 |
|
|
|
|
|
| 27-01-2012 |
| José Ignacio Gonzáles Faus S.J. |
| Woman of flesh and bones. |
|
|
Before being a Saint, doctor of the Church, mystic or Carmelite, Teresa of Jesus was simply a human being and a woman. To say this seems obvious but, sometimes, we believe that the heavenly consists in forgetting all what is elemental: with thus those great things seem that they don’t belong to our earth; and we come to think that they don’t have anything to do with us, but only to people of another condition.
That is why I don’t think it’s good to read Teresa without taking in account her letters: they have an spontaneity that we can’t find in other writings of her, exposed to the surveyors eyes of the inquisitors and theologians. In her writings she is able to refer to the Bishop as “Melquisedec”, to the members of the inquisition as “the angels”, or to the Carmelites as “those of fabric”. And when they make a provincial a friar that has mistreated her nuns she says “it must be so because he has more qualities of making other people martyrs”…
In her letters she confesses that “I fear more an unhappy nun than many demons”; and that is why in some letters we can see her struggle so that no confessors be imposed to the nuns: “that I fear more that they lose the happiness with which our Lord is taking them, than other things: because I know what an unhappy nun is”. And she is happy that “our father issues them to eat meat the two that have much prayer life”… because she thinks that the ecstasies “don’t seem to me that is a better prayer”.
She acknowledges that “young nuns with old ones can’t find themselves good” and that is why she says to J. Gracian that she is amazed “because he doesn’t get tiered of her”. But she comes to leaving that to God so she “may pass the life that he gives her with such a poor health and happy moments, if it is not in this”. All of her infatuation with Gracian may be objet of further analysis. But at least we can point out that sometimes she becomes bothersome, in other occasions she explains him how much it makes her sad that he has tooth aches: “because I have much experience as to how painfully that is”, and if you have one damaged “it may seem that all of them are damaged” because of the pain; or she insists that “he may put on more clothes, because it is cold”. By the other hand when she sees that a friar is very sure on admitting a postulant because he thinks that “just by looking at her you may know her”, she stops him right there, telling him that “we women are not so easily to be known”…
By the end of her life she will recognize that she has learned to rule and that she isn’t the same person that she used to be: now “everything goes with love”, even if she doesn’t know if that is for the reason that she has less interest or that because finally she “has come to understand that thus it is better solved”.
It is also pleasing to know how people considered her, in the declarations to her canonization process: friends of her like Juana Suarez, some other supposedly neutral like “El Tostado” or enemies like the duchess of Eboli (in case that she really made a declaration). But at least we may conclude, that the deepest mystical experience isn’t compatible neither with common sense, neither with the irony or the struggle for what seem to be the right thing, neither with a strong character or emotions difficult to control and with a possessive tendency… In one word: neither with being who we all are. Because in every place we can be able to grow.
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
