For when your prayer has gone dry and you suspect it is you. She was a nun for almost twenty years before anything happened, and she says so — falling and rising, on a stormy sea — and then, at thirty-nine, everything did.
Let nothing disturb thee, nothing affright thee; all things are passing; God never changeth. Patient endurance attaineth to all things; who God possesseth in nothing is wanting. Alone God sufficeth.
Saint Teresa, pray for us.
Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada, born at Ávila in 1515, granddaughter of a converted Jew who had been paraded through Toledo for it. She read romances of chivalry as a girl and wanted, for a while, to be a martyr among the Moors. Her mother died when she was thirteen. She entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation at twenty, more from fear of hell than love of God — her words — and nearly died within three years, paralyzed for months and in a coma for four days, so that a grave was dug.
Then eighteen years of what she called a stormy sea. The Incarnation was a comfortable house with a hundred and eighty nuns and a parlor full of visitors; she was good at the parlor. She gave up mental prayer for a year because she felt unworthy of it, which she later called the worst mistake she ever made. In Lent 1554, at thirty-nine, she stopped in front of a statue of the wounded Christ that had been put out for a feast, and something ended.
What followed was the reform: a vow to found a house that kept the old rule, St Joseph's in 1562 — Ávila rioted — then, once Rome permitted it, sixteen more, by mule cart, in poor health, across Spain. She took a young friar named John of the Cross to do the same for the men. Her confessors ordered her to write her life, and the Inquisition took the manuscript. She wrote The Interior Castle in two months in 1577, between foundations. She died at Alba de Tormes on the fourth of October 1582 — the night the calendar was reformed, so that the next day was the fifteenth.
The map she left is of the road she had walked, and she is precise about how long it took. In the Life she calls the years at the Incarnation nearly twenty of falling and rising, and says that she would sometimes have been glad of any excuse to leave the chapel; that is a Doctor of the Church describing her own prayer at thirty-eight. The Interior Castle, twenty years later, begins with the image that gave her the book: the soul as a castle of a single diamond, with many rooms, and God in the innermost. She had been living in the outer courtyard for two decades and knew every stone of it.
What it made of her was not solemnity. She is the funniest saint who ever wrote — a line long attributed to her has her telling God, after the mule cart went into a river, that if this was how he treated his friends, no wonder he had so few. She asked for a determined determination in prayer, and that phrase, from The Way of Perfection, is the whole method: not feeling, resolve. And she is the reason a shy Jewish philosopher in Germany, four centuries later, read one book in a night and closed it saying this was the truth. That woman is on this site too.
Canonized in 1622 alongside Ignatius and Philip Neri. In 1970 the first woman named a Doctor of the Church, by a week — Catherine of Siena followed. The Discalced Carmelites are still keeping her rule in every country there is. Bernini carved the moment from the twenty-ninth chapter of her Life — the angel and the spear — in marble in Rome in 1652, and it is the most famous image of prayer in the world.
Ávila is largely as she left it: the walls, the Incarnation with her cell, and a convent built over the house she was born in. Her body is at Alba de Tormes, in the convent she died in. Edith Stein — Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — took her name.