Introduction
It is an extraordinary fact that the BBC, not known for its fondness for the Catholic Church, chose in its broadcast on Radio 4 in the final hour of the old millennium, on 31 December 1999 at 11pm, to devote a broadcast to St Teresa of Avila. The talk was given by atheist feminist Camille Paglia. She concluded: ‘Teresa of Avila, bold, fiery and tenacious, is for me a woman of the future, blending practical realism with passionate idealism.’ Similarly, the continuing extraordinary power of Teresa in the 21st century is illustrated by a comment attributed to the British novelist and story writer Nicola Barker as recorded online in 2019. She writes: ‘The Life of St Teresa of Avila. I read an old, yellowed paperback of this little autobiography about 10 years ago and it fostered a powerful, inexplicable urge in me to take holy communion. This urge ran counter to everything I thought I believed and loved and wanted and felt. It was painful and inconvenient and infuriating’.1 Teresa is active out there today and much appreciated among the citizens of the world! This admiration — seen in figures as different as Nicola Barker and Julia Kristeva — raises deeper questions about how Teresa’s obedience to the Church is understood. It is a paradox not only in cultural commentary but also in the lived experience of Carmel, as the following reflections will show.
Julia Kristeva
The most prominent and most outspoken among the feminist promoters of Teresa in the twenty-first century so far has been Bulgarian-born Julia Kristeva, Parisian literary critic, psychoanalyst, university academic. Kristeva is a name to be conjured with in France, a legendary figure with more than thirty books and a large number of awards to her name.
She has been described as ‘one of France’s most admired intellectuals and one of the world’s leading psychoanalytic thinkers.’ All the more extraordinary that in the year 2008 she should have published a 700-page book in French with the delightful title Thérèse mon amour — in the English version of 2014 Teresa my love. The book is actually presented as a novel, but in reality it is an embroidered biography, replete with the author’s meditations, the story being told by a narrator who is a psychiatrist. So, this legendary modern figure in Parisian intellectual life not only writes a huge book about a sixteenth-century Spanish nun – it is a declaration of love! ‘For some ten years, I read Teresa’s books, I lived with this Carmelite from another era, I loved her and I questioned her – I even argued with her. I brought her into my life…’2
This book was not the first time Kristeva had expressed her love for the Castilian saint.3
She also wrote a revealing short essay entitled, ‘The Passion according to St Teresa of Avila’.4 In this she tries to suggest that Teresa and St John of the Cross were on the margins in the Church of that time,5 that they were severely marginalised figures.
This is very misleading, but it conforms to the assumption often made in the modern West that creative geniuses, the iconic people we choose to venerate, must inevitably by definition, be operating transgressively and provocatively in their societies or at least on the margins of their societies. The general assumption is that you are either an original thinker, a creative person who does your own thing, or you are a mediocre conformist.
By definition, if you are submissive to the Catholic Church you have not developed into a fully mature adult.
The authoritarianism problem
So, on the one hand adoration of Teresa’s character and achievements; on the other, a rejection of her fundamental stance as she herself saw it, according to which her work arises out of her commitment to Holy Mother Church and not in opposition to it. This issue is fundamental if we consider modern ideas about human development. The assumption is that the child grows to maturity when as a teenager or young adult he detaches himself from parents – and by extension, from the beliefs of parents. You must let go of the internal voice of the inner parent, you must develop your own voice.
Of course we know there is truth in that, but for so many Christian and Catholic young people today that means detaching yourself from your parents’ belief in the Gospel.
Hence, if I haven’t rebelled against my parents’ faith, I am not a proper adult. Catholics then are widely dismissed as imprisoned within an authoritarian Church which takes their decisions for them. By definition, they haven’t grown up, they don’t make decisions for themselves, the Pope does it for them.
One of the founding principles of the whole secular world is ‘I am the best judge of my own interests, I am the best judge where my own interests are concerned.’ I choose what to do with my life, I choose my vocation, I choose where to live’ and so forth. ‘What do you really want?’ is the classic counselling strategy with a client. When the client has dug down and understood what he or she really wants and is ready to implement the needful changes in his or her life, the counselling has been successful – even if it leads the client to abandon a family dismissed as ‘damaging’. By contrast, as Catholics we surrender our right to choose to the God who watches over us lovingly. This paradox is not only visible in cultural commentary; it is something I have wrestled with personally in my own Carmelite journey, as the following section will show.
The journey into ourselves is a journey into God
One of the greatest treasures of Carmel and a great surprise to me – was the discovery that in committing to the adventure of moving closer to God, I would at the same time be developing as a human being. How does this work? How does entry into the Carmelites enrich and promote our personal human and Christian development?
The Mystery of Carmel
I personally crave explanations, I am one of those poor souls that are often somewhat derided, a highly educated intellectual. I always assumed that God must be as rational as myself. In Carmel I found out that this was not the case! For a long time I assumed that God operated according to our thinking. Since I had given my life to Him, He would surely reward me appropriately. In my mind it was an unspoken quid pro quo.
OK, I understood that he doesn’t satisfy a person’s ambition for power or wealth or worldly success. But surely he would give me fulfilment and some measure of achievement in a career offered to Him? This however did not happen.
Later as a Carmelite I got to know Therese of Lisieux. She famously came out with three words that on the face of it look quite banal. ‘Tout est grâce’ – Everything is grace.
I finally began to understand the importance of that word ‘everything’. It means that the rocks and stones that life throws at us are grace, just as much as the sunshine of our delightful experiences. It’s just that the grace in the rocks and stones is hidden from our sight, at least initially. You have to delve deep into what is happening to find the grace in it. Even then you may fail to discover it – but that doesn’t mean it is not there.
At some point, you may have to give up trying to understand
I think this is of fundamental importance for human and Christian development. Surely – apart from the traumas we suffer from the circumstances of our infancy and childhood – the main obstacles to our personal development are the difficulties we encounter along life’s way, difficulties that lead to our getting stuck? Traumas like sickness, bereavement, marital breakdown, career failure, stress, general frustration with life, and so forth. These things can derail development. These are the things that test my mettle as a person and my deep-down stability. This means that what I most need in life if I am to grow and develop is the capacity to cope with pain, deprivation, and disaster without falling into bitterness, rage, and despair. So many people are embittered in their subsequent lives by some tragedy or trauma that has befallen them at some stage. (For some it seems to be a reason to abandon the Church and their Catholic faith.) So many relationships are poisoned by resentment at past injuries or imagined injuries. On the other hand, if I am schooled to look at the challenges I face in everyday life as the challenges God has chosen for me, I can use those challenges as the building blocks for the house of my life. If everything is really grace, I know that God is to be sought in those painful experiences.
What we really need if we are to grow into lovable people, inwardly strong people, people others can lean on, is to learn to find God in the dark as well as in the light.
That then we can learn in Carmel – especially in John of the Cross.
Learning in Carmel
How do we learn this precious lesson? I learned it not just by my reading of the Carmelite saints, but by the sharing I have done with fellow-Carmelites in my Secular Carmelite community. Shared discussion, shared prayer, a shared purpose. Shared insights as we read the Carmelite writings. The inflow of divine grace as we sit in silence together before God.
Surrender – a personal experience
Carmel is all about surrender to Jesus. I had a concrete personal experience of the effect of this in my life. Twelve years ago, I had the good fortune to be invited to a Renewal Course in the Holy Land along with other Seculars. During the course I was renewed!
I can’t tell the whole story but it involved an experience of the Holy Spirit as a powerful force invading me and completely overwhelming me. It also involved an experience of tears. Every time I went to my room I wept. Meanwhile I kept waking up in tears at night. From the day I returned home my prayer life was profoundly transformed. I saw the tears as a flood breaking down a barrier which I had set up to keep God at bay. He was telling me: ‘Just Say Yes!’ I knew what this meant, I knew that I always found reasons not to serve the Lord in this or that way. I knew that I lived too much in my mind and not in my heart. Shockingly, I was so lazy that I had nearly missed the course, having thought of all kinds of reasons not to go on it. In the end, I only went because at the last minute my mentor in Carmel, a lady whose recommendations I made a habit of following, told me to go. However, this experience itself is not my point here, I just want to record a little sequel to it which has remained embedded in my memory.
Not long after my return I was talking to a fellow member of my Carmelite community about this extraordinary experience in the Holy Land. Suddenly out of the blue she blurted out: ‘I used to be afraid of you!’ The transformation then was not just in my imagination. She was telling me that through a grace given to me in Carmel I had lost a disagreeable behaviour and gained an attractive one. This I call a real spiritual and psychological transformation. I realised her fear was in part justified because I had indeed been carrying a lot of anger around with me. This was in part at least because I was too cerebral, focussing on people’s opinions and whether I agreed or disagreed with them, but in truth it was also about a certain continuing reluctance to forgive: I had long resisted the injunction in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’
The Good Lord was calling me to be all heart. I recalled that the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to England a few years previously had taken as its motto ‘Heart speaks to heart’.
I knew that henceforth I must focus on touching the hearts of others, no matter what their opinions. This call to live in the heart is one of the gifts of Carmel to the Church and to the world. In this, we walk in the footsteps of Teresa herself, whose bold fidelity continues to inspire both intellectual admiration and personal transformation.
- Nicola Barker. ‘My Hero: Thomas Merton’ in The Guardian (22 June 2012). Available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/22/my-hero-thomas-merton-nicola-barker ↩︎ - Julia Kristeva, ‘The passion according to Teresa of Avila’ in Peter Tyler and Edward Howells (eds.), Teresa of Avila. Mystical theology and spirituality in the Carmelite tradition, London/New York: Routledge, 2017, 99-106; here, 100. ↩︎
- Elizabeth Coles, ‘Therese mon amour’, online 2015, 4. ↩︎
- online at www.kristeva.fr/passion.html ↩︎
- Kristeva, ‘La Passion’, 2. ↩︎
