Over the past two weeks I have found solace and strength from Bill Haley’s encouragement to go deeper in Jesus when the seas get rougher and Ken Wettig’s exhortation to be mindful of who’s speaking to my heart.  Dallas Willard said it is our hearts that most define us.  When Jesus encouraged us to love God with our whole hearts, He was speaking fundamentally to the core of our beings, which is most clearly expressed in our choices.  What do I choose when I am free from external pressure?  What do I choose when I am under pressure, and I am tempted to move into fight or flight mode?  James KA Smith reminds us that we worship what we love.  Am I loving God with my whole heart?  Am I loving my neighbor as myself?

Another voice of wisdom, clarity, and hope for me over the past several months has been the discovery of the richness of Teresa of Avila’s hard-earned intimacy with God amid the challenges of her day.  Through hardship Teresa discovered a depth of friendship with Jesus that would lead to her becoming the Catholic church’s primary expert on the practice of prayer.  She would come to embody Jesus’s invitation in John 15 to dwell in and with Him in intimate friendship.  As with the disciples, the living out of this reality would be forged amid great hardship and persecution.

Teresa’s experience of prayer as the intimate sharing between friends did not come to her easily nor early in her life.  She was raised in a devout nurturing environment but lost her mother at the age of 12.  Her father, out of fear of the corrosive impact of worldly influences on her character, enrolled her in a convent school at 16.  In a surprising twist Teresa would then join a convent as a nun without her father’s permission at the age of 20. Contrary to what I imagined Teresa received little instruction or encouragement in how to cultivate a personally intimate relationship with God.  She faithfully practiced mass and the divine office daily with the balance of her days spent largely socializing with the patrons of the convent.

Not long after entering the convent Teresa contracted an illness that left her paralyzed for three years.  She was not expected to live let alone recover.  It was in this time of solitude that Teresa was able to read spiritual books that her uncle possessed.  While reading the Third Spiritual Alphabet she was introduced to the Prayer of Recollection which offered her the first glimmer of hope that she could actually know God in a personal, loving, interactive relationship.  This prayer encouraged her not to fear her thoughts and distractions but to bring them all to God without any sense of shame or guilt and release them into His care.  This stirred a growing confidence in God’s intimate desire to be with her.   Sadly however, after miraculously recovering from her illness, she would go another 16-17 years without further encouragement to carve out time for personal communion with God.  She spent these intervening years being torn between her desire to be well-liked and intimately connected to the patrons of the convent and her hunger to be with God.  Finally at the age of 39, in a moment of desperation, she cried out to God to free her from her divided heart and connect her securely with Him.  Thus began an intimate journey of setting aside an hour a day to be with Jesus, Abba, and Holy Spirit in addition to mass and the divine hours.

She came to recognize that three virtues/qualities were essential to growing intimacy with God: 1) a genuine sense of being loved by God and of then naturally loving Him in return.  This shared love organically led to loving all those God brought her in touch with (her neighbors);  2) a humble acknowledgement of her need for His help and her inability to reach Him in our own efforts alone; and 3) a desire to sever all attachments that were not rooted in God.  She pursued these virtues with the determination to set aside one hour a day to be alone in intimate companionship with the Trinity.  Over time she came to experience dramatic physical and emotional expressions of His divine presence, but these were not the goal nor the end.  These experiences would pass over time and what remained was a quiet, settled, secure attachment to the love of Jesus.  Her imagination was captured by Jesus’s promise of preparing dwelling places for His disciples (John 14:2-3) and by the friendship He expressed in John 15:15-16.  Teresa’s experience of growing intimacy reminds me of Curt Thompson’s exercise to help us establish a secure loving attachment to Jesus.  I marvel at Teresa and Ignatius’s psychological wisdom long before psychology and neuroscience were recognized as disciplines.  They, along with other church fathers and mothers, were skilled in understanding and recognizing the movements of our affections.

Teresa’s settled confidence in God’s loving companionship and initiation in her life led her to share this prayer with those she mentored and nurtured:

• Let nothing disturb you (Joshua 1:9)
• Let nothing frighten you (Psalm 23:4)
• All things are passing (every experience of life, joy filled and painful, passes and cannot be held onto)
• God never changes! (the steadfast hesed love of God endures forever)
• Patient endurance attains all things (this is the hope of Romans 5:1-5 and James 1:2-4 that will not disappoint us)
• Whom God possesses in nothing is lacking (Psalm 23:1; Dallas Willard’s Life Without Lack)
• Alone God suffices. (Job’s experience of encountering God 42:5-6)

I have been inspired by Teresa’s deep, transformative, loving engagement with the marginalized, overlooked, and desperate seekers for loving security of her day.  I had wrongly assumed that she was a cloistered mystic with little concern for the world around her, totally absorbed in her ecstatic experiences of God’s love.  To my delight I have discovered Teresa’s tireless engagement despite regular bouts of illness in caring for those in need and in creating reformed Carmelite convents where women could dedicate themselves to the unbroken flow of intimate time spent with Jesus and sharing His love for those desperately in need of His presence.  Out of friendship with Jesus Teresa taught her sisters this prayer:

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ’s compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about
doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.”

Teresa has much to teach me.  I am growing to understand why Eugene Peterson and Dallas Willard both said they learned to pray conversationally with God from Teresa.  I am beginning to grasp why she, along with St. John of the Cross and Ignatius of Loyola, were so formative in CS Lewis’s intimate connection with God, expressed so beautifully in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Ransom Trilogy, and Til We Have Faces.

Teresa’s tone with the sisters under her care was compassionate, kind, humble, gentle and patient (Col. 3:14).  This is the fruit of being with Jesus.  She encouraged them to release any concern about striving to gain deeper levels of intimacy in prayer and to simply focus on being with Jesus as one close friend with another.  And their friendship with Jesus compelled them to love their neighbors sacrificially.  She came to trust that we cannot help but be transformed like Mary of Bethany, pouring out her precious oil on Jesus’s feet, when we have come to know His love in the core of our beings (John 12).

So in these challenging times, beset by global, national, and personal hardships here are some resources to draw on Teresa’s wisdom and encouragement:

• Carmelcast episodes 67 and 68
• The Intimate Sharing of Friends, Saint Teresa of Avila on Prayer by Mark O’Keefe
• The Way of Perfection by Teresa of Avila
• The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila
• The Prayer of Recollection in The Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, pp 281-3 by Adele Calhoun

  May we all find that deep security in the adoring, nurturing, affirming, loving gaze of God upon us that frees us to love with power and conviction those He has called us to in our day.