Homily for Memorial of St. Teresa of Avila

Homily for the Memorial of
St. Teresa of Avila

Thursday, Week 28 of Ordinary Time
Oct. 15, 2020
Collect
Provincial House, New Rochelle, N.Y.

Based on Benedict XVI, Holy Men and Women of the Middle Ages and Beyond: General Audiences (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2012), pp. 185-192.

“O God, thru your Spirit you raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection…” (Collect).

In the 1st reading, Paul teaches that God chose us before the world was created “to be holy and without blemish before him” (Eph 1:4).  Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada from Avila came to that realization early in life, well before she entered Carmel.  She tells us in her autobiography that she recognized 2 fundamentals:  “All things of this world will pass away,” and God alone is forever.

In that light, she writes elsewhere, “Let nothing disturb you.  Let nothing frighten you.  Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.”

As she matured, Teresa nurtured her spiritual life on the Scriptures, the Fathers, and reflection on her own experience of God’s mercies and of Christ’s friendship.  This was the basis of her writings and for her prayer.  [Cf. Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy.]

But her busy, reforming life rested also on the evangelical counsels and such human virtues as affability, truthfulness, modesty, courtesy, cheerfulness, and culture.  She was staunchly faithful to the Church during the turmoil of the Church’s reform and her own reform of the Carmelites, and she backed up St. John of the Cross in his reform of the men.  (They say that behind every great man is a great woman.)

When Paul VI named both Teresa and Catherine of Siena doctors of the Church, the 1st women so exalted, it demonstrated that even without ordination women have, and merit, a powerful place in the Church and in Christian life.