St. Teresa : of Avila, (1515-82), Spanish Roman Catholic nun originally named Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada: originator of the Carmelite Reform that restored & emphasized the austerity & contemplative character of primitive Carmelite life.
... the unnatural tax it lays on one by its rigid rules and its grinding tasks, there is the very great possibility of its not spiritualising one at all. Who is usually in charge of a nunnery? Not a St. Teresa or a St. Catherine, but an ordinary Mother Superior who has an ability to govern and organise, but no special spiritual radiancy. How is she to help one's soul? Of course one may turn to the occult... do, have many petty traits, for they too are not supernormal folk. A religious bent of mind or an impetuous turn towards the cloister does not transmute people into superhuman beings. And unless a St. Teresa or a St. Catherine is there to guide a nun and help her and uplift her by their very presence and make all her travails and tribulations as worth while as they can be made, the aspirant will not ...
... martyrs like Ignatius and Poly carp to the Fathers of the Desert like St. Antony and St. Pachomius to the great monastic leaders like St. Benedict and St. Bernard, to St. Francis and St. Dominic, St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, right up to Mother Teresa at the present time, there have always been hot only individual saints who have revealed the love of Christ, but whole communities who have borne ...
... luminosity; there is more of the ethical put forward than of the spiritual or divine man. The Christ that has strongly lived in the Western saints and mystics is the Christ of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa and others. But apart from that, is it a fact that Christ has been strongly and vividly loved by Christians ? Only by a very few, it seems to me. As for Krishna, to judge him and his revealing ...
... its self-division and barrenness, and becomes verily a chain of linked self-evident truths that embraces the whole universe. The mist disappears; light floods the tablelands of the mind; and as St. Teresa remarked, "in a room into which the sunlight enters strongly, not a cobweb can be hid". 20 Mirra neatly concludes her discourse with what is almost like an amplification of the celebrated Gayatri ...
... business capacity is specially noted in a curiously large number of cases. For instance, Plotinus was often in request as a guardian and trustee; St. Bernard showed great gifts as an organiser; St. Teresa, as a founder of convents and administrator, gave evidence of extraordinary practical ability .... The mystic is not as a rule ambitious, but I do not think he often shows incapacity for practical ...
... spontaneity is real enough, yet not utterly or altogether so; we raise our hands in prayer, we offer these flowers to Him - but have our hands and these flowers an existence apart from Him? St. Teresa, developing a familiar simile beloved of mystics, says that our soul is like a garden, untilled and barren, overgrown with weeds; God plucks out the weeds, and the plants and flowers have to be ...
... action, and a simultaneous self-identification with the Transcendent and the Immanent. The general trend of mystical thought in the West, in spite of the towering achievements of Ruysbroeck and St. Teresa, inclines towards a denial of the possibility of a complete and constant union with God in human fife. "Man shall not see my face and live" has been accepted more or less literally by almost all ...
... (td the surrender) from on high came quickly. A brilliant light shone about him; he heard in his ears a divine voice of adorable sweetness." Similar instances are recorded in the lives of St. Teresa an St. Catherine of Sienna, which go to prove the stupendous power of conversion and transformation inherent in the act of self-surrender. It is only by self-surrender, that is to say, by surrender ...
... impoverishment of the essence of sensuous rapture. Where in the whole literature of love is there a description more electric with concrete personal sensation than those of the mystical ecstasies of St. Teresa and Mirabai? Where in Nature-poetry is a stronger sense of substantial being invading all our powers of perception and meeting us everywhere and infinitely and in a million forms than in the spiritual ...
... And there is Dante's music about the santo riso, the saintly smile, of Beatrice which guided him from the sins of the flesh to the soul's ecstasy of worship. Crashaw wrote a hymn in honour of St. Teresa, lauding her devotion to Christ and her transforming influence on men. Francis Thompson made a shrine for Alice Meynell: she was the religious calm-centre to the storm of his much-tossed and vagrant ...
... luminosity; there is more of the ethical put forward than of the spiritual or divine man. The Christ that has strongly lived in the Western saints and mystics is the Christ of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa and others. But apart from that, is it a fact that Christ has been strongly or vividly loved by Christians? Only by a very few, it seems to me. As for Krishna, to judge him and his revealing tradition ...
... the vehement devotee— Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine and seek to mend, Page 132 or Crashaw cries de profundis to St. Teresa, echoing her exaltation— By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee His, By all the heavens thou hast in Him (Fair sister of the Seraphim ...
... line of the seers of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and the world's other scriptures. If we are to run down those seers and later mystics like St. Francis and St. Teresa, Rumi and Baha-ullah, Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi as deluded fools, we needs must keep away from Sri Aurobindo. But all these mystics were, in a high sense ...
... after all so dark and unregenerate as it has been the familiar custom to represent it. Christian Europe – the Europe of cathedrals and monasteries, of saints and sages, of St. Francis and St. Teresa, of Boehme and Bernard, of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, had an enlightenment all her own, which was real and living and dynamic, possessing a far-extending and deeply penetrating influence; in as ...
... 391 Sri Ramakrishna, 57, 161, 239, 385, 395 St. Augustine, 150 St. Bartholomews, 52 St. Bernard, 150 St. Francis, 150, 164 St. Peter, 382 St. Teresa, 150 St.. Thomas Aquinas, 150 Stalin, 106, 125 Sumeria, 223 Sun-yat-Sen, 242 TACITUS, 87 Tagore, Rabindranath, 195, 197-8, 200-1 Tantras, ...
... to the world and its activities.¹ That seeking, as we have already seen, is an intense but exclusive trend, not the whole tenor of its being and consciousness. "You may think, my daughters," says St. Teresa, "that the soul in her state of union should be so absorbed that she can occupy herself with nothing. You deceive yourselves. She turns with greater ease and ardour than before to all that which ...
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