The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [46]
“No one,” my grandmother whispered.
And here’s the worst part, God: Even in that moment of heartbreak and abandonment, she probably forgave you. On her deathbed, my Nana forgave you. How come you never have to feel guilty, God?
Teresa of Avila
(IF YOU NEED DIRECT CONTACT)
A.K.A. The Roving Nun
FEAST DAY: October 15
SYMBOLS: a pierced heart, a book, a dove
For years, Teresa of Avila suffered poor health—probably malaria—an unpleasant prayer life, major guilt pangs, and debilitating shame spirals.
When she complained to God about it all, he just said, “Teresa, so do I treat my friends.”
“That’s why you have so few friends,” she snapped.
Still, she remained devoted.
As a young teen, Teresa had lost her mom. Nine kids left to a single dad. It was time for the girl to figure out what she intended to do with her life: matrimony or the convent? Marriage prospects weren’t that great for the Christian descendant of a Jew in sixteenth-century Spain, and Teresa managed to dim them further by having an affair. She entered a convent for the first time at age eighteen—but just as a boarder. After less than two years, ill health forced her to return home.
Her father didn’t want her to leave again. “Find a man,” he said. “Any man.”
She found plenty of men, but none of them husband material. The pickings were just too slim. Nights of passion, but by morning she was over it. It was under cover of darkness that Teresa ran away to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation. But the religious community turned out to be something less than pure. Rich nuns kept servants and lapdogs, lived in private suites, wore jewelry and perfume. Poor sisters slept in a dorm. They all had plenty of male visitors.
Teresa’s malaria started acting up again—fevers and fainting spells—so the mother superior packed her up once more and released her to her dad. She was given experimental treatments and quack cures, got worse. Finally her dad brought her home to die.
“My tongue was bitten to pieces,” she later wrote. “Nothing had passed my lips and because of this and of my great weakness my throat was choking me so that I could not even take water. All my bones seemed to be out of joint and there was a terrible confusion in my head. As a result of the torments I had suffered during these days, I was all doubled up, like a ball, and no more able to move arm, foot, hand, or head than if I had been dead.”
She fell into a coma, was given last rites. Her grave was dug, her coffin left open. She would have been buried, but her dad kept insisting: “She isn’t dead yet.”
When she woke up, she couldn’t open her eyes—they’d already been sealed shut with wax in preparation for burial.
For months, Teresa lay paralyzed, but it was during this time that she took to daily mental prayer. She insisted on being taken back to the convent, where she remained in the infirmary for several years, recovering in time to nurse her dad through his own final illness. “I felt as if my own soul was being torn out of me, for I loved him much,” she wrote. “He died like an angel.”
In time, the passion she’d turned toward the various men in her life became focused on Christ, who appeared to her in her cell—the most sacred Humanity in full beauty and majesty.
She spent long hours in meditation, often slipped into trances where she felt her soul lifted out of her body like a “detachable death.” Her mystical flights were disorienting to Teresa—even embarrassing—but they were also dangerous. It wasn’t uncommon for visionaries to wind up at the stake. Some sisters and friends shunned her, afraid of being associated with a witch. Her autobiography was already being examined by the Inquisition for signs of heresy. The granddaughter of a Jew who claims to see angels?
“I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him,” she said.
Her raptures continued. When she was forty-four years old, a cherub appeared to Teresa, its face aflame. When it plunged a golden spear into her heart, she moaned in agony, didn’t want it to stop. From