Doctor of the Church • Mystic • Carmelite Reformer
(1515–1582)
Today we honor St. Teresa of Ávila, a woman of deep prayer, courage, and reform — who taught the world the path to divine union through “The Interior Castle.”
She revealed seven stages of prayer, guiding the soul closer to God:
1️⃣ Mental Prayer – Speaking with God through reflection, Scripture, and devotion.
2️⃣ Prayer of Quiet – The soul rests in peace and begins to sense His presence deeply.
3️⃣ Prayer of Union – God unites Himself more intimately to the soul.
4️⃣ Prayer of Ecstasy – A mystical encounter where the soul is lifted beyond itself.
5️⃣ Prayer of Quietude – Deeper stillness, resting entirely in the will of God.
6️⃣ Perfect Union – The soul desires nothing but what God desires.
7️⃣ Transforming Union – The soul becomes one with God’s love — fully His instrument.
🕊️ “Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you.
All things are passing; God never changes.”
– St. Teresa of Ávila
Her life reminds us: prayer is not a formula — it’s a journey into the heart of God.
May her teachings lead us to deeper silence, surrender, and divine intimacy.
"We should, during our work and other actions, even during our reading, even spiritual reading, during outward devotions and vocal prayers, stop for an instant as often as we can, to adore God in the depths of our hearts, savor him rapidly and as it were by stealth, praise him, ask him for help, offer him our hearts and thank him. What could be more pleasing to God than for us to leave aside created things a thousand times a day, to recollect ourselves and adore him interiorly?
For being with God, it is not necessary to be always at church. We may make an oratory of our heart, wherein to retire from time to time, to converse with him. Everyone is capable of such familiar conversation with God."
-Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection (17th century Carmelite friar), as quoted by Jacques Phillippe on page 99-100, "section 1. Outside the time of prayer", and Part IV "Practical Advice for Personal Prayer" of his book Thirsting for Prayer
“How to Pray at All Times” By St Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (1696-1787) A Method of MENTAL PRAYER or Meditation According to St Alphonsus. Excerpt – Part I Preparation
(via Thought for the Day – 24 November – A Method of MENTAL PRAYER – AnaStpaul)
Should you find neither delight nor consolation in meditation, do not be disheartened [...] However great your dryness, only continue to present yourself devoutly before God. How many courtiers daily appear before their sovereign without a hope of speaking with him, content to be seen by him, and offer their homage? So, Philothea, we must pray purely and simply in order to do homage to God, and show our faithfulness.
- St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Part 2: Counsels Concerning the Soul's Approach to God in Prayer and the Sacraments, Chapter 9: The Dryness Which May Trouble Meditation. (TAN, 2010).
Why is St. Teresa of Avila a Doctor of the Church?
In 1970, Pope St. Paul VI declared St. Teresa of Avila to be the first female doctor of the Church. In a theologically astute and culturally perceptive proclamation (which is unfortunately not translated into English), Paul VI gives several reasons to justify his innovative decision.
Not the first point, but one that we wouldn’t even think to ask today, is how can a woman be a doctor (i.e., a teacher) in the Church, when St. Paul explicitly forbids this in 1 Corinthians 14:33-5? St. Paul VI interprets St. Paul the Apostle as referring to “the hierarchical functions of teaching and ministry.” Declaring a woman to be doctor is not to ordain her, but to recognize that her teaching is an exercise of the baptismal priesthood of all the faithful. The fact that women cannot be priests “in no way is to diminish the sublime mission of women in the heart of the people of God.”
[“To the contrary, [women], being incorporated into the Church through baptism, participate in the common priesthood of the faithful, which enables them and obliges them to confess before mankind “the faith which they received from God by means of the Church” (Lumen Gentium 2,11). And in this confession of faith many women have reached the most elevated heights, to the point that their words and their writings have been a light and guide of their brothers. A light nourished each day in intimate contact with God, also in the most elevated forms of mystical prayer, for which, St. Francis de Sales would say, they possessed a special capacity.”]
Rather than say something flatfooted, such as “It’s about time, after centuries of discrimination against women by the patriarchy, to break the glass ceiling,” St. Paul VI instead explains how one of the central teachings of Vatican II, the universal call to spread the Gospel, a call that is a result of our baptism and not reserved to the ordained, means that women (and all those who are not ordained) have a mission from God to teach and share the fruits of their encounters with God. So even though St. Teresa was not especially well-educated (she never went to the university, the first person after the development of universities to be proclaimed a doctor without a degree), the Church recognizes that her teachings about mental prayer represent a treasure, the action of the Holy Spirit in a specially chosen soul, for the building up of the whole Church.
More central to his purpose in declaring her to be a Doctor, says St. Paul VI, is that, after the nutty sixties, people had turned away from prayer to psychology.
“[St. Teresa’s] message of prayer comes to us, children of the Church, in an hour characterized by a great effort of reform and renovation of liturgical prayer; it comes to us, who are tempted by the claims and the commitments of the outside world, to give in to the bustle of modern life and, conquered by the seductive treasures of the world, to lose the true treasures of our soul.
This message [of prayer] finds us, children of our time, in the middle of losing not only the custom of conversation with God, but also our sense of the necessity to adore and invoke Him. The message of prayer, of the song and music of the spirit penetrated by grace and open to the dialogue of faith, hope, and charity, comes to us amidst attempts by psychoanalysis to deconstruct the fragile and complicated instruments that we are, not to listen to the voices of humanity, suffering and redeemed, but to listen to the confused murmurings of the subconscious animal, to the shouts of our undisciplined passions, and to our hopeless angst. Now there comes to us the sublime and simple message of the wise Teresa, who exhorts us to understand ‘the great good that God does to a soul that is disposed to hold to prayer willingly... Mental prayer is nothing else, it seems to me, but friendship, being present many times alone in the presence of the One whom we know loves us.’ (The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, 8, 4-5)”
There is a tendency today for Catholics to incorporate psychoanalysis into our spirituality. If you think that “wounds” are important to your spiritual life, if you think that discernment requires that you pay attention to your feelings, if you think that your sexual orientation or your psychological drives are givens that cannot be questioned or disciplined, you are suffering from the intellectual mistakes that St. Paul VI warned against. The message of St. Teresa of Avila is that through asceticism and mental prayer, we can learn to subdue our bodies and reform our subconscious passions so that we can be open to God’s grace. We are not bound by our past, our attractions and desires, or our fallen natures--provided that we abandon our attachments, and abandon ourselves to Christ’s transforming grace, no matter the costs.
(Spanish below the break.)
The first quote:
“Por el contrario, ella, al ser incorporada a la Iglesia por el bautismo, participa del sacerdocio común de los fieles, que la capacita y la obliga a «confesar delante de los hombres la fe que recibió de Dios mediante la Iglesia» (Lumen gentium 2, 11). Y en esa confesión de fe muchas mujeres han llegado a las cimas más elevadas, hasta el punto de que su palabra y sus escritos han sido luz y guía de sus hermanos. Luz alimentada cada día en el contacto íntimo con Dios, también en las formas más elevadas en la oración mística, para la cual San Francisco de Sales llega a decir que poseen una especial capacidad...”
The second quote:
Esta es la luz, hecha hoy más viva y penetrante, que el título de doctora conferido a Santa Teresa reverbera sobre nosotros. El mensaje de oración nos llega a nosotros, hijos de la Iglesia, en una hora caracterizada por un gran esfuerzo de reforma y de renovación de la oración litúrgica; nos llega a nosotros, tentados, por el reclamo y por el compromiso del mundo exterior, a ceder al trajín de la vida moderna y a perder los verdaderos tesoros de nuestra alma por la conquista de los seductores tesoros de la tierra.
Este mensaje llega a nosotros, hijos de nuestro tiempo, mientras no sólo se va perdiendo la costumbre del coloquio con Dios, sino también el sentido y la necesidad de adorarlo y de invocarlo. Llega a nosotros el mensaje de la oración, canto y música del espíritu penetrado por la gracia y abierto al diálogo de la fe, de la esperanza y de la caridad, mientras la exploración psicoanalítica desmonta el frágil y complicado instrumento que somos, no para escuchar la voces de la humanidad dolorida y redimida, sino para escuchar el confuso murmullo del subconsciente animal y los gritos de las indomadas pasiones y de la angustia desesperada. Llega ahora a nosotros el sublime y sencillo mensaje de la oración de la sabia Teresa, que nos exhorta a comprender «el gran bien que hace Dios a un alma que la dispone para tener oración con voluntad…, que no es otra cosa la oración mental, a mi parecer, sino tratar de amistad estando muchas veces tratando a solas con quien sabemos nos ama» (Vida, 8, 4-5).
Contemplative prayer [oración mental] is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.
The Tongue of the Hidden Self (Studies in Syriac Christian Contemplative Mysticism)
"For God is silence, and in silence is He sung by means of that psalmody which is worthy of Him [the psalmody which spiritual beings use to praise Him]. I am not speaking of the silence of the tongue, for if someone merely keeps his tongue silent, without knowing how to sing in mind and spirit, then he is simply unoccupied and becomes filled with evil thoughts: he is just keeping an exterior silence and he does not know how to sing in an interior way, seeing that the tongue of his hidden self has not yet learnt to stretch itself out even to babble. You should look on the spiritual infant that is within you in the same way as you do on an ordinary child or infant: just as the tongue placed in an infant's mouth is still because it does not yet know speech or the right movements for speaking, so it is with that interior tongue of the mind; it will be still from all speech and from all thought: it will simply be placed there, ready to learn the first babblings of spiritual utterance.
"Thus there is a silence of the tongue, there is a silence of the whole body, there is a silence of the soul, there is the silence of the mind, and there is the silence of the spirit. The silence of the tongue is merely when it is not incited to evil speech; the silence of the entire body is when all its senses are unoccupied; the silence of the soul is when there are no ugly thoughts bursting forth within it; the silence of the mind is when it is not reflecting on any harmful knowledge or wisdom; the silence of the spirit is when the mind ceases even from stirrings caused by created spiritual beings and all its movements are stirred solely by Being, at the wondrous awe of the silence which surrounds Being.
"These are the degrees and measures to be found in speech and silence. But if you have not reached these and find yourself still far away from them, remain where you are and sing to God using the voice and the tongue in love and awe. Sing with application, toil in your service until you arrive at love. Stand in awe of God, as is only right, and thus you will be held worthy to love Him with a natural love -- Him who was given to us at our renewal.
-- John the Solitary quoted in, Spirituality in the Syriac Tradition, translated from Syriac-Aramaic into English by Professor Sebastian P. Brock
