A Sermon offered
for the Executive Council of TEC by Katharine Jefferts Schori
Monday,
October 15, 2012, The Feast of Teresa of Avila
Texts: Song of Songs 4:12-16; Psalm 42:1-7; Matthew
5:13-16
Most
people who know anything about Teresa of Avila know that she was a mystic, and
spent much of her life in contemplation.
Some people are aware that she was proclaimed a “doctor of the church”
by the pope in 1970, the first woman to get that title. In Roman Catholic circles, that means that
her writing is judged sound and good for teaching, and it means that this
gospel is read on her feast day – you are salt of the earth. Teresa’s life was a good deal more complex
than the popular image of a sickly nun shut up in her cell only to pray and
write. One modern commentator calls her,
“stubborn as an ox, thick-skinned as an elephant, and sly as a fox.”[1] There’s a taste of the saltiness that Jesus
charges us to be.
Teresa was born about 1515 to parents who were
members of the foremost families of Spain.
All of her life, she seems to have been profoundly hungry for God. When she was a child, her uncle found her and
her younger brother outside of town – they were going off to be martyred by the
Moors so they could enter heaven. He
took them home. Teresa’s mother died
when she was 14, which seems to have unleashed a fairly normal and frivolous
adolescence. She writes about indulging
in clothes, and perfume, and trashy novels, and, she says, “all the vain
trimmings my position in the world allowed.”
Her father responded by packing her off to a convent school. She got sick and had to come home, and it
appears that she continued to experience the same kind of illness most of her
life. Maybe it was recurrent malaria.
At
age 20, Teresa insisted on entering a Carmelite monastery. She stayed four years, when she got so sick
that they dug her grave. Her father took
her home again, and it took her three years to recover. She eventually went back and spent another 18
years there. She grew tired of the tepid
life, for many convents in those days were more like hotels for unmarried
aristocratic women.
With
the assistance of two Jesuits, Teresa began a period of serious silent prayer,
and began to have vivid experience of the near presence of God. Her writings are the first to give a fairly
explicit description of the experience of deep prayer, as a process of
contemplation, quietude, and union with God in both conscious forms and un- or
supra-conscious forms. She was both
descriptive and analytical, like William James centuries later, and her
writings invited others into a similar kind of experience.
Within
a few years, she began to envision a radical reform of the Carmelite order,
that would return to a more ancient and ascetic discipline. She established the Convent of St. Joseph in
1562, where the nuns gave up shoes in favor of sandals, took a rough habit,
lived fully cloistered, largely silent and in strict poverty, and ate no
meat. After a while her superiors
objected, and she was ordered off into seclusion. The pope spoke up for her and countermanded
the order, and permitted establishment of the discalced, or shoeless,
Carmelites as a separate religious order.
In all, she founded 17 convents for women and 14 for men. Teresa died while on a journey to establish
yet another convent.
Teresa
hungered and thirsted for God in ways that may shock us today – think of that
imagery in the Song of Songs has often been used to speak of mystical union
with God. Bernini made a famous
sculpture of Teresa in rapt prayer that was termed “indecent” by one
commentator because it’s so sensual.
Christians who live too much in their heads have a good deal to learn
from Teresa’s salty writing.
You
are salt of the earth and light of the world, Jesus says to his disciples. We’re not worth much at all if we can’t use
our saltiness to spread light abroad.
Let me make a connection between salt and light. In chemical terms, salts are charged
molecules that react in the presence of water or other solvents. Salts are what make batteries work, salts
underlie most of the chemical reactions that give life. The sun, and the light it gives off, are the
result of reactions among charged particles.
The ability of plants to use sunlight to make sugars depends on
salts. Saltiness is the potent ability
to interact with the world around us – and it’s intimately related to our
created nature – it’s part of our earthiness.
We can’t be light-bearers if we reject our created nature. Teresa’s hunger, and all that sensual imagery
in the Song of Songs, are about the way we are created – to interact with
creator and creation. If we have no
salt, we can shed no light.
What
does that say to us right here? Embrace
your salt – in moderation. Teresa’s
ascetic lifestyle was designed to give her salt its optimum field for
action. That field looks different in
different human beings – some of us are made for the convent and monastery;
most of us are not. We are all, however,
made to be conscious of our created nature and how it might be stewarded most
effectively. Think about what a whole
lot of salt does – it preserves living things so that they stop living, like
the brine we use to make ham or bacon or pickles. If we eat too much salt, at the very least
our blood pressure goes up, and at most, we die. Salt mines are used to store precious things
and as tombs for dangerous ones like radioactive waste. Perhaps the abandoned salt mines under the
Diocese of Michigan would make a good home for the Episcopal Church’s Archives…
But
salt in moderation is essential to life – balance is the key. You are salt of the earth and light of the
world. Salt is not meant for us alone. It’s meant to react with the world around us
and create light.
Teresa
has something to offer this body in her push to get back to the core of her
monastic tradition. She challenged her
sisters and brothers in the religious life to let go of the non-essentials, the
frills and the frivolity, so that their own salt could be readier to interact
with God. We’re challenged to do similar
kinds of work – recovering and focusing on the central aspects of God’s mission
that engage this church and its partners.
That’s radical work – going back to the roots, to get back to the essence
of God’s call to heal the world, and to let go of the details that so often
distract us.
How
will the challenging conversations here (God willing in moderation!) help to
shed light in the world around us?
The
salt of reactivity is essential to produce light. But I don’t mean simple
anxiety; rather the kind of reactivity that can experience hunger like
Teresa’s, or feel the suffering of the vulnerable and hurting people around
us. What gets our justice juices flowing,
what rouses our passionate response?
That is salt at work – and there is no light without it. Teresa’s cell did not cut her off from the
world’s hunger. She felt that hunger
deeply, and she responded.
Where
is your salt at work? What suffering is
starting your tears, what need is making you sweat, where is your lifeblood
being spent? That’s how light gets shed
in the world. That’s how we give glory
to God. And that is the garden in which
we find the beloved, and the beloved finds us.
[1]
Christian Feldman: God’s Gentle
Rebels: Great Saints of Christianity.
Crossroad, NY: 1985
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