Chapter 7: St Teresa of Avila
7.5: Effects of her teaching on union with God
7.5.3: Effect on the contemplative life
women, who could not afford such luxuries, often slept in common dormitories with not even enough to eat. Even their robes were different depending on the social class they came from, being indicated by the number of pleats, colours and buckles. The women were required to recite the Office, but were not expected to live an enclosed life, and entertained at their leisure.
Kavanaugh and Rodriegez write that:
From the prior general Rubeo‟s visit to the Incarnation in 1567, we learn that there were one hundred forty-four nuns with the black veil (in solemn profession), that there was only enough food to feed the community for a third of the year, that the monastery was in debt, that the maximum number of nuns sustainable would be sixty, and that the unfinished church was about ready to collapse. Forced by hunger, the nuns had to go out for help to friends and relatives and get permission to keep their own money (Kavanaugh and Rodriegez 1985; 19).
We must remember that the one hundred and forty four nuns professed and living in the community did not include the servants, slaves or relatives, and so the number was in fact far higher. It is out of this context that socialising, particularly with rich benefactors became a tool for survival for these women and an increasing feature of life at the Incarnation.
But the atmosphere was not conducive to silence or to prayer. Luti notes that often such communities had become extensions of noble life rather than communities in search of God. She comments: “monasteries were endowed by members of the local nobility to ensure perpetual prayers for their souls, provide placement for unmarried or widowed clan members, and show off the family‟s resources and generosity, thereby enhancing dynastic prestige and linking monastic institutions and the nobility in a symbiotic relationship of privilege and mutual obligation” (Luti 1991; 50). This was often the reality of the state of religious communities.
It is in this context that Teresa began to teach and create a community of equals, where poverty would be the common value. It was in such an environment she believed sisterly love would flourish, with small communities of women who were bound together through their love for God, and their renunciation of the world. Teresa‟s desire was to return to the original practises of her order. She began to reintroduced fasting, perpetual abstinence from red meat, and the wearing of a coarse habit. Vows of seclusion, enclosure and silence were taken by all the women. The houses were founded in poverty, living on alms and whatever could be earned from the nuns own handicrafts such as spinning and weaving. The term „discalced‟
referred to the fact that the nuns wore rope-soled sandals. Although the conditions were austere, the spirit within her communities was full of life.
There was music, song, dance, poetry and story telling, even in church.
Recreation and play were important elements in Teresa‟s spirituality. These were the qualities Teresa both embodied herself and tried to cultivate in her orders. She loved her sisters to be daring in their love for God, to be willing to take risks and not to afraid of anyone.
This establishment of communities in poverty challenged to contemporary religious and economic practices of the time. In speaking of her first foundation, Luti writes:
If it were founded with no endowment or other certain income as Teresa insisted it should, this new religious house would break the hallowed link of lineage by eliminating the need for noble patronage.
Moreover, women admitted to the house would really want to be nuns;
unmarriageable noble girls would find no haven in St Joseph‟s. An upper-class woman who felt a true attraction to austere religious life would be required to live poorly and strictly enclosed, severing economic and affective ties with her kin, turning her back on the code
by which they lived (Luti 1991; 50).
She goes on to say that it is not surprising, therefore, that the most vocal opponents of her reforms were the ones with the most to lose if the system, on which they had always relied for spiritual and prestigious dominance, was now to be challenged by Teresa. Resentment grew both within the order and without and yet Teresa remained adamant, writing in the Way of Perfection
“It looks very bad, my daughters, if large houses are built with money from the poor. May God not allow it. The houses must be poor and small in every way. Let us in some manner resemble our King, who had no house but the stable in Bethlehem where He was born and the cross where He died” (Way of Perfection 2.9).
Added to the stress on poverty was the flouting of racial purity laws. Teresa refused to allow the adoption of any “pure blood” regulations into her communities, and was very critical of the arrogance underlying such beliefs.
This must be partly due to the fact that she herself was a converso. But Teresa‟s primary allegiance lay not to her lineage and family history, but to the family of the church. And the church followed Jesus, who himself came from a family of low caste, who owned nothing, and had no place to lay his head.
Teresa did not restrict herself to reform within the female orders, but she was also greatly concerned about the state of the male communities within her order, which were not only decreasing in numbers but also needed great reform. She feared that as her foundations grew, her sisters would have no Carmelite friars to take care of their spiritual needs. She persuaded the Father General of the Carmelite order to allow her to begin convents of friars who would, like the women, return to the original rule.