Saint Teresa of Ávila

Teresa de Ahumada was born at Ávila in Castile on 28 March 1515. As a girl she read the lives of the saints with her brother, and the two set off to seek martyrdom among the Moors, but an uncle brought them home. Her mother died when she was about fourteen. At twenty she entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation at Ávila.

The Incarnation was a large, comfortable house, with many visitors and much conversation in the parlour. Teresa was lively and charming, and for nearly twenty years, through long and serious illnesses, she prayed half-heartedly and felt torn in two. Around 1554, before an image of the wounded Christ, she was converted at last. She gave herself wholly to prayer, and God led her into deep mystical graces.

In 1562, amid fierce opposition, she founded the small, poor convent of Saint Joseph in Ávila, where a few nuns lived in enclosure, silence and prayer according to the original Carmelite Rule. This was the beginning of the Discalced, or barefoot, Carmelites. In the next twenty years, travelling across Spain in rough carts, she founded sixteen more convents, and with Saint John of the Cross she extended the reform to the friars.

Under obedience she wrote her Life, The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle, which are among the great books on prayer. Prayer, she wrote, is “nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends.” Her humour and practical sense shine through her letters. She died at Alba de Tormes on the night of 4 October 1582. She was canonized in 1622, and in 1970 Paul VI made her the first woman Doctor of the Church.