Pope Francis, in a letter to Carmelites1, describes the essence of Carmelite spirituality as ‘intimate friendship with the One who loves us,’ a friendship that enables us to see with God’s eyes, speak with his Word in our hearts, and share that experience with those ‘hungry for eternity.’ This beautifully reflects our holy mother, St Teresa of Jesus, the relationship she had with Christ and her gift for sharing that experience with her sisters and, through her writings, with us today.
As this talk was being prepared, the Sunday gospel was the parable of the talents, which suggested itself as a lens on Teresa’s spiritual journey. Her early religious life, marked by struggle, uncertainty, and fear, resonates with the servant who, out of fear, buries his one talent instead of investing it.
Early life and the ‘one talent’
Teresa initially resisted becoming a nun and feared marriage, seeing religious life more as the lesser of two daunting options than as a joyful vocation. At the Incarnation, she entered an environment with many social visits and distractions that contributed to what she later described as nearly two decades of ‘spiritual mediocrity.’
Like the servant who buried his talent, Teresa did not at first ‘invest’ fully the gift God had given her; fear, attachments, and self-doubt immobilised her. The first three mansions of the Interior Castle reflect this cautious, hesitant progress, a journey marked by self-knowledge, distractions, and ‘reptiles,’ but not yet the full light of divine union.2
Mansions 1–3 can be seen as the ‘hidden talent’ phase: the soul is fearful, unskilled and tentative, called to courage, honesty, and gradual purification. Teresa’s later reforms, writings, and mystical experiences witness to what happens when the buried gift is finally entrusted to God and allowed to grow through prayer and surrender.
In the Book of her Life, Teresa describes with moving honesty the first two decades of her religious life: repeatedly falling and rising, torn between worldly pleasures and the memory of what she owed to God. (Ch. 4-8). The crucial turning point is that, even while she remained entangled in ‘the world,’ the Lord gave her courage to practise prayer. (Life, ch. 8). This becomes the key that begins to unlock her vocation.
First comes prayer
This priority of prayer, before virtue, before perfection, is echoed in the Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim. That text stresses that prayer itself gives rise to good works and virtues; what lies within our power is not perfection, but the frequency and regularity of prayer.
Two insights follow. First, prayer has chronological priority: we do not wait to be holy before we pray; we pray so that holiness can begin. Second, what we can actually offer God is our time, frequent, regular moments of turning toward him, with all our limits and distractions.
For Teresa, this steady fidelity becomes ‘determined determination.’ In Life, Chapter 8, she insists that no one who has begun mental prayer should abandon it, however great their sins, because prayer is the most accessible means for amendment of life. She famously describes mental prayer as ‘friendly intercourse and frequent solitary converse with him whom we know loves us’, and insists that if love and friendship are to endure there must be accord of wills: on God’s side unfailing; on ours fragile and in need of grace.
Friendship: from Aristotle to Christ
To situate Teresa’s understanding of friendship, it helps to recall Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship: those of utility, pleasure, and virtue, the highest being that in which friends share a common love of the good and become, as he says, ‘another self.’ Yet Aristotle’s model struggles to account for friendship between God and human beings, because for him real friendship presupposes a kind of equality.
In the Christian vision, equality in friendship with God does not mean equality of nature or power, but a communion made possible by God’s gracious self-emptying in the Incarnation. Christ takes the form of a servant and shares our humanity, so that a genuine, though asymmetrical, friendship becomes possible. Teresa stands within the tradition that sees charity as true ‘friendship of man for God,’ made possible by grace.
Scripture undergirds this: Jesus calls his disciples friends in John 15:15; Wisdom 7:27 speaks of holy souls as ‘friends of God and prophets’; and 2 Timothy 2:13 reminds us that even when we are unfaithful, God remains faithful. Friendship with God moves from metaphor to reality through Christ’s self-gift and our response in grace.
Friendship with Christ: Incarnate and concrete
For Teresa, friendship with Christ is rooted firmly in his humanity, his suffering, joys, and companionship. She does not seek to transcend the image of Christ, but to find him precisely as friend and companion, especially in his Passion, as in her powerful devotion to the image of Christ scourged at the pillar.
In her writings, friendship with Christ is not an illustration or symbol but a lived, reciprocal relationship. She speaks of prayer as an intimate sharing between friends, a real encounter with the One ‘whom we know loves us,’ grounded in presence, dialogue, and slow transformation. Teresa emphasises how Christ patiently endures her slowness and infidelity, exclaiming in effect what a good friend the Lord is, who waits for us to adapt to his nature while putting up with ours.
Her guidance to her nuns is practical: imagine Christ near you, speak with him as with a friend, bring sorrows and joys into his presence. She resists spiritual trends that would leave behind Christ’s humanity, insisting that genuine friendship with him must remain anchored in his human closeness.
Friendship and the Thomistic tradition
Theologically, Teresa aligns with the Thomistic understanding that caritas is a kind of friendship between God and humans, initiated by God and made possible by grace. The metaphors Teresa uses, the castle, the garden, water and marriage serve to describe stages and aspects of the journey, but they never replace the central reality of friendship.
Her letters, counsels, and poems portray Christ as a living companion, capable of mutual love and vulnerability, who actively communicates and sanctifies. The well-known apocryphal story from her journeys, Jesus commenting on how he treats his friends and Teresa’s witty reply that it is no wonder he has so few, shows the intimacy and freedom of this friendship, as well as the trials that accompany it. Scripture reinforces this pattern when it speaks of God’s particular friendship with figures such as Abraham, Moses, and David.
For Teresa, friendship with Christ is therefore not a mere figure of speech but the living centre of Christian holiness: as concrete as any human friendship, yet uniquely founded on Christ’s living presence and transforming love. Mystical experiences are set within, and never above, this ongoing friendship.
Three visions of transformation
The question of how sinners are made right with God and transformed has been answered differently across Christian history. A helpful contrast can be drawn between Martin Luther’s emphasis, the Catholic Church’s sacramental understanding, and Teresa’s interior, relational vision.
Luther speaks of the justified person as simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and sinful. An image of the snow-covered dunghill often attributed to Luther, though not found in his writings, highlights a legal righteousness that covers the sinner without necessarily transforming the inner corruption. Holiness, in this view, is largely outside us, a merciful declaration rather than an inner renovation.
The Catholic Church, by contrast, presents Christ as the Divine Physician and the Church as the hospital where his healing grace is dispensed through the sacraments and sacramentals. Baptism, Eucharist, Confession, and other sacramental encounters function as medicine that gradually heals and strengthens the soul. Teresa fully embraced this sacramental life. There is no rivalry between ‘her way’ and the Church’s means of grace.
Teresa’s distinctive contribution is her image of the soul as the ‘Interior Castle,’ in which sacramental grace takes root and transforms from within. If the sacraments are medicine, then friendship with Christ in prayer is like a good diet and exercise: our free cooperation with grace that deepens and accelerates healing. The soul is not a dunghill covered by snow, but a diamond castle being cleansed and filled with light, room by room.3
Teresa remains wholly Catholic: her interior way presupposes the sacraments and shows what happens when they bear their full fruit. Luther may emphasise the covering (Luther’s forensic justification), the Church the medicine (sacramental healing), but Teresa invites us to welcome Christ as Friend and Guest within, so that we become radiant dwelling places of his presence.
Growth in human friendship
Teresa’s journey also reshapes her view of human relationships. Initial fears that human attachments would distract from God gradually give way to the conviction that true friendship, rooted in God, can be a path to holiness.
Her friendship with Jerónimo Gracián illustrates this.4 Their collaboration in reform was marked by trust, shared mission, and spiritual growth. Teresa’s vow of obedience to Gracián, made under Christ’s guidance, shows how a human relationship, purified and ordered to God, can become sanctifying. In the Spiritual Testimonies she recounts how the Lord joined their hands and asked her to receive him as his representative for life.5
Friendship in community
Teresa’s vision of the Carmelite community is built on spiritual friendship: the sisters are to be friends in Christ, not merely cohabitants. Prayer is communal, and bonds in Christ are to surpass blood ties. In The Way of Perfection she warns against excessive preoccupation with relatives and urges the sisters to find in community the ‘truer friends’ the Lord sends.6
This communal friendship supports a climate of mutual support, simplicity, and shared pursuit of God. It is meant to be both contemplative and apostolic: prayer and friendship overflow into service for the Church and the world.
Fruit of friendship: joy
One of the deepest fruits of both divine and human friendship in Teresa’s writings is joy. She often speaks of gusto or spiritual delight, while carefully distinguishing it from fleeting consolations.
True joy is grounded in the secure knowledge of being loved by God and remains even amid suffering or spiritual dryness. Scripturally, this is reflected in Proverbs’ description of divine Wisdom rejoicing in the human race (Proverbs 8:31), and in the Gospel’s assurance that Christ’s joy can be in us so that our joy may be full (John 15:11).
Friendship and the mansions
The Interior Castle can be read as a map of growth in friendship with God. Each mansion represents a stage in the deepening of relationship, from initial longing through purification to spiritual marriage.
Yet friendship is not left behind in higher mansions; it is purified and intensified. Teresa insists that love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable: to the extent that we love our neighbour, we truly love God.7 Mature friendship with Christ always bears fruit in concrete charity toward others.
Friendship and evangelisation
For Teresa, friendship with God cannot remain private. The joy and love discovered in Christ must overflow into service, reform, and witness. Pope Francis’ description of Carmelite spirituality as treasuring the beauty of friendship with the One who loves us, and sharing it with those ‘hungry for eternity,’ captures this outward movement.
Evangelisation, in this sense, is not primarily strategy but overflow: the radiant impact of lives shaped by friendship with Christ. Teresa’s foundations, letters, and counsels all show a woman whose interior friendship drives her outward to serve the Church.
Practical guidance for cultivating friendship
Drawing on Teresa’s teaching, several practical points can guide our own growth in friendship, human and divine:
- Give Christ regular time in mental prayer, simple, honest conversation with One who loves you.
- Bring struggles, sins, and confusions into that friendship instead of waiting to ‘be better’ first.
- Seek spiritual friendships that are ordered to God, both in community and beyond.
- Let joy and service be the visible fruits of your friendship with Christ in daily life.
- Keep the humanity of Christ central: his life, Passion, and Eucharistic presence as a ‘living book.’
- Hold together contemplation and action, allowing Martha and Mary to walk side by side in your vocation.
Teresa notes that for love to be true and friendship to endure, the wills of the friends must be in accord, and she applies this to our relationship with Christ. Prayer gradually aligns our will with his, making friendship stable and fruitful.
‘Jesus of Teresa’: friendship as vocation
A scene in the Incarnation Monastery at Avila captures Teresa’s whole vocation. She meets a little child on the stairs who asks, ‘Who are you?’, and she replies, ‘I am Teresa of Jesus.’ When she asks his name, he answers, ‘I am the Jesus of Teresa.’8
This reciprocity expresses Teresa’s deepest desire: to belong wholly to Jesus and to let him, in turn, claim her as his own. May our own spiritual lives echo this, growing in friendship both human and divine, until our communities and relationships become, in some measure, ‘the Jesus’ for those we serve.
- Pope Francis, ‘Letter to the Carmelites on the Occasion of the General Chapter 2013.’
Available at: https://ocarm.org/en/item/2853 ↩︎ - Cf. St Teresa of Jesus, Interior Castle, First Mansions, ch. 2, in The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, vol. 2 (ICS Publications, 1980), pp. 295–299. Hereafter referred to as Interior Castle. ↩︎
- See Interior Castle, First Mansions, ch. 1, pp. 289–294. ↩︎
- See Teresa of Avila, Spiritual Testimonies, no. 32 in The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, vol. 1 (ICS Publications, 1976), pp. 327–328. Hereafter referred to as Spiritual Testimonies. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Cf. Teresa of Avila, Way of Perfection, ch. 4 in The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, vol. 2 (ICS Publications, 1980), pp. 76–82. ↩︎
- Cf. Interior Castle, Fifth Mansions, ch. 3, pp. 357–360. ↩︎
- Spiritual Testimonies, no. 25, pp. 323–324. ↩︎
