Author and interspiritual teacher Megan Don introduces the Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) as an exemplar of action and contemplation:
Teresa’s life provides us with an exceptional example of bringing the contemplative and active life together; it displays both a profound internal depth and an exceptionally productive outcome.…
At the age of twenty, after much deliberation, she chose to enter the Carmelite Monastery in Ávila. She did not make this choice because of a vocational “calling” but because Teresa understood it to be a favorable alternative to marriage….
Her fascination with the world continued while she lived in the monastery, since it was not an enclosed order, and a stream of visitors occupied much of her time…. Prayers were ordered and recited by rote, which left her soul dry and uninspired. She attempted to enter her own “prayer of quiet,” but finding the thoughts in her head far too noisy and disturbing, she gave up any attempt to develop a more meaningful way to pray. Her relationship with the Beloved [God] at this time was fairly superficial.
For twenty years she lived a divided life. On the one hand her ego desired worldly attachments, while on the other her spirit was calling her to a deeper communion with the divine. At the age of forty, Teresa finally surrendered completely to her Beloved. Her real life and work had begun. She returned to her prayer of quiet, allowing the Beloved to lead her, no longer relying on her own techniques. Meditation became essential to Teresa in establishing a clear and firm foundation with the divine, and as she walked further on her spiritual pathway, she came to understand that this external Beloved also “rests within.” It was to this place that she would constantly return to receive guidance, love, and a feeling of deep peace that she could not find elsewhere. [1]
From that place of peace and inner authority, Teresa worked to return the Carmelite order to its original emphasis on prayer, poverty, and simplicity, going on to found seventeen new convents and monasteries. Don continues:
Contrary to popular belief, the pinnacle of the mystical life is often lived in the world, even though it is not of the world. Having come into a full consciousness of the reality of existence, the mystic is now returned to society, displaying an extraordinary energy for the work required. This energy is none other than the divine force working in and through this willing worker of the Beloved, and it far surpasses anything we human beings can do alone. Teresa’s life is one such example of a person in and through whom the Beloved worked, and throughout her life she reiterated that the ultimate purpose of the sacred marriage [or union with God] is to give birth to good works in the world. [2]
Perfection Is Practicing Love
In his foreword to The Way of Perfection, Teresa of Ávila’s book on the practice of prayer, Richard Rohr asks:
What is “the way of perfection”? (It isn’t about our perfection, by the way, but the recognition of God’s seamless perfection, woven into the fabric of our life and present all along.)
Saint Teresa writes:
Let the truth be in your hearts, as it will be if you practice meditation, and you will see clearly what love we are bound to have for our neighbors. [1]
Teresa teaches the way of perfection as practicing fraternal love, nonattachment to material things, and authentic humility. Some aspects of this wisdom might seem counterintuitive to readers today. Forgive me, but these virtues of nonattachment and humility don’t often make the vision boards of contemporary spiritual seekers!
Why is this?
What the mystics know, and what we’re having to relearn, is that it’s through a kind of luminous darkness of nonattachment and humility that we come to be seized by real love, God’s love.
I wonder if the only way that conversion, enlightenment, and transformation ever happen is by a kind of divine ambush. We have to be caught off guard. As long as we are in control, we are going to keep trying to steer the ship by our previous experience of being in charge. The only way we will let ourselves be ambushed is by trusting the “Ambusher,” and learning to trust that the darkness of intimacy will lead to depth, safety, freedom, and love.
God needs to catch us by surprise because our very limited, preexisting notions keep us and our understanding of God small. We are still trying to remain in control. We still want to “look good”!
God tries to bring us into a bigger world.
A world where, by definition, we are not in control.
A world where we no longer need to look good.
A terrible lust for certitude and rigid social order has characterized the last five hundred years of Western Christianity, and it has simply not served the soul well at all. Once we lost a spirituality of darkness as its own kind of light, there just wasn’t much room for growth in faith, hope, and love.
So God, as The Way of Perfection attests, has to come indirectly: catching us off guard and out of control, when we are empty instead of full of ourselves.
That is why the saints—including Teresa—talk about suffering so much. About nonattachment to the fleeting passions that put us on a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs.
The mystics are not masochistic, sadistic, negative, morbid, or oppositional. They have seen the pattern and, as Teresa says in one place, it is not that we are happy for the suffering. Who could be? Who would be?
No. We are happy for the new level of intimacy with God that the suffering has brought us to.
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Leave this place, you and the people you brought up out of Egypt, and go up to the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
14 The Lord replied, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”
4 Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.
4Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. 5I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.
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