Who was St. Teresa of Ávila?
Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in Ávila on March 28, 1515, into a large and devout family; Benedict XVI counts three sisters and nine brothers. As a small girl she briefly ran away from home to find martyrdom, telling her parents, "I want to see God." Her mother died when she was thirteen, by the Discalced Carmelites' count, which agrees with the Catholic Encyclopedia's "in her fourteenth year"; Benedict XVI says she was about twelve. In November 1535, against her father's wishes, she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Ávila, a house of 140 nuns. The separation from her family caused her a pain, the Encyclopedia says, "which she ever afterwards compared to that of death."
About a year after her profession she fell gravely ill. The treatment made her worse; she lay in a coma for four days and was given up for dead. She credited her recovery to St. Joseph, but her health never fully returned. She later wrote of that time, in words Benedict XVI quotes, "I saw clearly that I was not living, but rather wrestling with the shadow of death." For years afterward her prayer was lukewarm, and she gave up mental prayer altogether for a time because, the Encyclopedia says, she thought her worldly conversations made her "unworthy of the graces God bestowed on her in prayer."
The turn came in Lent of 1554, at thirty-nine, in front of a statue of Christ "most grievously wounded." The Discalced Carmelites date her definitive conversion about two years later. After it, God's presence began to come over her, she said, unexpectedly. Visions and interior words followed, and so did fear. Her confessors and the laymen she consulted decided the visions came from the devil. "The more she endeavoured to resist them," the Encyclopedia says, "the more powerfully did God work in her soul." The town talked. Francis Borgia and Peter of Alcántara, both now saints, were among those who examined her. Her own conscience, the Encyclopedia notes, was so delicate that it treated small failings "as grievous faults."
On August 24, 1562, she opened the convent of St. Joseph in Ávila, the first house of the reform, and from 1567, at fifty-two, she spent the rest of her life on the roads of Spain, founding, by Benedict XVI's count, seventeen convents for nuns, from Medina del Campo (1567) to Burgos (1582), and, with John of the Cross, the first houses of reformed friars. The Discalced Carmelites record that she was denounced to the Inquisition several times, and that a 1575 process in Seville ended in acquittal. In 1580 Rome made her reformed houses a separate province. On the way back from her last foundation at Burgos she collapsed at Alba de Tormes and died there on the night of October 4, 1582, which the calendar reform of that year counted as October 15. Her last words, Benedict reports, were "After all I die as a child of the Church." Paul V beatified her in 1614; Gregory XV canonized her on March 12, 1622; and in 1970 Paul VI made her the first woman Doctor of the Church.
Why Catholics pray to St. Teresa in anxiety and in dry faith
There is no decree behind it. Franciscan Media lists her patronage as relief from headaches, which tells its own story about a woman who was sick for most of her life. Catholics in anxiety go to her for a better reason: she describes it from inside, and she got through it without ever becoming someone who did not feel it.
Consider what she carried. A body that failed her early and never recovered. Years of prayer that felt like nothing. A conscience that turned every small fault into a crime. Confessors who told her the God she met in prayer was the devil, in a city that gossiped about her, in a century when the Inquisition took such talk seriously. Franciscan Media calls her conversion "an arduous lifelong struggle." Teresa did not wait to feel safe before she acted. She founded the first convent of the reform while her own visions were under examination, and she called the book of her life, as Benedict notes, the "book of the Lord's mercies," which is not how a frightened woman usually describes her past.
What she gives a frightened person is her definition of prayer, which Benedict XVI quotes: prayer "means being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with him who, we know, loves us." A conversation with a friend who is already on your side. It is possible when the mind will not stop. Her Interior Castle, Benedict says, retraces her own journey through seven "rooms," each one further in, which is another way of saying that the noise is at the edges and the center is quiet.
How to pray to St. Teresa
Pray to her any day. Her memorial is October 15, and the nine days before it run October 6 to 14. Her body rests at Alba de Tormes, where the Encyclopedia reports it incorrupt.
Say the prayer below once, slowly, and then do what she did: talk to Christ as to a friend, in your own words, for a few minutes, without trying to feel anything. Go to Mass. Go to Confession, and say the scruples out loud to a priest rather than arguing with them alone; Teresa's trouble eased when she found confessors who understood her. If you can, read a few pages of the Way of Perfection, which she wrote for beginners.
If the anxiety is constant, if it brings panic or keeps you from sleeping or working, see a doctor as well. Teresa was treated by physicians, badly at first, and would have taken a good one gladly. Prayer and treatment are not rivals. If you are thinking of ending your life, call emergency services or, in the United States, 988.
She had every reason to be afraid, and she went on founding convents. The fear did not leave first. The friendship came first, and the fear learned its place.