As we journey through our own spiritual lives, we often find ourselves seeking guides, companions who have walked the treacherous and glorious paths of the interior life before us. We look for figures whose struggles mirror our own and whose triumphs ignite our hope. In the great cloud of witnesses, one such figure stands with particular brilliance and fortitude: St Teresa of Ávila, a Carmelite, a Doctor of the Church and, above all, a woman of profound and audacious courage. Teresa’s courage is the virtue of a woman who allowed God to work through her weaknesses and her strengths. It is a courage we are invited to share.
We often think of courage as dramatic action – the bold gesture, the heroic moment. But Teresa teaches us something more profound and more challenging: the courage of persistent beginning. How many of us recognise ourselves in her famous confession that for nearly twenty years she struggled with prayer, abandoning it and returning to it, caught between the call of God and the pull of worldly comfort? “I was more occupied in wishing my hour of prayer were over and in listening whenever the clock struck, than in thinking of things that were good,” she confessed in her autobiography. Here we find courage of a different order. Teresa shows us that holiness is not about never falling but about rising again and again. We live in an age that seeks for instant transformation and immediate results, yet the Carmelite way invites us into a longer, more patient journey. When we stumble in our prayer life, when we find ourselves distracted and distant from God, Teresa stands beside us as one who knows this territory intimately. Her courage was not in being perfect but in being persistent – in choosing day after day to return to the interior castle of her soul even when the journey seemed fruitless. She urged us never to abandon prayer, no matter the trials. “We must have a determined determination to never give up prayer,” she insisted. In our moments of fatigue or distraction, Teresa reminds us that each act of turning toward God, however feeble, is itself a victory of grace.
Teresa’s courage was not only for her own soul. It spilled over into the world in work that defied the conventions of her time when women had almost no authority in the Church; in fact, the very idea of female leadership was suspect. Teresa heard God calling her to reform the Carmelite Order and return it to its ancient simplicity and rigour. Imagine the courage it took for a woman in XVI-century Spain, without wealth or power, travelling the rugged roads of Spain in a bumpy cart, facing sickness, opposition from ecclesiastical authorities and even the mockery of her peers, all to establish small houses dedicated to poverty, prayer and enclosure. She persevered, founding 17 convents for women, and with St John of the Cross, laying the groundwork for the reform of the male branch of the Order. She could not stand by and tend her own garden while souls were being lost. She needed to build oases of prayer, new spiritual foundations from within the walls of Ávila and beyond, where the radical love of God could be the sole priority. Teresa dared to imagine something that seemed impossible to nearly everyone around her. Her courage was rooted not in self-assertion but in radical obedience to what she discerned as God’s will for her life.
A final aspect of Teresa’s courage that it will be well for us to reflect on is her joy. Despite chronic illness, despite opposition and misunderstanding, despite the genuine hardships of founding monasteries across Spain, Teresa maintained what can only be called a holy playfulness. She had a great sense of humour, once exclaiming, “From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us!” And who can forget the spontaneous prayer that emerged from her lips when she fell into the mud while travelling in terrible weather: “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends… it’s no wonder you have so few of them!”? How real was her friendship with the Lord! Teresa’s joy is itself a form of courage – the refusal to allow difficulty to harden us, the choice to trust that God’s love is more fundamental than any suffering we encounter. We can just imagine her – passionate in her love for God but never grim. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.” (Phil 4:4)
Teresa shows us that courage is not the absence of fear or doubt but the choice to move forward anyway, grounded in love. She reminds us that we are all called to be reformers – not necessarily of institutions but certainly of our own hearts, creating spaces where God can dwell more fully. “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you,” she wrote in words that have comforted countless souls. “All things are passing away; God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.” In these words, we find both challenge and comfort, both the call to courage and the assurance that we do not walk alone. May we, like Teresa, have the courage to begin again each day, to trust our deepest callings, to enter into genuine prayer and to embrace the joy as God’s beloved children.
For a deeper reflection on the life of St Teresa, pick up Maria R G Casas’ book “Teresa of Jesus: Woman, Prophet, Mystic”.