Saint Teresa of Ávila
(1515-1582)
Feast: 15 October
When Saint Teresa read Saint Augustine’s Confessions, a book overflowing with love of God, with repentance and return to God, her eyes were opened to the mysteries on high, and she began to live anew a life of prayer, fervour and mortification.
She began to say: “God alone suffices.” She worked at reforming herself before reforming others. She devoted herself to meditation and mental prayer, and began to experience ecstasies and extraordinary phenomena. So she consulted great theologians, Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans, who reassured her that all this came from God and that she had nothing to fear. From then on, the Lord Jesus began to appear to her and to set her heart ablaze with the fire of his divine love, so much so that an angel pierced her with a fiery dart that went through her heart and set it on fire with a love she could hardly bear.
She also began to mortify her body in all kinds of ways: she wore rough sackcloth, bound her body with a spiked metal belt, fasted and prayed, until her body became the captive of her soul, thirsting for God and shining with heavenly light.
Among her famous sayings:
“Christ has no body now but yours” (words often attributed to Saint Teresa): yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world; yours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good; yours are the hands with which Christ blesses this world.
“The important thing is not to think much, but to love much.”
“Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you; all things pass away, God never changes. Patience obtains all things; whoever has God lacks nothing: God alone suffices.”
“When the devil reminds you of your past, remind him of his future” (a saying popularly attributed to her).
Help us, Jesus, to imitate the lives of the saints and to meditate on their words, so that we may become saints like them. Amen.
Prepared by Rita of the Sawt el Rab team
