St. Teresa of Avila & Lent

Beloved in Christ,

As part of the Canon Orders of St. Benedict, during Lent each person chooses a spiritually edifying book to read as part of our Lenten discipline.

This year, I am reading St. Teresa of Avila's The Way of Perfection. She was a Spanish nun in the Caremlite order and is known as a mystic and whose writings make up an important component of the counterreformation, which was a period of reform within the Roman Catholic Church during the rise of Protestantism, the “reformation.”

In her work The Way of Perfection (St. Teresa of Avila, trans. & ed. By E. Allison Peers, 2018) notes that a major component of the work treats “three essentials of the prayer-filled life - mutual love, detachment from created things and true humility, the last of these being the most important and including all the rest.” (p. 1)

It is these things which “help us to preserve that peace, both inward and outward, which the Lord so earnestly recommended to us” (p. 22).

A critical component of Lent is about reorienting ourselves, our whole selves, to God.

St. Teresa writes to her sisters in the convent the importance of being “inwardly fortified” and attaching ourselves not to earthly things but to “things eternal.” (p. 18). 

That is she is noting the importance of focusing our whole selves, particularly in prayer, towards God. And in doing so, we become “inwardly fortified,” that is, we become more resilient and fully who we are because we are focused on God.

She teaches detachment from things where rust and moth destroy and corrupt, to focus on heavenly things, eternal things. To some, this may sound like a method of putting our head in the sand, ignoring the horrors of the world in order to merely hope for a better time in the future.

But Teresa was living in the midst of profound social upheaval. Christendom, and the semi-stability it brought throughout Europe, was in utter upheaval with kingdoms and nations and empires convulsing in rapid religious and social change. 

St. Teresa is writing to her sisters a reminder that the work they have set before them is to be rooted, first and foremost, in that which created all things.

Not that we may ignore things.

But rather participate in the greater component of all things - which is God, the creator.

In doing so, we are able to root into the prayerful and contemplative life which, for Teresa, is of utmost importance to the Christian life and development.

I am grateful for her writings and her deep faith, and I am curious to see what meditating on her works will bring about. For the time being, I am working on reframing my day to day in light of the Eternal.

All we do, after all, moves us closer to or further from our God. The practice of framing our focus on God throughout our days is a worthwhile practice, one that I am inspired to practice by the work of St. Teresa of Avila.

Yours in Christ,

Alex+