As I said in my earlier post today its been a wonderful 2 weeks here in Texas. Its the first time I have worked with a group using 'Teresa of Avila: Doctor of the Soul' as a text and it was great to see how the very mixed group interacted with it and in many cases were able to take Teresa's writings and make them their own. It all bodes well for the 500th anniversary year and confirms my suspicion that 'her time has come' and she speaks to us now in a way that is new, arresting and ultimately very healing. I attach the last chapter of 'Doctor of the Soul' for you below as it seems an appropriate place to finish. Thanks especially to Fr Ron Rolheiser and Cliff Knighten for inviting me and looking after me so well - and all the team here. We are now talking of taking a group to Avila in 2016 so watch the Oblate School of Theology website for more on this in the coming months...
Best wishes
Peter
Epilogue. Teresa of
Avila: Doctor of the Church, Doctor of the Soul
In
1970 Teresa of Avila, along with St Catherine of Siena, was declared a Doctor
of the Universal Church by Pope Paul VI in Rome. According to the ‘New Catholic
Encyclopedia’ in 1967:
No woman has been proclaimed (Doctor
of the Church), although Teresa of Avila
has popularly been given the title because of the influence of her spiritual teaching; it would seem that no
woman is likely to be named because
of the link between this title and the teaching
office, which is limited to males. (Forshaw: 1967)
By
conferring this honour upon her, the church demonstrated that Teresa’s teaching
had indeed become of age, yet it had waited several centuries before giving her
this recognition. In light of the examination of her texts in this book this is
perhaps unsurprising. As I have argued throughout, I believe that her writings
remain as challenging today as they did five hundred years ago. What I hope to have
demonstrated in this account is the intellectual rigour with which Teresa
explores the landscape of the soul and how throughout she is alive to the nuances
and subtleties of the language required to depict the encounter of the soul
with the transcendent. As we have seen, this she does by using the tradition of
theologia mystica to which she is
heir but adapting it, almost playing with it, to forge a unique spiritual
language as finely wrought as anything by a contemporary linguistic
philosopher. By forging this provocative and challenging language she truly
deserves to be called a ‘Doctor of the Soul.’
I have concluded the book with a
descriptive analysis of two aspects of the contemporary psycho-spiritual
thought-world: the rediscovery of ‘mindfulness’ as a tool for clinical
intervention and the long shadow cast by Carl Jung and his pioneering research
into the nature of soul and psyche. In doing this I hope to have demonstrated
how a re-reading of Teresa in the light of this context can challenge us to
perceive our contemporary spiritual anthropology in new and surprising lights.
In the case of Jungian analytical
psychology the questions raised by the challenges of Teresa’s approach are ones
not unfamiliar within the discipline itself. The second generation Jungian
theorist, James Hillman (1926 – 2011), writing in the same year as the
‘Catholic Encyclopedia’ was pronouncing on the legitimacy of the female
teaching office, stated:
Because the soul is lost – or at least
temporarily mislaid or bewildered –ministers
have been forced, upon meeting a pastoral problem, to go upstairs to its neighbour, the next
closest thing to soul: the mind. So the
churches turn to academic and clinical psychology, to psychodynamics and psychopathology and psychiatry, in attempts
to understand the mind and its
workings. This has led ministers to regards
troubles of the soul as mental breakdowns and cure of soul as psychotherapy. But the realm of the mind –
perception, memory, mental diseases
– is a realm of its own, another flat belonging to another owner who can tell us very little about the person whom
the minister really wants to know,
the soul. (Hillman 1967:44)
Yet,
shortly before his death in 2011, the same theorist voiced a sense of
disillusionment with the direction that Analytical Psychology had taken in the
past few years:
I am critical of the whole analytic
discipline… It has become a kind of New
Age substitute for life, on the one hand; a substitute for rigorous education in culture, philosophy and religion,
on the other; and third, a ‘helping
profession’… the whole thing has lost its way. Something is deeply missing.[1]
This,
‘something’, he had described in somewhat cryptic terms in the earlier Insearch in terms that Teresa would
probably have concurred with:
Besides the familiar reality of my
mental activity (my introspection, worries,
plans, observations, reflections, projects), and the worldly reality of objects, there can grow a third
realm, a sort of conscious unconscious.
It is rather non-directed, non-ordered, non-object, non- subject, not quite a reality of a concrete kind… It is a realm
for itself, neither object nor
subject, yet both. This third reality is a psychic reality, a world of experiences, emotions, fantasies, moods,
visions, dreams, dialogues,
physical sensations, a large and open space, free and spontaneous. (Hillman 1967:66)
It
is from this ‘third position’: ‘the knowing unknowing’ of the medieval stulta sapientia, that I have suggested
Teresa’s perspective on the soul arises, and it is from this third perspective
that this book has been written. As we find ourselves in a world of rising
materialism on the one hand and simplistic religious fundamentalism on the
other, Teresa offers, I suggest, a light-footed path of desire that will lead
us from the abyss into which we stare. Taken as a whole her writings provide a
course in self-awareness and discovery, the aim of which is to lead us back
into engagement with the world where our ‘decentred’ self may be nourished by
the deep libidinal sources of grace that lie within us as our birthright.
Kristeva, with whom we began this
book, sees in Teresa’s phrase Buscate in
Mí / ‘Seek Yourself in Me’ - heard in prayer sometime around 1576 (See VE),
a rebuke to the Western tradition of ‘Know Thyself’ and the Cartesian ‘I think
therefore I am’. She replaces the Socratic command with the Teresian Connais-toi en Moi – ‘Know Thyself in
Me’ (Kristeva 2008:35). Is this, perhaps, Teresa’s message to us today? She is
the ‘symbolic thinker’ who taps into the deep subterranean libidinal sources
upon which the roots of Western culture rests. As we listen to her gentle voice
we realise that the wounded and disorientated postmodern soul is being called
back to the ancient realities of the pre-modern self. For if we listen
carefully we can just about make out the quiet song of a little girl singing in
a cool courtyard high above the mountains of central Spain on a hot summer
afternoon a long, long time ago. The breeze catches her song and we hear it
again, now clear, now indistinct. Now, more than ever, the world once again
needs to listen, and dance to, that song:
Alma, buscarte has en Mí, Soul, you must Seek Thyself
in Me,
Y a Mí, buscarme has en ti. And in Thyself Seek Me!
De tal suerte pudo amor, With such fortune could
love,
Alma, en mí te retratar Soul, portray you in me
Que ningún sabio pintor Such that no gifted
painter
Supiera con tal primor Could portray that
beauty
Tal imagen estampar With which the image
is engraved.
Fuiste por amor criada For love created you,
Hermosa, bella, y así Precious, fair one,
En mis entrañas pintada, Deep within me carved,
Si te perdieres, mi amada, For if you lose me, love,
Alma, buscarte has en Mí Soul, Seek Thyself in Me!
Que yo sé que te hallaras For I know that you will
find
En mi pecho retratada Yourself engraved in
my heart
Y tan al vivo sacada And so drawn from
life
Que si te ves te holgaras That when you see you
will rejoice
Viéndote tan bien pintada. To see yourself so well
painted.
Y si acaso no supieres And if by chance you
do not know
Donde me hallarás a Mí, Where to find me,
No andes de aquí para allí, Don’t wander here and there,
Sino, si hallarme quisieres For, if you want to find
me,
A Mí buscarme has en ti. In Thyself Seek Me!
Porque tú eres mi aposento, For you are my refuge,
Eres me casa y morada, My home and my dwelling
place,
Y así llamo en cualquier tiempo, And if I call at any time,
Si hallo en tu pensamiento And find in the castle of
your mind
Estar la puerta cerrada. The door is closed.
Fuera de ti no hay buscarme Do not look for me outside
yourself
Porque para hallarme a Mí For, if you want to find me
Bastará solo llamarme, All you need do is
call me,
Que a ti iré sin tardarme Then I shall come quickly
Y a Mí buscarme has en ti. And in Thyself Seek Me!
oooOOOooo
[1] Interview with Jan Marlan, International Association of Analytical
Psychology Newsletter 26:2006.
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