“Never give authority to anything other than Love – to say who you are.”
Scripture tells us that we were created in the image and likeness of the Creator (Gen 1:26) and that our existence is in God, and God in us (Jn 17:21-23). As children of the Beloved, we inherit a participation in God’s divine life (2 Peter 1:4).
So, where is our center of “image and likeness,” and how do we partake??
From the center of the soul, Teresa teaches, God is calling. The driving force of our existence is our longing to find our way home to him. This quest involves passage through the seven essential chambers of the interior castle (her metaphor of the soul). Our doorway to the castle is contemplative prayer which is prayer of “receptivity in the unknowing.”
Below, you will traverse simple illustrations as well as short excerpts taken directly from The Interior Castle originally written in Teresa’s native Spanish and translated to English by Mirabai Starr.
Mansions 1, 2, and 3
Entry into the castle is guarded by a host of venomous creatures (the ego self) whose mission is to thwart the soul’s journey to union with the Beloved by distracting with all kinds of insidious worldly temptations. Many choose not to enter. They do not hear God.
Even once the soul succeeds in entering the castle, she can be sure that various nasty reptiles (ie. our brokenness, shame, idolatry, the ego self) will sneak in behind her, persisting in their efforts to lead the soul astray. The soul’s only hope is to cultivate a discipline of humility and self-knowledge.
If the soul can quit trying to figure God out with the mind and concentrate on feeling in the heart, … a surrender of personal will to the will of the Beloved, one can progress to the fourth dwelling.
4th Mansion
What a wondrous abode this is! The fourth dwelling is the balance point between the first three dwellings, where the soul evolves through one’s own conscious effort, and the final three dwellings where God takes over. It is the place where the natural and supernatural commingle. The senses and the intellect are recollected, stilled, and fall to the background. The ego no longer has authority or final say in defining our “true-self,” which is our God given identity.
5th Mansion
In the fifth dwelling, the soul becomes engaged to marry God. What joy! The soul experiences this promise of infused contemplation. When the soul emerges from this state it is led without a shred of doubt that one’s soul is in God and God is in one’s soul.
Teresa employs the metaphor of a silkworm that miraculously spins itself a house of the most exquisite material and then climbs in it to die. The house, Teresa explains, is Christ, and the worm is the soul before she has been transformed by union with the Beloved into a beautiful white butterfly. Only by dying to our small separate selves can we be set free to fly home to God. Everything in God is God which calls us to conform through love.
6th Mansion
In the sixth dwelling, the soul and God get to know one another better. As they spend more time alone together, they fall more deeply in love. The soul in the sixth dwelling experiences this love as a searing wound. Sometimes the pain is expressed as unbearable longing; other times it manifests in the form of terrible afflictions. Sometimes the torment comes through malicious gossip and misunderstanding from people the soul felt closest to; the kind of betrayal, says Teresa, “takes the biggest bite out of her.”
Still, much of the soul’s suffering in this place is infused with an ineffable happiness. Healing comes in the 7th mansion.
7th Mansion
The soul has arrived at the innermost chamber where the Beloved dwells. Full union is complete. The separate self is annihilated. Like rain falling into an infinite sea, all boundaries between the soul and God melt. There is only love.
Still, says Teresa, until the beatific vision given after death, the soul must eventually recover its individuality even from this ultimate melding and return to the ordinary world, but forever changed. The soul has dissolved into God reemerging with a vibrant wakefulness.
Teresa conceives of this experience as a living realization of the three divine Persons. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit reveal themselves simultaneously to the soul in this moment. “Through a wondrous kind of knowledge,” Teresa writes “the soul apprehends the truth that all three divine Persons are one substance and one power and one knowing and one God alone.”
It is where we exist and have our being.
ps. I may follow with another blog with more personal wanderings through St. Teresa’s writings of the contemplative journey. Although, there can be no substitute to your own reading of her autobiography, writings, and self experiential journey. The two books I have used are listed in the recommendation section. Also check out www.cac.org. The 8wk guided study is offered several throughout the year. It was a fruitful and timely experience.
“Our soul is God given and worth all that God is worth.”
In this moment, you are “fully” blessed and beloved in the presence of the Beloved. The world cannot change that divine truth. But know …that it will try. Refuse it.
The main featured image, “Love and Marriage,” is a bit whimsical but not without a relevant thread to this blog’s content. I will leave it at that.
