HOLINESS IS FOR EVERYONE

The Universal Call to Holiness in the Writings of St. Theresa of Avila

I. The Universal Call To Holiness:
-The road to perfection is meant to be traveled by men and women of good will in all walks of life.
-Too often the average lay person thinks of holiness as ‘just beyond’ his or her grasp…if only they were in a cloistered monastery, then things might be different, they tell themselves.
Summary of the Christian life:
A.)The goal of human life is ‘holiness’
B.)Everyone is called to this holiness
C.) Holiness is the perfection of our relationship with God
D.) This relationship finds it’s beginning, growth, and fulfillment in prayer…

1. Means To Approach The Call To Holiness:
As St. Theresa of Avila points out, “Mental prayer is nothing else than an intimate friendship, a frequent heart to heart conversation with Him by whom we know ourselves to be loved.”
The beginning of our relationship with God, then, must be prayer. In her work Interior Castle, St. Theresa imagines Jesus the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords enthroned in great majesty in the center of a great castle (the soul in a state of grace), in which a person enters by seven stages, or mansions, each stage representing a deepening of our relationship with God.

- St. Theresa will call this road the “royal highway” or “heavenly journey”.
- As St Theresa points out; “Insofar as I can understand, the door of entry to this castle is prayer and reflection”
- Prayer and meditation, then, are the means through which Christians begin this journey. St. Theresa of Avila beautifully illuminates the way in which this journey can be traveled, pointing out all the dangers, blessings, and steps or means necessary to take on this road, which we have stated earlier, is for every devout Christian no matter what their vocation in life.
The means to reach this perfection then, are prayer and meditation, which over time (depending on God’s grace and our disposition) perfects us in love for God and our neighbor.
In order to understand how this should take place we first need to define some terms; prayer and meditation.

II. What is Prayer and Meditation?
We’ll use St. Theresa’s definitions. For Theresa prayer is a dialogue, a conversation with God who dwells within and an exchange of love… that which we have for God and that which God has for us.
- This converse, or dialogue, can take place because of a principle basic to Theresa’s spirituality, that God is present within the depths of our soul. Here, Theresa is following in the footsteps of St. Augustine who tried to fulfill the longings of the human heart through the material things of the world, but realized after introspection, that it was God who had been calling out to his heart all along.
- When we speak of this ‘indwelling’ we often hear the term ‘mystical’, which comes from the Latin meaning ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ . With this in mind, namely that prayer is a conversation with the most Holy Trinity who dwells within us, we can then provide a simple definition of meditation.
- For Theresa, meditation involves knowing and loving. Knowing means simply being aware of who we are speaking to (who our prayer is addressed to), and who we are in relation to Him whom we are addressing. He is everything, we are nothing without Him .
- This necessarily involves loving, because our desire to converse with God needs to be motivated by our love for Him. As St. Theresa puts it, “The soul’s profit, then, consists not in thinking much, but in loving much”. Love above all.

1. The need for meditation
- God has created us for Himself and is always calling us to be with Him;
“Although man can forget God or reject Him, He never ceases to call every man to seek Him, so as to find life and happiness” (CCC ch.1,&30). “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in His own blessed life. For this reason at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek Him, to know Him, to love Him with all his strength…” (CCC Prologue, &1).
If God has created us for Himself, and prayer and meditation are a conversation and intimacy with Him, then we find the need for this type of relationship to develop. Without it, St. Theresa warns us in her ever so subtle way; “He who neglects mental prayer needs not a devil to carry him to hell, but brings himself there with his own hands”.

2.The reason for meditation
- The reason then, for meditation, is the fostering of a love relationship with God.
- As such, the Christian life is an interior one.
Prayer is our primary means of building this relationship.
- This relationship can be likened to marriage.
Example of man who comes home and doesn’t give time to his wife…
Imagine a married couple, with the husband working full time. He comes home every evening and passes by his wife, but never says a word to her. This happens day in and day out for the entire week, month after month, without so much as a thought for his spouse. There’s no communication between the two.
And then once a week he sits down with his wife and says, “OK, honey, let’s chat for an hour”. And the whole time he looking at his watch wondering when it will be over. How much love is there? How long will the relationship last?
- It’s the same in our relationship with God. If we neglect to speak with Him, then how long will our relationship last? How much love do we have for him? This is often how we treat God…
We may once in a while give Him a small amount of attention on Sunday at mass, but the rest of the week we don’t give a thought to Him.

Basic principle of the spiritual life:
- Love yearns to know what it loves. If we only begin this journey then, with the right dispositions, our heart begins to long for more. Loving leads to knowing, which leads to loving more, which leads to wanting to know more, etc.

- Our reason for prayer and meditation then, is based on our love and knowledge of God, which build and feed on each other.
- It is God Himself who calls men and women into relationship with Himself.
We read in the Catechism, “This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator” (CCC I.27).

3. St. Theresa’s idea of meditation
- St. Theresa speaks of prayer and meditation in the same breath.
- Prayer is our conversation with God, and meditation is the consideration and loving attention to the one to whom we are speaking.

How can we start this ‘mental prayer’ or prayer with loving attention?
- For Theresa, the humanity of Jesus is the starting point, “Yet do not imagine I want you to make long meditations on our divine Savior or much reasoning or profound and subtle conceptions. If you cannot do more, keep your eyes fixed for some moments on your adorable spouse”.

III. How to begin meditation
We’ve established the need and reason for prayer and meditation, we need to move on to the actual way of meditation itself.

1.Preparation and disposition
- First, we need to explain that the actual method of prayer used by Theresa is not necessarily the only one, as she herself indicates.
- She intends merely to distinguish clearly the necessary elements preparatory to our conversation with Christ. If her outline is followed, it may be worked out in any framework of the individual’s choosing”.
- For Theresa, the first step should be to ‘put oneself in the presence of Christ’.
- This is the prerequisite for proper prayer and meditation for the beginner. – Distractions should be kept at a minimum, so it may be necessary to simply find a quiet place where our thoughts can be focused on our project ahead.
- This necessarily involves determination and perseverance before one even begins.
- Once the mind is stilled and the surroundings are free from anything that may divert one’s attention, then its time to make sure there is something to give the mind to meditate upon, something to consider that will raise our hearts and minds to God.
- Here it is necessary to properly choose the material to meditate upon

2.Material for use in meditation
In order to properly focus our attention, we need to have something which will engage the senses.
- We use the senses because we are sentient beings and we experience reality through our senses of touch, smell, hearing, sight, and taste.
- This gives the mind something to be occupied with.
- For Theresa, the humanity of Christ was the subject with which to begin meditation.
- This could be a scene from his passion or a scene from his earthly life, according to your own personal mood.
- Theresa herself, for many years could not even enter into her prayer time without a book to help focus her wandering mind and aid her in concentrating on the life of Christ, as she herself states; “…my soul would become disturbed and my thoughts would wander…as soon as I started to read they began to collect themselves and the book acted like a bait to my soul. Often the mere fact that I had it by me was sufficient”.

- This is what Theresa refers to as ‘taking charge of the senses’. – Even a picture can be of great use to bring about a loving attention towards Him, in the same way as a picture we may carry in our wallet reminds us of our loved ones when they are not with us.
- Thus, the value of spiritual books, sacred scripture, and sacred images, and the things of the created world around us.

3.Methods of meditation
- What do we do now that we’re ready to begin? While we can say that there is no hard and fast rule of just how to proceed, we can draw from the writings of Theresa a ‘way’ of entering into prayer with Christ.
- We begin by taking the material and consider the subject matter before us. For example; if we’ve chosen the gospels as our material, we choose a scene, such as the ‘agony in the garden’ (one of Theresa’s favorites), and we may even use a picture of Jesus in this scene, to look at as we read the actual account from one to the Gospels.
- We imagine the scene before us. We imagine with our minds eye that Jesus is kneeling in a garden with olive trees, and we are also there in the garden with him. We see the trees, the grass, the rocks, and Jesus in front of us. We listen to him talking to the Father.
- Imagine what he would say, and use the words of the gospels as a guide but don’t restrict yourself to them.
- This is also the method of prayer for beginners which St. Francis de Sales recommends in his work ‘Introduction to the Devout Life’ in which he states; “This is simply to picture in the imagination the entire mystery you wish to meditate on as if it really took place here before us. For example, if you wish to meditate on our Lord on the cross, imagine that you are on mount Calvary and that there you see and hear all that was done or said on the day of the passion…by such imaginative means we restrict our mind to the mystery on which we meditate so that it will not wander about, just as we cage a bird…”.
- This is also the teaching of another great spiritual master, St. Ignatius of Loyola, who states in his classic work on spirituality The Spiritual Exercises; “The first prelude (to our conversation with Jesus) consists of a certain mental re-creation of the place. It should be observed in this regard that during any meditation or contemplation…of for example Christ…we shall see with a sort of imaginary vision a physical place representing what we are contemplating…for instance a mountain with Jesus on it…and everything else related to the theme of our contemplation…”

We have the scene, we’ve put a rein on the senses, now what?
- Now we ponder the scene before us, and ask ourselves questions;
-Who is it before us that is suffering?
-Why is he suffering?
-What does his suffering mean to me?
-This is Theresa’s way of preparing for the next great step, that of conversation with Jesus, which is the fundamental element of beginning meditation.
-We now actively begin to speak to our Lord. If we have chosen the agony in the garden to meditate upon, then we may tell him we love him, or ask forgiveness for our sins that are the cause of his suffering. We can offer Him comfort, holding him in our arms, taking the place of the Angel that came to him in his anguish.
-We can wipe the bloody sweat from his face and just be with Him, as we would be for a dear friend who was in deepest need.
-We need to really be there.
-We use our imagination to picture the scene and we move and participate, if only in our minds and hearts, fully in the event before us.
-Imagine what caressing his beard and face would be like. Look into his beautiful, divine eyes and see the love that radiates for us, even amidst such deep and sorrowful suffering.
-Another example is one given by St. Theresa when speaking about the scourging at the pillar; “The mind sets to work to seek out the reasons which are to be found for the great afflictions and distress which His Majesty must have suffered when He was alone there…it is well to reflect for a time and to think of the pains which He bore there, why He bore them, who He is that bore them and with what love He suffered them”
-This immerses and occupies our senses and keeps our attention fixed on the subject matter of our meditation.
-We can approach our Lord in different ways; “Speak to Him as with a Father, a Brother, a Lord and a spouse…and sometimes in one way and sometimes in another, He will teach you what you must do to please Him”.
- Sometimes, no words are necessary, as when two lovers hold each other in their arms, no words are exchanged but each knows that the heart of the other beats for it alone.
- In the words of Theresa; “It is well to reflect for a time…but sometimes we must remain by His side with our minds hushed in silence. If we can, we should occupy ourselves in looking upon Him Who is looking at us; keep Him company; talk with Him; pray to Him; humble ourselves before Him; have our delight in Him”.
-This is all a means of approaching our Lord and finding subject matter for a loving conversation with Him, which is the heart of beginning meditation.
- Now that we’ve studied the subject matter, put ourselves into the scene, and pondered questions about what is taking place before us, we now talk with Jesus.
- For those who argue that they can’t meditate on our Lord without having seen Him physically, Theresa argues “You will ask me how you can possibly do all this, and say that, if you had seen His Majesty with your bodily eyes at the time when He lived in the world, you would have done it willingly and gazed at him forever. Do not believe it…anyone who would not make the slight effort necessary for recollection in order to gaze upon this Lord present within her, would have been far less likely to stand at the foot of the cross with the Magdalen.
- Here, we need not repeat long prayers and meditations that others have composed, but we need to speak our own words. This is what is meant by ‘praying with the heart’.
- We simply say what is on our minds, not worrying about content or form, as Theresa tells us, “With regard to the habit of conversing often with your Divine Spouse, be confident that He will suggest to your heart what to say. You are not embarrassed when you speak to His creatures, why should words fail you when you wish to speak to your God? Do not believe that will happen to you: for my part, at least, I look on that as impossible if you have acquired the habit of this interior conversation with Our Lord”
- As we mentioned above, the main thing to keep in mind during all of this process is not to think much but to love much, as Theresa points out; “He has no desire that we tire our brains by a great deal of talking, if only we can realize that we are in His presence…”
- We need to mention also that our words to God need not be audible, but from the interior, a conversation with the heart. This is what makes our material for meditation so important, we have something to focus our minds on so we can form mental images of our subject.
- If words do fail completely, and we feel restless just trying to be in the Lord’s presence, then we can turn to the traditional ‘four ends’ of prayer; adoration, thanksgiving, contrition, and petition.
- In adoration we turn to Jesus with acts of love and affection, which can lead us into thanksgiving for all he has done for us and for who he is, which might lead to contrition as we think of our ingratitude for all his gifts, which can lead us into petition for our needs and those of others.
- Here we must emphasize again that we mustn’t confine ourselves to any given method or formula, but we must let our love and prayers flow naturally from our hearts as we feel inspired.
- As St. Theresa tells us, “Do you suppose that because we cannot hear Him, He is silent? He speaks clearly to the heart when we beg Him from our heart to do so.

- It is an expression of love, not one of simply asking our Lord to supply all of our needs. We, in turn, listen to our Lord speaking to us in our hearts with His light, grace, and holy inspirations.
- We have the material for meditation, and we try to initiate a conversation.
- What if we have so many distractions that our mind still can’t focus on the subject before us? St. Theresa offers the solution of vocal prayer. She states, “I know there are many people who practice vocal prayer in the manner already described and are raised by God to the higher kind of contemplation without having had any hand in this themselves or even knowing how it has happened. For this reason, daughters, I attach great importance to your saying your vocal prayers well…”
- She goes on to describe one of her sisters who was supposedly having trouble meditating, and so resorted to repeating the Our Father over and over slowly during her prayer times.
- When Theresa examined her, she found that this sister had reached perfect contemplation through this simple method.
- The ‘Our Father’ was one of Theresa’s favorite prayers, and she goes into detail in her work The Way of Perfection giving over a dozen chapters of commentary on this prayer because she knew this was a great way to enter into contemplation when recited properly, especially since it was given to us by Jesus, the Master Himself.
- She explains, “By using these means we may learn to say the Paternoster well and not find ourselves thinking of something irrelevant. I have sometimes experienced this myself, and the best remedy I have found for it is to try to fix my mind on the Person by Whom the words were first spoken”.
- Sometimes our minds our so distracted that vocal prayer is the only remedy, but this should not discourage us, as Theresa encourages “I must tell you that while you are repeating the ‘Our Father’ or some vocal prayer, it is quite possible for the Lord to grant you perfect contemplation”.
- Another remedy for distractions that is suggested by Theresa is meditative reading which acts as a means of keeping the mind occupied with holy thoughts amidst distractions and also acts as a guide.
- She tells us “To use a book written in our own language is another very useful means of holding discourse with the Lord. While reading it, your mind will become more easily recollected and you will feel better disposed for prayer”.
- This practice was, for St. Theresa, the only remedy for distractions in her early prayer life while trying to meditate. She tells us, “During all these years, except after communicating (receiving Holy Communion), I never dared to begin to pray without a book…It seemed to me, in these early stages of which I am speaking, that provided I had books and could be alone, there was no risk of my being deprived of that great blessing.
- This practice of meditative reading has long been a practice among the monastic traditions of the Church where it is known as ‘Lectio Divina’ which is from the Latin meaning ‘Divine Reading’.
- The Catholic Encyclopedia gives this definition; “A meditative reading of Sacred Scripture leading to prayer…with a view to the enrichment of one’s spiritual life”.

- Fr. Santan Pinto, spiritual director and retreat master, provides this guidance with scripture prayer; “Don’t choose scripture passages at random and pray. Divide the entire book or letter into sections that are manageable. Choose parts which are not too long or too short, (about 15 to 18 verses) and then focus on one section at a time. Read it first at your normal pace, then a second time more slowly and attentively. As you read a third time, pick out the ideas that have and impact on you. If you are drawn to particular verses or qualities of Christ, or have insights, write them down with the verse. Number these points, and reflect on each one, slowly, drawing fruit from each before shifting to another point”.
- This way of praying with good spiritual reading is important to keep the mind full of holy thoughts not only for the period of prayer but throughout the entire day, and by so doing we learn more about the one to whom our prayer is directed.
- As Fr. Marie-Eugene points out in his book I Want To See God, “…love begins to yearn to know that which it loves”. This is what I call the ‘great circle of love’- the more we know of God the more we love Him, and the more we love Him, the more we want to know of Him, etc. This will be our greatest joy in Heaven, that the knowing more and loving more will never end.
- We must also note here that the time for meditation shouldn’t be the only time we take to be with God. We must develop an attitude of awareness that the God who dwells within is always available for dialogue throughout our entire day.
- St. Theresa points out, “We must retire within ourselves even during our ordinary occupations. If I can recall the companionship which I have within my soul for as much as a moment, that is of great benefit”.
- This prayer then permeates all that we do with the constant awareness of God present and acting in all that we do.
- For the periods of time especially set aside for prayer, it can be a valuable exercise to end with a reflection on how our time was spent, what distractions we had, and what fruits or graces we may have received. This is recommended by great spiritual masters such as St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis de Sales.
- This practice helps us to evaluate the way our prayer is going and the way Our Lord is leading us, and it can help us to plan our next meditation.
- Some like to make a ‘prayer journal’, to keep track of prayer time, it’s lights and fruits, etc.

4.The ends of meditation
- With these different methods we must keep one thing in mind…the ends of meditation.
- The ends of meditation are a deepening relationship with God, the perfection of love, and the growth of all the virtues.
- It can happen that people can become attached to a method of prayer, which provides them with a “comfort zone” in which they feel they are praying if they simply recite their daily quota of prayers.
- Although the habit of prayer is good and indeed necessary, we must not confine ourselves to any set standard for our prayer time. The time may come when God will raise us to a higher level of prayer beyond vocal and meditative prayer, that of contemplation.
- In the beginnings of meditation discussed above, we use much of our own effort in prayer. In the later stages of meditation, God himself brings us to a higher level of relationship and intimacy with himself.
- These higher states of prayer cannot be reached by our own efforts, but they can be prepared for, that’s what the early stages of prayer are for, we are preparing for God to draw us closer to himself.
The early stages are a testing ground for our perseverance, fortitude, and love on this heavenly highway. When God feels we are ready, he draws us up with his own hand.

IV. Growing in holiness
These beginning levels require the individual to put forth an effort in order that God, whose generosity is without limit, will see the love that one has for him in desiring to come closer to Him. This is ultimately what prayer, our conversation with God is – an expression of our love for Him. If we truly love someone, then we want to spend time with that person. This is the test for beginners at prayer…whether or not they are willing to take the time, effort, and sacrifice necessary to draw closer to and build a relationship with God.

End:
- The relationship we build with God here, on earth, is what we carry over into eternity. Our glory in heaven will be determined by our holiness now.
- Because our holiness is ultimately a measure of our love for God that has developed over our lifetime…