Saint Teresa of Ávila

Teresa was born in Ávila, Spain in 1515, to a wealthy family of partially Jewish heritage. As a girl she was lively, popular, and ran away at age seven with her brother trying to find martyrdom (their uncle caught them). She entered a Carmelite convent at twenty. For twenty years she lived a lukewarm religious life, torn between prayer and worldly distractions. Then, at age forty, she had a profound conversion before a statue of the wounded Christ. She became a great mystic, experiencing visions, raptures, and the transverberation — an angel piercing her heart with a flaming arrow. She felt called to reform the Carmelite order, which had relaxed its original strictness. Despite opposition, ill health, and constant travel, she founded seventeen reformed convents across Spain — the Discalced (barefoot) Carmelites. Her writings are among the greatest in Christian spirituality: her Autobiography, The Way of Perfection, and The Interior Castle, which describes the soul as a crystal castle with seven mansions, each deeper than the last, with God dwelling at the center. She collaborated closely with St. John of the Cross in the reform. Teresa was practical, funny, and ferocious — she once told God during a time of trial, 'If this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder You have so few!' She died in 1582. In 1970, Pope Paul VI named her the first woman Doctor of the Church.