The feast of Teresa of Avila is celebrated on October 15.

Teresa of Avila, born in 1515, entered a convent just at the point when Spain was feeling most fattened with its achievements, both economic and religious. The feeling permeated everything. At the Convent of the Incarnation, if religious life was not totally corrupt, it was at least mediocre, satisfied, and largely without life-changing purpose.

The worst thing that can happen to religious life is not difficulty. The worst thing that can happen to religious life is security and approval. In newly united Spain, Catholicism was a social status, not a social conscience. By the time Teresa entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation to do penance for her sins, religious life had settled into the most conventional, most social of enclaves. Carmels had become, for the most part, places of routine that were not really bad but were not really fervent either.

The dichotomy between what Teresa said she was and what she was really doing in the convent caused her great tension and may well have led to the physical breakdown that changed her life. After the illness, she didn’t simply re-enter the convent. She re-entered the community with an eye to changing first herself and then, eventually, to changing religious life itself. In the next twenty years, she developed a prayer life that would become both her virtue and her scourge, her strength and the basis for the suspicions in which she was held. Her prayer was personal. She began to talk about the voice of God directing her in a period when mystics were tried for witchcraft. Worst of all, she wanted to reinstate the Primitive Rule of the order and introduce a new kind of prayer life—her own—into a community that was quite comfortable the way it was.

Teresa of Avila faced what anybody faces who sets out to make a system work or a business ethical or a country moral. She was opposed at every level by the people from whom she should have been able to expect the most support. Finally, she was plagued by self-doubt.

But Teresa went on, her crisp voice and clear language calling the simplest of people to the heights of the spiritual life. “You must know that there is a time for partridge and a time for penance,” she said. She crisscrossed Spain in a dangerous and difficult time, fanning fervor and founding communities committed to living Carmelite life in a new spirit. “Strive like the strong until you die in the attempt,” she wrote, “for you are here for nothing else than to strive.” She trusted the spirit of God as much as she trusted anyone around her. “The Creator must be sought through the creatures,” she taught. She went on developing a process of “mental prayer” that revolutionized religious life from a series of exercises to a way of living in God.

Teresa of Avila was, by her own admission, a sinner who never doubted the mercy of God. She was a very human being who became a saint without becoming a plastic personality, a visionary who never surrendered her vision to the politics or pressures of life. She is an icon of humanity, of vibrancy, of fire and of hope in a world bent on bending the spirit of a new age to the shape of the past. She is a sign that perseverance can cut through reaction and persistence can overcome resistance. She is a clear and resounding sign that a woman can hear the word of God and do it. She taught generation after generation how to pray themselves into the presence of God, and she never used prayer as an excuse to run away from life. She wrote: “What is the purpose of prayer, my sisters? The purpose of prayer is always good works, good works, good works.” And given her unending attempts to make religion spiritual and the church holy, God knows she has the right to say so.

—from A Passion for Life (Orbis Books), by Joan Chittister