You Can’t Judge a Saint by Her Shoes

John 14: 1-14

 

In September of 2000 I had the privilege to travel to Spain.  I went there to study the life and work of St. Teresa of Avila.  Teresa was born in 1515 in a small town about two hours northwest of Madrid.  Avila is a walled medieval city with a rich spiritual heritage.  Muslims, Jews and Christians have lived together in the city and some of the most outstanding lines of Hebrew, Muslim, and Christian mystical poetry have been written there.  Teresa of Avila was one of those mystics.

 

I was particularly struck by the statue of Teresa that guards the central entrance to the gates of the city of Avila.  The statue shows Teresa in a moment of ecstatic encounter with the Holy Spirit as she receives inspiration for one of the many books and poems she wrote on prayer and the life of Jesus.  Her head is turned heavenward and one of her palms upward as she writes with a quill pen.  I was amazed at how large her hands were—oversized, it seemed, to hold and write all that she received.

 

My class of 30 students stayed in the convent connected to the church built on the birthplace and family home of Teresa.  We actually made the Avila newspaper while I was there.  The city was all abuzz with us.  They just couldn’t understand why 30 Protestants would come all the way to Spain to study about Teresa!  I hope after sharing a little about her life and work you will know why.

 

At an early age Teresa joined the order of nuns known as the Carmelites.  She became troubled by the classism and lack of prayer and devotion in her order.  Many of the nuns were from wealthy families and brought their servants and cooks with them to the convent.  Even though they were to be cloistered—separated and set aside from the world in order to be devoted to God—the nuns would receive visitors all day long.  It became a fashionable thing in Avila to go and visit the nuns.

 

Listen to what Teresa says about it in her autobiography:

A convent of unenclosed nuns seems to me a place of very great peril, and more like a road to hell for those bent on wickedness than a remedy for their weaknesses.  These houses make me particularly sad.  Where the standards and amusements of the world are followed and a nun’s obligations are so imperfectly understood, the Lord must call not once but many times on each of them individually, if they are to be saved.  These poor girls do harm not only to themselves but to everyone else, and often they are not to blame, since they merely follow the ways they are shown.  Many of them are to be pitied, wishing to withdraw from the world, and thinking that they are going to serve the Lord and avoid the perils of the flesh, they find themselves in a place ten times as bad, without knowing what to do, or how to help themselves.

 

Teresa succumbs to some of these same habits (no pun intended), and one day, during a visit with a friend, she has a vision of the crucified Christ chained to a column in the parlor.  This vision compels her to reform the Carmelite order.

 

Teresa calls her reformed order, the Discalced Carmelites, or ‘unshod’ Carmelites.  You see, in the old order the sisters would judge one another by the shoes they wore.  Your shoes indicated your class—not that any of us would know anything about that!

 

Teresa required all her sisters to wear the same shoes—sandals.  During her lifetime she founded 17 Discalced Convents in Spain, and worked with St. John of the Cross to found Discalced Orders for men.  To this day, the sisters still wear sandals.

 

Not only was Teresa a great reformer and foundress, she was also a person of deep prayer.  Her experiences of prayer were so profound that her superiors requested that she write them down as a guide for others.  Teresa’s most well-known book on prayers is called The Interior Castle, written in 1577.  In it she describes our soul as a dwelling place of God.  Our soul is like a castle with many rooms and God is at the center most interior room.

 

She says,

Well, let us consider that this castle has, as I said, many dwelling places:  some up above, others down below, others to the sides; and in the center and middle is the main dwelling place where the very secret exchanges between God and the soul take place. How can we enter this beautiful and delightful castle?  It seems I’m saying something foolish.  For if this castle is the soul, clearly one doesn’t have to enter it since it is within oneself.  How foolish it would seem were we to tell someone to enter a room they are already in.  But you must understand that there is a great difference in the ways one may be inside the castle.  For there are many souls who are in the outer courtyard—which is where the guards stay—and don’t care at all about entering the castle, nor do they know what lies within that most precious place, nor who is within, nor how many rooms it has.  Insofar as I can understand, the gate of entry to this castle is prayer and reflection.

 

Teresa’s words sound a lot like our gospel lesson for today:  “In God’s house are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am there you may be also.  And you know the way to the place where I am going.  Thomas said, ‘this is foolish, how can we know the way?’  Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’”

 

Traditionally this passage from John’s gospel has been interpreted as something Jesus said about heaven, but this passage is really about the mutual indwelling of God and Jesus.  Throughout John’s gospel Jesus is always reminding the disciples that he and God are one.  In the very next chapter Jesus will use the image of the vine and the branches to talk about the way God dwells in him and the way the disciples should dwell in Jesus.

 

The Greek noun translated in this passage as “dwelling place” is derived from the verb, “to remain” or “to dwell” and is used in John’s gospel to talk about the mutuality and reciprocity of the relationship of God and Jesus.  The word’s use here in this passage points to the inclusion of others in this relationship—this house.

 

Within each of us is a dwelling place—if it were not so, would Jesus and Teresa have told us that it is prepared for us?  Because of who and what Jesus has done we have the ability to dwell in God in the same way Jesus does.  This is what Jesus means when he says he is the way, the truth and the life.  When he makes this statement he is not putting down other religions or making a statement about who does or does not get to heaven.  And quite frankly it saddens and frustrates me that we have reduced the mystery and wonder of this passage to those kinds of arguments.

 

Jesus is telling us about our interior castle.  He is telling us that we have the ability to dwell in God, have union with God, in this lifetime, in the same way that he had union with God in his lifetime.

 

Teresa understood this in a powerful way and tried her best to describe how to arrive at that most interior room of one’s soul.  Imagine how different we would be, the world would be, if we dwelled in God in the same way Jesus did.  Some of us don’t have to imagine because we have experienced what Jesus and Teresa were talking about.

 

The course I took in Spain was called “Walking in the Footsteps of St. Teresa.”  This is what I learned from walking in Teresa’s shoes.  We are all called to a life of deep prayer and union with God.  This kind of life is not reserved for monks and nuns and saints.  Certainly there are those of us in the church who are gifted in different ways and all of us are at different places on our spiritual journeys.  But we short change God and ourselves when we say things like, “Oh I could never pray like that.”  “That kind of spirituality is too feminine.” 

 

Some of you might be thinking to yourselves, “Well that’s fine for her to say, but how do you cultivate a life of deep prayer?”  I think Nike had the answer—JUST DO IT.  If you wait to stumble on some fool proof formula, or take some class that instantly reveals deep prayer to you, then you are going to be like Thomas in the gospel lesson.  Jesus tells him, “I am the way.”  And that’s our answer.  Spend regular, consistent time in prayer, asking Jesus to show you the way.

 

The other thing I learned from Teresa is that the interior life eventually leads us outward.  Over the years people have criticized this kind of spirituality saying that it leads to navel gazing or a removal from the real world and its problems.  That has not been my experience.

 

A world without prayer has no center to it.  That is why monasteries and convents exist.  The spiritual principle of a deep prayer life is that ultimately we will be flung out into the world from that center.  It’s the same centrifugal force that was at work in Jesus’ life.  He and God were one, and because of that he had great compassion for the suffering of the world.

 

Our acts of compassion go hand in hand with our deep relationship with the one who is all compassion—Jesus the way, the truth and the life.  Indwelling with Jesus is the only way the soil of our faith will richen and deepen.

 

Walking in Teresa’s shoes also made me realize that a life of deep prayer doesn’t have to make us boring.  Teresa was known for her wit and her love of music and poetry.  She required that singing and poetry be added to the daily routine of the Carmelite Order.  She was even known to dance on the tables of the refectory with castanets!

 

One of her most famous poems was found scribbled on a bookmark in her prayer book.  It has been set to the music of Taize and I taught it to my classmates in Avila.

Nothing can trouble.  Nothing can frighten.

 

Those who seek God shall never go wanting.

Nothing can trouble.  Nothing can frighten.

God alone fills us.

 

May it be our prayer as we seek to dwell in God.