Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

LA MADRE. Wretched am I, a wretched sinner! (Normal voice.) I thought I was Laurencia, or Angela, or goodness knows who. I thought I was married to my Paul as I was married to the Lord. Did I ignore His Majesty’s voice? Did I forget to be that other person I became for You and with You.…(Still normal voice.) The Teresa of Jesus who is in love with the one and only Third Person, His Majesty?

HIS VOICE. My Will is that the great favors come through the hands of the sacred humanity. As I have told you numberless times, that is the gate you must enter through.²⁹

LA MADRE. And that’s how I understood You, Lord. Your Majesty never said that there is a great difference in the ways one may be…a master; (reading, still in a normal voice) or that the master “is never so far from his pupil that he has to shout.”³⁰ (Pause.) I feared confessors who feared the devil more than I feared the devil. (Calmly.) It was Master Gratian who immersed me in Your humanity.

HIS VOICE. Daughter, it is written in Exodus that the people saw the signs, rather than merely hearkening to the “words which the Lord had spoken”;³¹ but you have done more. You don’t merely see My Voice, you feel it in your whole body. More than a visible or audible presence, I am a sensory presence for you.

LA MADRE. “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”³² Ego phonè, ego vox.…Now I’m talking like a scholar, like John the Baptist. Too proud, again? (Normal voice.) And I am the wilderness, and I am the voice that gropes in darkness…I don’t understand why this is, but that I don’t understand gives me great delight.³³

HIS VOICE. Listen, daughter, there is something demonic about a voice that rises within. A Greek philosopher said so before me and without me, and he was right. Because the voice that calls you out of yourself usually deflects you from what you are doing; it never urges you to act.

LA MADRE, ardently, My Lord, Voice of His Majesty, You never turned me away from action.

HIS VOICE. That is what I like about you, daughter. In you, the voices don’t die away as the Word grows, they only fan out through all the senses, as Jesus’s Voice did in John. But who understood this? It took sixteen centuries for you to come along and persuade the Church that this metamorphosis is always, still, possible. You and Ignatius Loyola, don’t forget!

LA MADRE, greedily. Nobody receives the Voice of His Majesty…without knowing true pleasures and refreshments, gustos, from God.

HIS VOICE. What do you mean?

LA MADRE, in a meditative, quiet voice. The Lord gives me to understand. El Señor me da a entender. The Lord gives us freedom. Licencia nos da el Señor. As he gives us, when we think of the Passion, greater anguish and torments than the evangelists record.³⁴ When I speak of refreshment, I am speaking of “a gentle refreshment — strong, deeply impressed, delightful, and quiet.”³⁵

HIS VOICE. Show some humility, daughter. You are not the first to embark on this path. “The senses rebound in thought,” wrote Meister Eckhart; he and his disciples were familiar with “the essential foundation”³⁶ and “learned ignorance” that were nonetheless open to be “touched” and “tasting of eternity itself.”

LA MADRE. I didn’t know, my Spouse. I am determined to be different from all those bookish, saintly men. For Your call does not keep me in “indefiniteness,” as the honorable doctors past and future like to say.³⁷ You authorized me not to turn absolutely away from all that is familiar. (Pause. Eyes, squarely in shot.) And there’s nothing indeterminate about this familiarity, to my mind. It is delectable through and through.…(Smile that fades at once.)

(The Voice does not reply.)

LA MADRE, in a conversational tone. That being the case, Your word and Your call are not for me reduced to a “vocal utterance.”³⁸ I appreciate them, I seek them out. You know it. But more importantly I register them as a brazier burning inside my body. Because I don’t neglect other sensations, on the contrary I savor them, Lord.…Where your humble servant is concerned, I must say that sensations often take the upper hand, I mean the lower, well, in short, they take over! (Red cheeks despite the livid features; then meditative voice, closed eyes, peacefulness.) For aren’t all sensations destined to be reabsorbed into the movement of imaginative thought that is distinct from intellectual understanding?

HIS VOICE. The flesh is feminine, my beloved child, Christ himself was aware of it. To the best of my knowledge, in his case the Father’s Voice was not merely a “giving-to-understand,” and was indisputably a “giving-to-feel,” as it is for you, my daughter.