glory, into unmediated, infinite union with the infinite love of God as our destiny, our ultimate destiny. And the sincerity of seeking to live this way in prayer, carried over into daily life, day by day, is really holiness. It's really kind of the essence of everything, really. That the currency of the land is holiness, the sincere desire to continue seeking to draw closer to God who guides us and draws us ever onward, sustains us throughout the learning curve of our life up to our last breath.

So then we saw in the fourth mansion, beginning of the fourth mansion, it's in the midst of the sustained sincerity over time. There comes a certain moment in which we begin to realize that as we sit in prayer, embodying our intention to reach out and draw closer to God, more faithful to God, the energy stream, that intentionality toward the hidden center of union with God, one with us in the seventh mansion, opening up on paradise, we begin to realize the flow of an energy coming from the opposite direction. That is, we begin to realize it's not our sincere intentions of seeking God, but rather in the midst of our seeking, we discover God is seeking us. Not just seeking us, but rather God, and this is the subtlety of the fourth mansion, which begins the beginning of the mystical, which he calls Divine Favors. We begin to sense that the infinite presence of God is, with great delicacy, flowing into the intimate immediacy of our very presence, beginning to bring about a certain state of a kind of trans-objective communion, a certain kind of mysterious oneness with God, of God's presence flowing into, uniting, and merging with the intimacy of our very presence into the beginnings of a unitive state.