Roland Ashby, Contributing Editor of Living Water, reflects on St Teresa of Avila’s understanding of prayer, in which God’s love is always available to us in abundance. She says that growing union with this love, if we let it, can transform the soul from a silkworm into a butterfly, and transport us into a life of true freedom.
One of the ways I tried to stay connected with the sacred while in hospital recently was walking from my room to a place where I could view a small courtyard garden. Looking out at the leaves and grass, the sky, and a beautiful pink camellia bush in full bloom, had an instant effect on my spirit. My soul felt a little less shrivelled.
When we think of the beauty of the natural world, it’s little wonder that 16th century Spanish saint Teresa of Avila, in The Book of My Life, famously compares the soul to a garden, and prayer to four ways of watering the garden:
She writes:
You may draw water from a well (which for us a lot of work).
Or you may get it by means of a water wheel and aqueducts in such a way that it is obtained by turning the crank of the water wheel. (... the method involves less work than the other, and you get more water.)
Or it may flow from a river or a stream. (The garden is watered much better by this means because the ground is more fully soaked, and there is no need to water so frequently – and much less work...).
Or the water may be provided by a great deal of rain. (... without any work on our part – and this way is incomparably better than all the others mentioned.)
This is reminiscent of something Brother Roger of Taizé said: that all we can do in prayer is to wait like parched ground for the rain to come.
One of the first things to note about Teresa’s four ways of watering the garden, as lay Carmelite Bernadette Micalleff points out, is that there is a paradox here: “There is an increase in the amount of water from the first way to the fourth, and a corresponding decrease in the amount of work required to get the water. And we note the fourth way, with the most water and least work, is ‘incomparably better’”.[1]
Contrary to what we would expect, Micallef notes, “progress is not produced by more work. In fact, the deep seated and unquestioned assumption that more work yields more results, is an obstacle to progress along the path of prayer.”
The water of which Teresa writes is, of course, the Living Water Jesus offers to the Samaritan woman at the well. It is God’s love. As Micallef notes: “God’s love can neither be increased nor decreased. The references to ‘more water’ then refer to the increase in our experience of this love, “and out of this deepening experience God can draw forth in us a greater response in love to God who first loved us (cf 1Jn 4:19)”.
Micallef continues: “There is nothing in Teresa’s writing to indicate that God is initially inactive and gradually becomes more active. There is no sense of a balance of scales, as if in the beginning we work and God doesn’t, with the scales gradually tipping until the Lord waters the garden without any work on our part (Life 11:7). The beginning, our work and our progress – all this is possible because God is constantly active in us: God loves us and invites us to respond in love.”
This reminds me of George Herbert’s wonderful, and perhaps greatest poem, Love III, which encapsulates this perfectly. In the poem, God is the all-loving host who invites us, the guest, to join him for a meal. But we are reluctant to accept the invitation because we feel unworthy of such an honour. However, God, the host, isn’t interested in our faults, and dismisses our sense of unworthiness, and insists we sit down at table with him and “taste his meat”:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, you shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
God’s Living Water, his generous and abundant love, symbolised by the host in Herbert’s poem, and also in the soaking rain of Teresa’s fourth way of prayer, is always available, always present.
So what stands in the way of receiving such abundant life-giving Living Water?
Perhaps chiefly a sense of disbelief that we could receive such a gift without having earned it?! The belief that we aren’t worthy, and only hard work and discipline – ascesis – will render us worthy.
Like Simon the Pharisee, we get it the wrong way round. Jesus told Simon, when Mary of Bethany gate-crashed his dinner party and lavished expensive perfume on Jesus, that Mary was able to love Jesus so extravagantly because she first received his extravagant love and forgiveness (Luke 7:36-50).
Jesus loved and forgave her first. This is a complete inversion of what we normally do.
Likewise, the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) didn’t first have to earn his father’s love and forgiveness. It was available all along.
The elder brother’s response is like the ego, the small mind, which constantly, like the scales, compares, measures, analyses, judges. This is the left brain, the rational mind, the dualistic mind. It knows nothing of extravagant, even wasteful love – the love of God.
This is why, in meditation, we have to let go of the ego, and the left brain, the rational mind. And silently repeating a mantra, Benedictine monk John Main says, is the way to do this. The mantra he recommended was Maranatha, the Aramaic word for “Come, Lord”.
This will help us return, like the Prodigal, to the Father who is waiting for us at the ground of our being, in the cave our heart, always waiting and ready to run towards us with open arms. To hug and kiss us.
In Teresa’s other major work, The Interior Castle, she likens the soul to a castle made of pure diamond or crystal. It has seven rooms and God resides in the centre, the seventh room. Here, in which we realise our union with God, she again uses a water analogy.
This spiritual marriage, she says, “is like rain falling from the sky into a river or pool. There is nothing but water. It’s impossible to divide the sky-water from the land-water. When a little stream enters the sea, who could separate its waters out again?”
Here is the great cosmic river of love, as John Main called it, in which our sense of separation from God, and the Christ consciousness, dissolves.
I have only felt this sense of oneness on a few occasions. One time, it occurred after a six day silent retreat in Sydney with Laurence Freeman, Benedictine monk and Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation. I was at the airport to get a flight back to Melbourne. I felt completely at peace without any fear or anxiety. I had a sense of oneness with all, and a sense of love and acceptance for all. It was to understand Julian of Norwich’s profound belief and assurance that: “all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” It lasted for the whole journey, despite my fear and anxiety around planes and airports.
We are already in union with God, psychiatrist and author Gerald May says, but we are not aware of it most of the time. This is partly because, on the way to the centre of the castle, to union with God, we meet what Teresa calls some “poisonous reptiles”. These include the attachments and compulsions from which the Dark Night of the Soul, as described by St John of the Cross, attempts to free us.
Psychotherapist, Spiritual Director and author James Finley, whose novice master when he was a monk at Gethsemane Abbey was the great 20th century mystic Thomas Merton, and has been a great influence on his spiritual formation, says these reptiles can also include “habits of the mind and heart formed in trauma”, which can lead to “an addictive numbing in flights from oneself”. He says you come to realise “you’ve been raising these reptiles as pets!”
He certainly knows, from his own experience, something about trauma. His father was a violent alcoholic, and while a monk at the Abbey, he was sexually abused by one of the monks.
If we can get free of the clutches of the reptiles, and as we get closer to the centre of the castle, Teresa uses another beautiful image to describe our spiritual growth on the way to union. This is the image of the silkworm which spins its silk to form a cocoon around itself, from which it eventually emerges as a butterfly.
The soul is the silkworm, around which I like to see the mantra, spinning the silk that offers the soul a cocoon of darkness, stillness and silence, from which it can take to flight.
Here, in the butterfly, is a wonderful image of freedom – free from the reptiles, free from the gravity and dead weight of our egos, we can now fly with an exquisite grace, and lightness of being, towards the divine warmth and light, and the divine nectar, awaiting us in room seven of the castle, the centre of the soul.
But we have to let go of all the dead weight of self-consciousness and self-obsession. And this is difficult, John Main says, “because we are so hyper self-conscious. We cannot help, as it were, looking at the little television monitor serviced by the ego and seeing ourselves, thinking about ourselves, analysing ourselves.”[2]
But before we get carried away with the notion of flight from the world as enchanting butterflies in a state of bliss, Teresa warns us that our goal must be to integrate the Mary and Martha, the contemplative and active aspects, of our lives (see Luke 10:38-42).
Teresa, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says, “repeats many times that in the state of union ‘Mary and Martha join to welcome Jesus’. The condition we must grow towards is one in which contemplation and action are inseparable.”[3]
And Teresa also insists, Williams reminds us, that we “must never stop reflecting on the incarnate person of Jesus ... No one comes to the Father but through Jesus, after all, and we are not angels but people living in mortal bodies. So we need to be in touch with the bodily life of Jesus”.[4]
She suggests simple ways we can do this, Williams says. For example, “simply gazing” at an image of the passion, or absorption in some bit of a gospel story, or in the loving gaze we direct to Christ in the Sacrament [of Holy Communion].[5]
Teresa also makes it clear that those who set out on this spiritual path are to be “servants of love”, and as Jesus made clear, this demands courage and commitment, and even, for some, the ultimate sacrifice.
John Main said the great test of whether our meditation is working or whether we are making progress is: Are we growing in love? Are we growing in compassion?
“It does not matter how long it takes”, he says. “The only thing that matters ... is that we are on the journey. The journey is a journey away from self, away from egoism, away from selfishness, away from isolation, and it is a journey into the infinite love of God.”[6]
And here we find true freedom. “Heaven”, Evelyn Underhill said, “is to be in God at last made free”.
We are living at a disturbing time. Indeed, we could describe this time as a dark night for the world, and indeed a time of trauma for many.
And there is much to be traumatised by, including: the existential threat posed by climate change, war, corporate and individual greed, deep and growing inequalities, division, hate, violence and oppression.
As we try to live “within this trauma of the world”, as author and spiritual director Kerrie Hide puts it, what might being “a servant of love” mean for you? How are you being called to respond?
I would like to finish with prayer. The first is one Teresa kept as her bookmark.
Let nothing disturb you;
Let nothing make you afraid;
All things pass;
But God is unchanging,
Patience
is enough for everything,
You who have God
lack nothing,
God alone is sufficient.
And the second prayer is attributed to Teresa:
Christ has no body but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes
with which He looks with compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet
with which He walks to do good.
Yours are the hands
with which He blessed all the world.
Yours are the hands.
Yours are the feet.
Yours are the eyes.
You are His body.
Christ has no body on earth but yours. Amen.
To find out more about John Main, see: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/christian-meditation
References:
[1] This and all subsequent quotations by Bernadette Micallef come from two papers she presented at the Carmelite Centre in Melbourne, Australia, in 2014. The papers were entitled ‘Freeing the Flow of the Waters of Prayer (1): Obstacles to Progress’; and ‘Freeing the Flow of the Waters of Prayer (2): The Fragrant Flowers’.
[2] As cited in Silence and Stillness in Every Season: Daily Readings with John Main, Edited by Paul T. Harris (Medio Media, Singapore, 2010) 186
[3] Rowan Williams, Luminaries: Twenty lives that illuminate the Christian Way (SPCK, Great Britain, 2019) 59
[4] Ibid., 59
[5] Ibid., 59
[6] As cited in Silence and Stillness in Every Season: Daily Readings with John Main, Edited by Paul T. Harris (Medio Media, Singapore, 2010) 227