“Please spare me from the green vegetables.” That kind of attitude would not fly at all at one of St Teresa’s convents, I dare say. But it would fly like a wind in my home, where green vegetables are as common as gold coins.Â
Contrary to what you may think from my journal, I am actually not perfect. This becomes particularly clear to me when I read St Teresa of Avila, this time her book The Way of Perfection. Unlike her Life and Interior Castle, this one seems to not be written with a clear progression toward more and more inner purity. It is more of a guidebook for her nuns, on how to live in the convent. So I think I should be able to get through this one, without coming to a point where I feel I am cheating by looking at a holiness that is so far ahead of me that I should not even be able to see it.
That said, the contrast between me and what she expected from her nuns is pretty damning. They were to live in such poverty that while she did not expect them to starve to death, she reminded them that if they did, it would be acceptable. After all, they lived for Christ who died for them, and if they had to die for him as well, it would not be a big deal.
The purity and selflessness she expected from these people is really shaming me, who at this time of my life still have hobbies. Â They may be nice hobbies, but you really cannot fit that into the “way of perfection”. I assume even today, monks and nuns live a life of complete selfless devotion to God and their fellow humans, taking no time to indulge or even pay attention to their own interests. Living a life as God’s finger on Earth. That’s not how I live at all. Sure, I want to serve the Light, but it is more like having a job that interests you I guess. An employee is partly free, even if he thinks about his job a lot. A slave has no life of his own. He is at work even when sleeping.
St Teresa and her nuns (at least if they lived up to her expectations) were thralls of God’s love. Â They had nothing else to do, no other goals than to serve their Lord. That may indeed be the way of perfection. But it is not how I currently live. I try to serve God in my way, and they in His.
I use to read a little in the book each day on the commute bus. (It’s on my Galaxy Note, so no one can see the title.) It may take a long time getting through it this way, but that is OK. I am not so much looking for revolutionary new information, as to be reminded over and over how far I am from perfection. Because, as I am sure my readers can notice if they will, it is entirely too easy for me to preen in my advanced knowledge and tuck away my imperfect life where you can’t see it.
Saint Theresa was at one extreme end of the spectrum. I, of course, would love to have that kind of will and dedication and selflessness (although, if you look at it one way, she was very fulfilled, personally), but that wasn’t a gift God gave me. We can admire her greatly and look at her as a lesson to us in our daily lives, but unless God gave us her special gifts, we can’t be too down on ourselves for not being up to her standards. No matter how much a better musician I could be if I practiced all the time, I’d still not be Mozart. We each have our purposes here on Earth, and it may simply be to glorify God by seeing and really appreciating his creation. The fact that you also manage to articulate so much of the abstract things that you see in such a way that regular people like me and the rest of the world can understand them is a true gift, and . . . although I mean no disrespect to anyone by this . . . more people can approach and understand your writing than St. Theresa’s. Your gift may not be hers, but it is still very valuable.
I don’t know – most people just can’t become saints because, to put it bluntly, they don’t understand at all what it is about. Even the religious generally don’t have much of a grasp on religion: They can go through the movements and they receive a blessing for doing so, but they don’t know why except “God did it”, which is certainly true; but there are LAWS of the spiritual realm that are in their own way as immutable and precise as those of physics, but are not analogies of them.
To put is short, I know what to do, but I can’t seem to get my body with me. I feel a bit like Moses looking into the promised land, knowing that I fall short of getting into it. (I don’t feel like Moses in any other way, though!)
I think that if you suddenly were able to attain that high level of saintliness you wouldn’t be able (or fit) to live in this world. You have seen the photo of the ecstasy of St. Theresa, after all. I’m not sure how she got all the things accomplished that she did, with that level of enlightenment. Of course, the ecstasy isn’t a 24-7 state (or at least I don’t think it was, or I REALLY don’t know how she ever got anything done!), but still . . . I think that if I understood what everything was about, how everything fits together, and were able to keep that understanding within myself, both my mind and body might explode! (Your mind and body may vary.)
From what I gleaned, she kind of adapted to the extreme experiences eventually, developing into two persons at the same time: One inward, being always together with His Majesty, and one outward doing the ordinary things of this life. I am not entirely sure how that works. But she did indeed look forward to leaving this world, although this took its time. I agree that there are limits to what a body can contain, but in that case it may be that part of one’s spirit actually does not reside in the body. I am not sure about this though so I should not teach about it. I certainly have no memory of such a thing for my part, and it seems millions of years away right now. Just a little more is what I hope for, despite being who I am. And then perhaps just a little more more. ^_^
It feels to me like there is a part of a person that is much more able to commune with God than the actual “person” is, in flesh. The comparison between going in and out the door is apt for me. I am not able to keep both the physical and metaphysical active in the same body at the same time, at least not often. Not often at all. There are times, though, when the Presence is overwhelmingly real and . . . well . . . “present” and it feels like I’m a tiny light bulb plugged into the full output of a power plant. I think there is something to what you say about perhaps there being a part of a person’s spirit that exists outside the person. In some ways I am thankful that I’m a “normal”, although I do see that people such as the saints are far better than I. I admire their achievements, and I should aspire to them, I am sure, but I don’t think I could handle that much of the Presence without blowing a fuse. I like to be near it, but actually walking into it awes and overwhelms me, both mentally and spiritually.