Susan Muto, PhD
Dr. Susan Muto, executive director of the Epiphany Association and a native of Pittsburgh, is a renowned speaker, author, teacher, and Dean of the Epiphany Academy of Formative Spirituality. A single lay woman living her vocation in the world and doing full-time, church-related ministry in the Epiphany Association, she has led conferences, seminars, workshops, and institutes throughout the world. She is a frequent contributor to scholarly and popular journals and is the author and coauthor of over thirty books. Carmelite Digest is honored to present Dr. Muto’s latest work, Where Lovers Meet: Inside the Interior Castle.
The edifice St. Teresa of Avila named The Interior Castle offers us a masterful description of divine-human intimacy. She was a relatively uneducated Spanish woman, a graduate of no theological school, who became a mystic, a religious reformer, a renowned spiritual writer, and a Doctor of the Church. Her spirit permeates the reformed Carmelite movement from the moment it began to the present day. In her convents, the nuns still speak of her as if she were in the same room. And so she is. For Madre Teresa lives in the hearts of men and women who sense in her life and works a personal invitation to consecrate their whole being, body, mind and spirit, heart and will, memory, imagination, and anticipation to the Beloved. No halfway measure will do. For this great-souled lover, “God alone suffices.” St. Teresa’s personality, like her spirituality, is refreshingly human. She prayed as diligently as she worked, with efficiency and steadfast determination. She was not afraid to express the full range of her feelings. She immersed herself in the physical and emotional trials life demanded of her while placing every person she encountered, every trauma she underwent, and everything she owned in God’s hands. Owning nothing, she ended up having all. What her heart longed for was neither bodily comfort nor reaping rewards for the tremendous work she had done. Her only aspiration was surrender to God. The source of her spirituality and of the timeless lessons she exemplifies is intimacy with the Trinity. Her daily effort to trust in his Majesty more than in her own miserable attempts brought Teresa from the depths of self doubts to the heights of confidence in Christ. Experience assured her that nothing is impossible for God. In every plan, she looked for his purpose alone. She was not bewitched by her own skills or expectations. Her esteem of Spanish honor had to give way to humility. She realized that she even had to test the infused graces of contemplative prayer by the fruits of charity that flowed from them.
Her story begins in the wilderness near Mount Carmel in the Holy Land. A small group of devout pilgrims, mostly former crusaders from Europe, searched for a solitary place of prayer where they could share the ideals that drew them together. In utter simplicity, they organized themselves into a community, each one abiding alone in a cave or hut, spending their time in prayer or manual labor, leaving their solitude only to join with the others for the celebration of the Eucharist. Around 1209, they asked their bishop, Albert of Jerusalem, to draw up an official code of life based on their practice of the spiritual disciplines in the desert. This code would guide them and all who came after them. Bishop Albert composed what came to be known as the Primitive Rule of Carmel, a document of twenty-four paragraphs, unpolished yet profoundly edifying. It set forth the path to God for a heart already possessed by him. One is to ponder God’s law day and night, obeying his commands while engaging in prayer without ceasing. Even when daily duty compels one’s attention, one’s heart should remain at one with God alone. These hermits of Mount Carmel erected an oratory dedicated to Our Lady. From then until now, Carmel has been known as Our Lady’s Order. Brothers began migrating to Europe around 1239, and, over the next three hundred years, Carmel grew and spread throughout the continent, passing through the manifold ups and downs that mark any religious life in turbulent times. By the sixteenth century, numerous men and women were living in community in accordance with the Rule of St. Albert, though by this time it had witnessed many changes and mitigations.
As the sixteenth century dawned upon Europe, the Christian world was faced with internal crises of dogma and discipline unprecedented in their extent and gravity. The Protestant Reformation was a fact, and by 1545, the Council of Trent had been convoked. It launched the Counter-Reformation, which lasted for many years. Providentially, amid the social, economic, and political upheavals unleashed by these events, consciousness of the necessity of spiritual transformation struggled for life. St. Teresa found herself unwittingly at the heart of this movement of Christian awakening.
She was born in Avila, Spain, during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Her grandfather, a merchant from Toledo in Spain, was a Christianized Jew who had to move to Avila due to religious pressures. Teresa’s father, Don Alonso Sanchez de Cepeda was fourteen when the family arrived there. Alonso married in 1505; but after two years, his wife died leaving him with two children. Four years later he married again, this time to Doña Beatriz de Ahumada, who gave birth on March 28, 1515, to a daughter and future saint named after her grandmother. Teresa’s mother died at the age of thirty-three leaving behind her nine other children.
Teresa, a girl of medium height, tended to be more plump than thin. Her face was round, her forehead broad, her eyes black, lively, and finely placed under thick, dark brows. Her nose was small, her mouth medium in size and delicately shaped, her chin well proportioned, and her white teeth equal in size and sparkling. She had three tiny moles, considered a mark of beauty in those days. Her hair was shining black and curled. In many ways she was an extrovert, cheerful and friendly, a bright conversationalist, bubbling with life.
Only a little girl of seven, she set off with her brother, Rodrigo, for the land of the Moors to have her head cut off for Christ. Fortunately this plan never materialized. With the same undaunted spirit, she played “hermit” with the other children, praying, begging alms, and doing penances. For some reason, the piety of youth gave way to a different spirit during her adolescence. She absorbed romantic tales of chivalry, cultivated her feminine charms, planned possibly to marry, but soon felt an attraction to the religious life. After her mother’s death when she was twelve years old, she continued to court affection from her cousins, the sons of her aunt, and began a friendship with a frivolous relative. Later she looked back on this period with distaste having found from experience that one act of humility is worth more than all the knowledge and honor offered by the world. To free his daughter from such vain company and the enticements it offered, Don Alonso found a good reason to do so in 1531 when his oldest daughter married. At the age of sixteen, Teresa was entrusted to the care of the Augustinian nuns of Our Lady of Grace in Avila.
Since there was no public education system in Spain at the time, Teresa probably learned how to read and write at home. Her education in the boarding school did little more than prepare the girls for their future life in marriage, teaching them the usual household skills of cooking, sewing, and the like, complemented by some basic religious instruction. Happily for Teresa, one of her teachers was a woman of deep prayer, who meant more to the young saint than all her former friends. This nun, Doña Maria, loved to talk about God. Her high ideals made Teresa think more seriously about her vocation. The strain of this inner struggle took its toll. She experienced what would be one of many setbacks to her health. She left school to recuperate at her sister’s house. When she felt well enough to return home, she stopped along the way to visit her uncle, Don Pedro, who introduced her to some of the spiritual books he relished. One of them helped her to overcome the dilemma of what to do with her life. Through reading The Letters of Saint Jerome, she finally arrived at a definite decision. She had to follow her call and enter the convent.
Unable to bear the thought of separation from his beloved daughter, her father refused to give his consent to her becoming a nun. Finally, on November 2, 1535, at the age of twenty, Teresa slipped away from her father’s house to give herself to God as a nun in the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation in Avila. Later, in telling the story of her life, she relates that when she left her father’s house, she felt the separation so keenly that she thought she would die. It seemed to her that every bone in her body was torn asunder. A part of her was gone forever, so great was this detachment.
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