Yesterday, the Christian Calendar celebrated the life of St. Teresa of Avila, one of the greatest of the Christian mystics. This statue is the famous one by Bernini, the Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Teresa had a vision of angel repeatedly piercing her heart with a spear. Each time the spear pierced her heart, she became aflame, she said, with gretaer love for God, wanting God alone. Bernini clearly emphasizes the sexual nature of this experience--check out Teresa's open mouth and groaning posture. Whiel a Freudian read might say the spiritual is reduced to the sexual, the statue is appropriate as Teresa used erotic imagery herself in relation to the spiritual path. She developed a highly complex metaphor of spiritual bethrothal--i.e marrying Christ, which she claimed herself to have undergone. The spiritual life in a sense begins with flirtation--a sense of The Divine coming close and then going away, getting 'interested' in God. Then there might be dating ('going steady' in one's daily discipline of prayer, meditaiton). Then Teresa refers to a period of bethrothal ('engagement' at a deep level with The Divine), finally leading to what she calls the Spiritual Marriage ('union'), leading to the soul being taken to the bedhcamber and entering into ecstasy. Seriously, she wrote all that in the 16th century! For anyone interested for more information on this one, check out this article.
While on the one hand, Teresa is known for her ecstastic devotional mysticism, she also spoke of a deep inner silence and unmovedness as a core spiritual reality. This poem of hers speaks to that reality:
Let nothing upset you,
let nothing startle you.
All things pass;
God does not change.
Patience wins
all it seeks.
Whoever has God
lacks nothing:
God alone is enough
All things pass. That reference reminded me of two musical numbers which refer (directly or indirectly) to that passage.
First up George Harrison with All Things Must Pass (form the album of the same name):
And then OK Go, with This Too Shall Pass (the history of that statement, very close to Teresa's here). This one has the ecstastic sense of a Teresa (I love the kids running around at the end of it):
