Teresa of Avila, painted by Eduardo Balaca (c. 1877). Source · Public domain
About Teresa of Avila
Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada (1515-1582) was born at Avila in Old Castile, the daughter of Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda and Beatriz de Ahumada, and entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation at Avila as a young woman. After nearly twenty years of illness and an uneven life of prayer, she experienced a deepening conversion in the mid-1550s and in 1562 founded the small, strictly enclosed convent of St. Joseph at Avila, the first house of the Discalced Carmelite reform; with St. John of the Cross she extended the reform to friars, and she founded some seventeen convents before her death at Alba de Tormes. Her other works include The Way of Perfection, The Interior Castle, The Book of the Foundations and many letters. She was canonized in 1622 and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970.
Frequently Cited
“mental prayer is nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us.”
The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus is the spiritual autobiography that the Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila wrote at the command of her confessors, so that they could judge whether the extraordinary graces she reported came from God. It follows her from childhood in Avila to the founding of the convent of St. Joseph in 1562, and in its middle chapters becomes a treatise on prayer.
.jpg){kind=link}
