Some Christians hear God’s voice in visions and experience God’s presence through dreams. So-called mystical Christians” are people who not only think great thoughts about God, but experience God deep in the soul.
Teresa of Avila (1515-1581) was a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who has much to teach Christians today about the practice of prayer. She desired early in life to join a convent, but her father objected. If a woman in those days desired to serve God as a fulltime vocation, the only avenue available to her was to join a convent. Teresa prevailed on her father to enter a Carmelite order of nuns at age twenty. By her own admission, she was a fairly ordinary, not-so-devout nun until age thirty-nine, when she entered into a profound season of prayer.
As she matured in her spiritual life, other nuns asked her for help in learning how to pray. She wrote The Way of Perfection to introduce various ways of vocal, mental and silent praying. The book for which she is most known, The Interior Castle, is a deep dive into the spiritual journey to lead believers into ultimate union with God. While her writing is dense and sometimes hard to follow, her insights into prayer are worth the effort. She wrote of prayer, “You pay God a compliment by asking great things of him.” Her last words spoken as a prayer are memorable: “The hour I have longed for has come. It is time to meet one another.”
It would be a mistake to label her only as a contemplative. She founded fourteen monasteries in Spain to revitalize and expand the mercy mission of the church. The following prayer of hers comes from her spiritual autobiography, The Book of My Life: