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

JOHN OF THE CROSS. To make myself clear, tell me, are you capable of distinguishing between sensuality on the one hand and the taint of the sensual on the other? I’m asking you, Mother, and I’m not asking lightly. We both agree that nature takes pleasure in spiritual things. “Since both the spiritual and the sensory part of the soul receive gratification from that refreshment, each part experiences delight according to its own nature and properties. The spirit, the superior part of the soul, experiences renewal and satisfaction in God; and the sense, the lower part, feels sensory gratification and delight because it is ignorant of how to get anything else, and hence takes whatever is nearest, which is the impure sensory satisfaction. It may happen that while a soul is with God in deep spiritual prayer, it will conversely passively experience sensual rebellions, movements, and acts in the senses, not without its own great displeasure. This frequently happens at the time of Communion. Since the soul receives joy and gladness in this act of love — for the Lord grants the grace and gives himself for this reason — the sensory part also takes its share, as we said, according to its mode. Since, after all, these two parts form one suppositum, each one usually shares according to its mode in what the other receives. As the philosopher says: ‘Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.’³⁴ Because in the initial stages of the spiritual life, and even more advanced ones, the sensory part of the soul is imperfect, God’s spirit is frequently received in this sensory part with this same imperfection. Once the sensory part is reformed through the purgation of the dark night, it no longer has these infirmities. Then the spiritual part of the soul, rather than the sensory part, receives God’s spirit, and the soul thus receives everything according to the mode of the spirit.”³⁵

TERESA, eyes lowered, she continues to gaze inside her soul. The sensual also takes delight in spiritual things, Father, and I do not find that spirit and sense are so divorced from one another. Nor does merit consist only of gratification, it also means action, suffering, and love, all at once and together. “Look at my life: you will find no joy there other than that of Mount Thabor.” Of the Transfiguration. For incontinence of love is not dirty, Father; it is an excess that leads us down the true path, the path of suffering: I can’t forget that.³⁶ And I understood that you intended to reel me back toward your reason, your purity, when you offered me just half a wafer at Communion; you must remember that occasion, one which religious commentators will pick over avidly for ever and ever, amen.…(Short laugh.) You were already playing the psychoanalyst, my dear Seneca, trying to cure passion by means of frustration, weren’t you, go on! (Jovial laugh.) But surely the Discalced Rule I restored aims at the same result? I discovered it long before I met you, after all. (Vehemently.) And yet deep down in my soul I never thought it necessary to lay on the penance with a trowel, as your men do in Pastrana, and you too, in your own burning way.…The Rule, no more and no less: that seems enough to me. “The rule that heals all,” as a woman will write four centuries hence, without the least inkling of my existence.…³⁷

JOHN OF THE CROSS. I am a denying spirit, whereas you say yes to everything.

(Silence.)

TERESA. To everything, but also to nothing, Father. (Eyes, head-on.) On that day I mentioned, even if you’d given me nothing but a crumb of Host, or none at all, I to whom the Lord had already given so much would have felt just as replenished by the mere fact of knowing He exists. (Eyes, looking upward.) Therefore the presence of His Majesty — even in a tiny speck of matter on my tongue — is more than sufficient to unite me to the Beloved, in a way you cannot imagine, Father, with all due respect. (Lips.)

JOHN OF THE CROSS. O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn! O night that has united the Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover.³⁸

TERESA, losing her temper. So tell me, Father. When you say: “transforming the beloved in her Lover,” you’re talking about your soul, of course, but don’t you also mean yourself, Brother John, here before me in flesh and blood? Yourself in the feminine? Or am I mistaken, being so lowly.…Yo que soy ruin.³⁹ (Lips.)

(Silence from John.)