Sinful Teresa Became a Paragon of Prayer
Teresa sought wholeheartedly for God.
WHEN TERESA of Avila was seven, she read a book on the lives of saints, which made her want to die a martyr. She and a brother ran away toward “the land of the Moors” to get themselves beheaded so they might go straight to heaven. An uncle stopped the plot and brought them home.
Although her parents were devout, Teresa’s mother indulged in reading tales of chivalry. Soon Teresa was also engrossed in these fantasies, although she hid the books from her father, who detested them. After her mother died, Teresa had no maternal guidance during her teens. A cousin led her into frivolous interests, and her own mind suggested even more sins about which she remained vague, writing, “God favored me much in not proclaiming my secret sins to all men. And, thus, I am very glad that my detractor should ever report a trifling lie about me, rather than the terrible truth.”
Hoping to tame her, Teresa’s father placed her in an Augustinian convent for three months. However, Teresa became ill and returned home to recover. While ill, she read the writings of Jerome, which filled her with desire for a deeper, more austere life, but her father forbade her to become a nun until after his death. Teresa ran away and joined the Carmelites.
She was quickly disappointed there in her hope of holy living. Card playing, careless reading, gossip, quarrels, and worse were as common within the cloister as outside. Teresa became seriously ill again, and went home to Avila, where she slipped into a coma. Her sisters thought she was dead and would have buried her, but her father insisted she was alive. After four days, she woke to sharp pain and paralysis. It took her three years to recover the use of her legs.
Now she entered a dark period. She would later counsel sinners, “Let no one ever say: ‘If I fall into sin, I cannot then pray.’ In this the devil turned his most dreadful batteries [attacks] against me. He said to me that it showed very little shame in me if I could have the face to pray, who had just been so wicked. And under that snare of Satan I actually as good as gave up all prayer for a year and a half. This was nothing else but to throw myself straight down into hell.” However, she discovered that, “When we acknowledge our vileness, [God] remembers it no more. I grew weary of sinning before God grew weary of forgiving my sin.”
At Lent in 1554, she experienced a transforming conversion while meditating on Christ. Afterward, Teresa became a woman of prayer. She founded convents dedicated to a deeper walk with Christ—the Discalced (shoeless) Carmelites. No one was to enter these houses except women truly devoted to spiritual living. Her exhausting efforts to organize and supply these homes later led Presbyterian minister Alexander Whyte to write, “For forty as hard-working years as ever any woman spent in this world, Teresa labored according to her best light to preserve the purity and the unity of the Church of Christ.”
Teresa’s books—her Autobiography, her account of the homes, and her mystical writings—have touched many lives. “No one reads the saint’s writings who does not presently seek God, and no one through her writings seeks God who does not remain in love with the saint,” wrote Spanish Catholic bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza some decades after her death.
On her deathbed, Teresa said she hoped to be saved by the merits of our Lord Jesus Christ. She quoted parts of Psalm 51, repeating again and again, “A broken and a contrite heart thou wilt not despise.” Those were her last words. She died on this day, 4 October 1582.
—Dan Graves
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Teresa of Avila's story is documented in Pioneers of the Spirit: Teresa of Avila
Read some of her writing in Study Module #309: Teresa of Avila on Prayer