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265 ST. THERESA 265 Bollandists, '* accommodating herself by turns to Grod and to man and giving herself wholly to neither." « When I was in the midst of the pleasures of the world/' she writes herself, " the remem- brance of what I owed to God made me sad, and when I was praying to God my worldly affections disturbed me." The year 1555 has been marked by her biographers as a crisis in her life. Her attention was arrested by a picture of the Passion of Christ, which had been procured for an approaching festival and placed in the convent oratory. Teresa loved such pictures, the sufferings of the wounded Christ painted with realism and devotion, pierced her heart. She threw herself on the ground before the picture and felt every worldly ambition die within her. From that time prayer became an ever increasing delight. While she prayed she was subject to a species of trance, of brief duration, during which she saw visions. Her superiors and her confessor attributed them to delusions of the devil. In extreme perplexity her- self, she sought the advice of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, then in its first glory. They prescribed for her a more rigorous asceticism and under their direc- tions the visions grew in vividness. The most famous of them all is that of the transverberation of her heart, which seems to have frequently occurred. It is commemorated in her Order, Aug. 27. She saw an angel standing by her side with a golden spear, tipped with fire, which he thrust again and again into her heart. She described it as '*an imaginary vision seen by the eyes of the soul," yet it caused her extreme pain, bodily as well as spiritual, which lasted several days. Shortly after this, to give expression to the great love which burned in her soul for God, she took the vow — since called the Seraphic or Teresian vow — never in action to do what was the less perfect. For five years she kept it blamelessly, but, because she and her confessord found it almost impossible to decide what was the less perfect course, she was absolved from it. Teresa's visions continued for many years ; and all Avila long remained per- plexed as to their source. It was the talk of the town and the convent that Donna Teresa was bewitched. But the greatest men of her Church, such as St. Francis Borgia and St. Peter of Alcantara, bade her praise God and abide in the full conviction that her prayer and her visions were the work of the Spirit of God. Thirty- three reasons for this opinion were found among Teresa's papers and are attributed, by the Bollandists, to St. Peter of Alcantara. Her love to God was strengthened by these trials and the life of her convent was fast becoming too narrow for her ardent spirit. She longed to serve God. " Yet," she writes, '' I am not able to do more than adorn images with boughs and flowers, clean or arrange an oratory, or some such trifling acts, so that I am ashamed of myself." Meanwhile beyond the walls of the In- carnation, in Spain and on the continent, the spread of the Eeformation was caus- ing the destruction of many monasteries. Teresa saw the reason for this devasta- tion of the strongholds of her beloved Church, in the decay of monastic disci- pline. In her Autobiography she spoke boldly against it. " The way of religious observance is so little used," she writes, '< that the friar and the nun, who would really begin to follow their vocation thoroughly, have reason to fear the members of their community more than all the devils in hell." One festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, several nuns had gathered in Teresa's cell (which often re-echoed with merry peals of laughter, somewhat to the scandal of her confessors) ; among them were Teresa's friend Juana Suarez and a young and light-hearted novice, Maria de Ocampo, afterwards Teresa's devoted disciple. They began to talk, "in a kind of play or joke," of the difficulties and vexations belonging to the kind of life they were living. " Let us all here and now," cried Maria impulsively, " go and live another life of greater solitude like the hermits." And she declared herself willing to set aside a thousand ducats from her fortune, to buy a house for that purpose. A vision, which pro- mised that the monastery should become a star shining in great splendour, en- couraged Teresa to proceed with the