St. Teresa of Avila
Born: March 28, 1515
Died: October 15, 1582
Feast Day: October 15
Quick, name five reformers you know who have a sense of humor.
Anybody got one yet?
Too bad you didn’ know Teresa of Avila.
Teresa was that rarest of creatures, a merry reformer. The woman who cried, “God deliver us from sullen saints!” found that wit and charm made powerful allies in her struggle to reform the Carmelite order in sixteenth-century Spain.
Teresa was born in 1515 to a family of twelve children—“all of them,” she says, “resembled their parents in virtue except myself, though I was my father’s favorite.”
At the age of 7, she and her brother Roddrigo, fortified with some raisins and the stories of saints’ lives they’d been reading, set off for the land of the Moors to become martyrs for Christ. Fortunately for Teresa and probably for the Moors, an uncle quickly retrieved them.
Teresa was a typical young woman of her time, concerned with her hair, her dress, her companions. She became a nun, she said, more from fear of hell than love from God.
But the convent of the Incarnation in Avila was hardly a cloistered enclave. The nun gave parties, wore the latest fashions, and entertained friends in the convent paylor. When Teresa realized that amithe chatter she had begun to neglect her habit of mental prayer, she withdrew from the social life of the convent. Once more in contact with God, she began to hear inner voices and see visions, for which she was widely ridiculed by the nuns and townspeople.
When Teresa was 45, she decided to found a reformed Carmelite convent, where the nuns would live in poverty and devote themselves to prayer. Again a storm of criticism followed, but Teresa was firm. Slowly her charm and personality won over her critics, and even the papal visitors who was sent to size up—and possibly shut down—the new convent.
As prioress, Teresa encouraged austerity but also loved to enjoy herself. She insisted that the nuns attend recreation, sing, and play music- complete with castanets for dancing on feast days. When one nun sought humility by resolving to never express any clever thought that came to her during recreation, Teresa would have none of it: “It is bad enough to be stupid by grace.”
The woman whom Pope John Paul II called “God’s vagabond” traveled unceasingly throughout Spain, founding convents and reassuring nervous bishops and theologians. Eventually she was sent to the convent of the Incarnation in Avila- which she had left years before- to restore order and serve as prioress. The nuns, many still insulted by Terea’s reforming ways, flew into an uproar at her arrival. In a remarkable display of tact, Teresa quieted them and humbly asked for their help. The next day, reports Mary Hester Valentine in Saints for Contemporary Women, they found a statue of Mary in the prioress’ chair. Teresa pointed to it, saying, “There is you Prioress; I am simply her servant.”
Teresa, who once said she was so defenseless against affection that she could be bribed with a sardine, was certainly a friend of God, whom she talked with throughout the day.
Teresa died in 1582. Once accused of spouting theology “like a Doctor of the Church,” she was named just that in 1970—one of the first two women in history to be so honored.
Originally published in Salt magazine, ©Claretian Publications.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
