Categories: study, prayer, spiritual-writings, lives-of-saints
Date: 05 March 2010 23:55:44
As I ended this post on The Moral Life in Christ course, a quote from St Irenaeus, "... God prepared man to become his friend ...", makes an easy transition to the first night of the Reading the Classics short course and St Teresa of Ávila, whom we looked at Wednesday and will look again at next week before moving to St John of the Cross for the final two weeks.
In Chapter 8 of her Life, from The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila,
Volume 1 [ICS Publications], she writes:
For mental prayer in my opinion is nothing more than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us. In order that love be true and the friendship endure, the wills of the friends must be in accord.
p. 67
There was much unpacked from these two sentences, and in fact the entire second hour of the night was taken up with one other sentence from Chapter 8 ["Though we are always in the presence of God, it seems to me the manner is different with those who practice prayer, for they are aware that He is looking at them."] and the first sentence of the quote above. The first hour was taken up with Fr Greg Homeming OCD, who is a most engaging and knowledgable presenter, asking what we hoped to gain from these four weeks and then giving a brief overview of the fascinating life of St Teresa.
There is much to say on her life, and if you were unaware as I was, there was much that amazed as well as comforted. She lived in the 16th century and was born into a semi-noble family. Her paternal grandfather was a converso, a Jewish convert to Christianity under threat of expulsion from Spain. She was a wonderfully "real" woman: an implsive woman too shown with her running away with her brother at the age of 7 to fight the Moors [her uncle caught them at the city walls]. She once decided not to pray for one year due to her feelings of sinfulness. She fell in love with a priest, but stopped it as soon as she became aware of it. But she also a woman of great prayer, of great insight, and of great sanctity: people were drawn to her because of these. And she was also understood relationships, person-to-person relationships, and viewed them as of such importance which comes through in her writings, such as in the two quotes above. It was also shown in her life, with not only her experiences with God and people, but also in one aspcet of her reform of the Carmelite Order, establishing the Discalced Carmelites with St John of the Cross: her instructions were that these communities were small in number so that those in the order could grow in love, forming deep relationships with each other. As I wrote, there is much that could be said; but these were the events that particularly struck me.
Returning to the quotes, Fr Greg's method of unveiling them is not only to reveal the meaning, but also the context in which they were written. This latter emphasis will, as he said, help us to truly be able to "read the Classics"; for they do not exist in isolation, but come from a person's experience and personality, and furthermore from works that person has read which may shape the way they write [for instance St Teresa had a great love of St Augustine's Confessions and found much similarity with him]. As we get to know the author, truly get to know, not just in head knowledge but in heart knowledge also and perhaps moreso, a single sentence, as was shown in the first class, can take 30 minutes to unpack, and even that unpacking is not a complete exploration.
The joy I received from the first sentence I quoted ["For mental prayer in my opinion..."] was the reminder of God's great Love for us, and not love in only creating us, which is cause for great thanksgiving towards him, but, in the words of John 15, "No longer do I call you servants ... but I have called you friends" [ESV]: we read in James 2:23 that Abraham was called a friend of God -- and this is our calling too. St Teresa was indeed a friend of God, and through her works and her life she reminds us of and desires that we too become friends with God through a relationship with him. And prayer is one of the ways we grow in this relationship, which is a challenge to me to see prayer in this life and to desire prayer, to work at prayer, in my life: for for me it is a struggle to pray. But I take comfort that those before me, even Saints, have struggled with this too; as St Teresa writes:
[I] would that I the had permission to tell of the many times I failed God during this period by not seeking support from this strong pillar of prayer.2. I voyaged on this tempestuous sea for almost twenty years with these fallings and risings ...
3. However I see the great mercy the Lord has bestowed on me; for though I continued to associate with the world, I had to courage to practice prayer.
pp. 65-6
Through the mercy of God I pray I, and I pray for all, may have the courage to persevere in in prayer, and in our words and in our actions, to help us reach our high calling to be a friend of God.