St. Teresa of Avila

 

Teresa was born in the medieval fortified town of Avila in Spain on March 28, 1515. At seven she and her brother Rodrigo, impressed by the lives of the saints, ran away from home, hoping to die as martyrs. They were overtaken on the road out of Avila by an uncle and returned home where they contented themselves with playing at being "hermits" in their garden instead.

Beautiful, intelligent, and of a lively and assertive temperament, Teresa was given to prayer and seeking God’s will for her. At the age of twenty, having overcome her good father’s reluctance to be parted from her, she entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Avila, and was professed as a religious a year later.

Becoming ill, she suffered much for several years and was once almost given up for dead. Seeking God in the practice of virtue and solitude, she began to develop her famous doctrine on prayer and divine contemplation.

Yet her convent, much given to social encounters, and worldliness, for a while distracted her. Coming to herself, she quit the society of outsiders, and seeking only to fulfill her religious duties and grow in prayer, greatly advanced in the spiritual life. She began to be favored with rare divine communications, which she obediently submitted to the guidance of her confessors.

Inspired to reform the Carmelites, amid opposition and persecution – including from the Inquisition – Teresa went on to found the Discalced Carmelites with the support of St. Peter of Alcantara. Her first convent, dedicated to St. Joseph, was founded in Avila in 1562. Later, with the help of St. John of the Cross, she also undertook the reform of the male branch of the Order.

Once she started the great reform to return the Order to its original spirit of poverty, prayer and total enclosure, Teresa’s life was one of continuous foundations, which cost her much labor and suffering. It was during this period of the foundations that she wrote her treatises: The Way of Perfection, The Foundations, and The Interior Castle.

Teresa died in Alba de Tormes in October of 1582. She was canonized forty years later, was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970, and is universally revered as the Doctor of Prayer.