Conclusion
OBVIOUSLY, in the development of prayer climbing to the highest steps does not mean abandoning the previous type of prayer. Rather, it is a gradual deepening of the relationship with God that envelops the whole of life.
Rather than a pedagogy, Teresa’s is a true “mystagogy” of prayer: She teaches those who read her works how to pray by praying with them. Indeed, she often interrupts her account or exposition with a prayerful outburst. Another subject dear to the saint is the centrality of Christ’s humanity. For Teresa, in fact, Christian life is the personal relationship with Jesus that culminates in union with him through grace, love and imitation.
Hence the importance she attaches to meditation on the Passion and on the Eucharist as the presence of Christ in the Church for the life of every believer, and as the heart of the Liturgy.
Saint Teresa lives out unconditional love for the Church: she shows a lively “sensus Ecclesiae,” in the face of the episodes of division and conflict in the Church of her time. She reformed the Carmelite Order with the intention of serving and defending the “Holy Roman Catholic Church,” and was willing to give her life for the Church (cf. Vida, 33,5).
A final essential aspect of Teresian doctrine which I would like to emphasize is perfection, as the aspiration of the whole of Christian life and as its ultimate goal.
The saint has a very clear idea of the “fullness” of Christ, relived by the Christian. At the end of the route through The Interior Castle, in the last “room,” Teresa describes this fullness, achieved in the indwelling of the Trinity, in union with Christ through the mystery of his humanity.
Dear brothers and sisters, Saint Teresa of Jesus is a true teacher of Christian life for the faithful of every time. In our society, which all too often lacks spiritual values, Saint Teresa teaches us to be unflagging witnesses of God, of his presence and of his action.
She teaches us truly to feel this thirst for God that exists in the depths of our hearts, this desire to see God, to seek God, to be in conversation with him and to be his friends.
This is the friendship we all need that we must seek anew, day after day. May the example of this saint, profoundly contemplative and effectively active, spur us too every day to dedicate the right time to prayer, to this openness to God, to this journey, in order to seek God, to see him, to discover his friendship and so to find true life. Indeed, many of us should truly say: “I am not alive, I am not truly alive because I do not live the essence of my life.”
Therefore, time devoted to prayer is not time wasted. It is time in which the path of life unfolds, the path unfolds to learning from God an ardent love for him, for his Church, and practical charity for our brothers and sisters.
This speech by Pope Benedict XVI was aired on Vatican Radio on October 19, 2012, to mark the day the Church remembers Saint Teresa of Ávila. Her feast day is on October 15. This was first aired during the pope’s Wednesday General Audience on February 2, 2011. On March 28, 2015, is the fifth centennial of Saint Teresa’s birth.
Pope Benedict XVI