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Teresa Of Avila Quotes

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Teresa Of Avila Quotes

“Teresa (Saint Teresa of Avila) herself was starved for such companionship, especially when her mystical experiences of God reached a cosmic level to which no one else could relate. If is a great comfort to be understood by others who trust and believe in the personal experiences that we share with them, especially those for which there are no witnesses....When Teresa was fifty-two years old, she met John of the Cross, who was then only twenty-five. After they exchanged their experiences of God, they recognized each other as soul companions. In John, Teresa finally found someone with whom she could share the mystery of her life with God. After they met, she no longer needed to prove or defend her experiences of the soul. (Sadly, John burned all their correspondence shortly before his death.) Teresa emphasized the need for companions on the spiritual journey. No one should travel through her Castle alone, she wrote again and again. Teresa knew firsthand the difficulty of inner work required of the soul pilgrim, who was as likely to experience a dark night of the soul, to borrow a phrase from John of the Cross, as she was to experience the light and grace of liberation.”

“Before we had this true fear of God worldly people would have been poisonous to us and would have helped to ruin our souls; but now they will often help us to love God more and to praise Him for having delivered us from what we see to be a notorious danger. And whereas we for our part may previously have helped to foster their weakness, we shall now be helping to repress them, because they will restrain themselves in our presence, and this is a compliment which they will pay us without our desiring it.”