Marie Štechová
This among the most feminine women always needed a strong counterweight of masculine influence, stimuli, and support in the spirit of a man to balance the great spiritual tension of her life internally.
It is necessary to seize one's religious calling in an absolute sense so that it is not merely a toil or a search for distraction. Thus, it dragged on until the year 1555 (when she was 40 years old!). A glance at the tortured Christ awakens her. Jesus shows her the way. Not people, not the world, not books. The immense life flowing from Christ captures and consumes her. It breaks through the walls of human caution. It drives her into an assault on God. Not passivity, but an active collaboration with God. In 1559 she makes a vow: to always do what is most perfect for the soul in given circumstances. This vow makes her a saint. This period includes the miracle of transverberation (the piercing of the heart) (August 27).
Teresa observes around her in the monastery of the Incarnation how great works of God can be destroyed by small human things if the soul is not vigilant. How even the order can be seized by slackening, even when the rule does not seem to be transgressed and evil does not appear even to be observable. It is precisely the spiritual vocation that requires a decisive: either - or! Either wanting perfection and then wanting it absolutely, without reservations - or making it more humanly bearable, but spiritually weaker. The Carmel of her time no longer had a enclosure - its parlors often became literary salons where politics and social events were discussed. In such an atmosphere, dispersed souls could not concentrate on prayer and meditation - the world constantly pressed upon them. These monasteries were not truly God's; God almost never found souls in solitude, in that real inner solitude from which every strong and full religious life is born. The original Carmel - the order of the Virgin Mary - this is what Teresa constantly thinks about. The original Carmel, where the soul had only one company: God. God and the soul! A soul entirely close to God. -
She knew that rectification can only come from within. “It would be an excellent means for them to give them a good confessor... It is terrible work to want an external order when there is no one to care for the internal.”
To surround God with prayer. The religious life: The soul breaks into life in God. The path to life is the path of love. And in it, action is everything. “Not much knowledge, but much love.” Love is the creation over the entire range of the soul. It is the central nerve of the construction of Christian life - that is: the immortal life of the soul. And the growth of the immortal soul is not something cheap. The essential form of human life - as Saint Teresa sees it - is tragic essence. We sinners! Who will free us from this mortal body? she constantly asks. Y sin amor todo es nada! Without love, everything is vanity! A man who does not love is in her eyes morally shapeless. He is not involved in unity with God and the universe, he has no share in the fullness of life. He is incapable of understanding either God or man. Just as Jesus redeemed us with His sacrifice, His suffering, His blood, we must also walk the path of sacrifice, suffering, yes, and blood for the immortal glory of our soul. And precisely this reality is what man does not want to recognize. It is precisely before it that he constantly covers his eyes. He would often be willing to acknowledge the soul as immortal and of the highest value but is not willing to pay it.
Prayer is the service of love. The Lord calls to service, and the Lord also assigns the service. Saint Teresa warns against any mechanical nature of spiritual life, against the slavish imitation of others. She likes to compare the soul to a dwelling, a palace, a castle, whose Lord is God. It is primarily necessary for the soul to recognize this sovereignty. The recognition of God's sovereignty - it cannot be just nice declamations. To fulfill God's will is absolute inner surrender to God, experiencing the full reality of one's own nothingness, not wanting to lean on its rotten foundations. The will of God is something that true humility hears and by which true love is guided. It is the readiness for internal following. And all of this is already prayer. Yes, even just breathing with such a desire is prayer. - The main thing, however, is that we completely devote ourselves to God as His possession and remove all obstacles. This is the condition; it is placed and has a right to it. And I also do not know how otherwise He could operate, for He is a friend of order. If we do not clean the palace of lowly people and ordinary things, how could He enter with His court? (The Way to Perfection).
In the book The Castle of the Interior, she shows us where the first great enemy of the soul lies. Wandering in the ditches of the castle, on the periphery of the world - on the margin of life. The quiet whistle of the Lord calls her to the inner chambers of the castle, but she does not hear. “There are souls so sick and so accustomed to dealing with external things that they cannot enter into themselves. Terrible are the snares and tricks of the devil to prevent the souls from recognizing themselves and finding their paths” (The Castle of the Interior). “The soul is so absorbed in the things of the world, so immersed in goods or honors or activities of this world that even if it wanted to know and taste its beauty, the world does not allow it. It seems that it cannot get rid of so many obstacles. After external enemies, internal enemies approach. It is we ourselves with our self-love, our prejudices, and our expansiveness. “We must completely renounce confidence in ourselves and transfer it all to God.” The freedom of the spirit is nothing other than “finding God in all things” (Book on Founding). Thus, even in suffering. In order for life not to be a miserable dragging along this earth, but to be a gathering of strength for the supernatural and eternal life, it must spiritually process everything, the whole substance of life that is before it and within it. God grants freedom. He gives it just so in pain as in happiness, but primarily in suffering. This has primary cleansing value for us. Without suffering, the life of the soul would be shallow. If it wants to evade it and if it hesitates to bear it, it would rid itself of what ensures the spirit's freedom and mobility. It would become faint, slacken, and yield to its cowardice. A man who evades suffering and who resists bearing it lies internally. He calls the values of life by the wrong names. Only when we go through the flames of war can we speak of the struggle. Let no one ever speak of it who cowardly runs from every reality! It is veiled pride that does not want anything unpleasant to it, that does not want to bear anything heavy, that does not want to work on anything heavy, that does not want to acknowledge its defeats, its smallness, its wretchedness. A heroic soul waits for blows from God! It accepts them without cowardly laments, yes, it thanks for them, it asks for them. “And therefore it asks for suffering, but first for the grace to bear it. I want to suffer, God, because you have suffered. Your will be done in me, whatever it may be!” (Life). Only the eternal Sculptor knows why and how the rough boulder of our being must be worked on so that it may one day bear the image of the immortal beauty of its Creator.
Saint Teresa is a first-class teacher of asceticism. Our spirituality and corporeality require precise balance so that neither spirit may be excessively elevated nor body excessively expressed. The laws of this inner relationship between matter and spirit are so precise that even the slightest deviation creates dissonances. Weak spirituality is one that either ignores the body (the mass in us) altogether or submits to it. Bringing our corporeality into submission to the spirit is the characteristic work of asceticism. If we observe the appetites of the body, we see that against them all mortification must begin. For example, the mortification of the senses. Through sight and hearing, so many impressions pass that they could paralyze the spirit if we did not timely defend ourselves by denying them most of these impressions. From the greed of the senses, dangerous spiritual avarice can quickly ensue. A person dives into everything he finds along the way of life, dragging in all manner of carrion into his lair. A poor spirit takes only what he needs for the free movement of the spirit from everything. The results of good asceticism are always spiritual: the lightness of the spirit, its easy detachment from matter, its permeability to the influences of God's grace - that which the saint called “consent to God's will.” It is always given only after such arduous work of the soul. Saint Teresa wants nothing easy, nothing simple. Even the road to perfection is not something easy and cheap. Any spirituality, examined through her eyes, always reveals itself as either true or false. Whether it is veiled sensuality and crawling before oneself, or real work on spiritual life. The whole mystical work of Saint Teresa is a hymn of love, just as her whole life was. Love transmutes what is low and wretched in us. Love is the expansion of our being. Jesus was the most amazing reality of her spiritual life.
The mission of Carmel is to be a fortress of prayer - for all souls.
