靈魂的心堡-林順明神父主講
Prayer of St. Teresa
We want to learn from the experiences of St Teresa, to understand ourselves so as to know God. St Teresa herself says that spiritual guide should be learned and has experience, so that they will not lead those whom they direct astray. The quest has not ceased and will never cease, as long as there are honest souls who look deep within them and see that their desire is for something beyond themselves. They cannot be satisfied with whatever that the world as it is offers.
Let us start by taking a closer look at the prayer that was composed for the Centenary of St Teresa. It is a composite summary of her four major written works.
Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus! You who put yourself totally at the service of love: Teach us to walk along the path of interior prayer with determination and fidelity with our intention focused on our Lord, one God in a Trinity of Persons who is always present in the most intimate part of our being.
The first part summarized the essential mentality one should adopt when starting to pray. We start praying in love and prayer is an interior movement, not an intellectual exercise. This interior movement will bring us to the communion of the three divine Persons present by grace within the castle of the soul. To succeed in this journey, perseverance is a must. It is a summary of the Interior Castle.
Strengthen in us the foundation of true humility, of a renewed detachment, of fraternal and unconditional love, in the school of Mary, our Mother.
Next comes the famous triad of detachment, humility and love that St Teresa proposed to her sisters in the ‘Way of Perfection’ as the basic virtues that they need to practise as they seek for perfection in the Lord. St Teresa hopes that her Carmels become ‘dovecots of the Virgin’, privileged places that have the Virgin as the preferred example of their consecrated way of life.
Share with us your ardent and apostolic love for the Church, that Jesus will become our joy, our hope, our life-force, an inexhaustible source of deepest intimacy.
Professing to be ‘a daughter of the Church’ on her deathbed, the ‘Book of the Foundations’ gave ample proof to her apostolic zeal and love for our Lord and his Mother. Taking her strength from God in prayer, she untiringly worked for the establishment of monasteries of nuns and founds the friars to give the world the much needed light of Christ. We, her spiritual sons and daughters, continue her work and seek to communicate her zeal for souls today.
Bless our great Carmelite family; teach us to pray with you with all our hearts: ‘I am yours, Lord, I was born for you. What do you want of me？’ Amen.
Finally, St Teresa found her place in the Carmelite family, searching long and hard of what the Lord wants of her throughout her religious life. She wrote ‘The Book of Her Life’ at the command of her confessor in order to give thanks and glory to the Lord who has done great things for her, his lowly handmaid, dedicating herself totally to him, realizing that she was made for him alone.
Let us look at ourselves: We are a mystery to ourselves: we are unable to change our habits once it is fixed; we seem not to be able to know what really fuels our desires. ‘What do you want of me？’: St Teresa posed this question to the Lord when she looked at her life and tried to make sense of it. Many of us are asking the same questions in different ways and at different times of our lives. She did not make much headway without referencing her search to the Creator: ‘I am yours, Lord, I was born for you.’
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