Most of what I know about the phenomenology of God speaking to us, I learned from studying and putting into practice what Teresa says in the Sixth Dwelling Places, Chapter Three. I learned from it what it means to live in communication with God to him, not just speaking, but listening and acting. This book, and others such as The Way of the Pilgrim, helped me to understand what it is to live a life of prayer.

And so she does, but prayer understood precisely as a way of living, not as an occasional exercise. Teresa’s superiors had ordered her to write on prayer. The “rooms” in the interior castle are ways of living in relation to the God who made us and seeks us. We may be far from God’s will, but we must know “that it is possible in this exile for so great a God to commune with such foul-smelling worms and, on seeing this, come to love a goodness so perfect and a mercy so immeasurable.”

Teresa makes clear what lies half-concealed upon the pages of the Bible and in the lives of the “great ones” for Christ-that I am an unceasing spiritual being, with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. Teresa urges us to start on the path to transformation by “considering our soul to be like a castle made entirely out of a diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms.” We are meant to occupy every room or “dwelling place” with God, and thereby to become the radiant beings which he intends. That emphasis in turn inclines us toward thinking of ourselves as nothing, and to mistake our lostness and vileness for nothingness, a mere vacuum, rather than seeing it as the desolation of a splendid ruin. Emphasis upon the wickedness and neediness of the human being tends to submerge our awareness of our greatness and our worth to God. The first thing that Teresa helped me with was appreciation of the dignity and value-indeed, the vast reality-of the human soul. I think it very likely that you will experience the same refreshing shock as I did when you read this book. The book provided instruction on a living relationship with God that I had found nowhere else. I had found many helpful companions on The Way, spread across time and space and “denominational distinctives.” But this book and this author immediately announced themselves as a unique presence of God in my life. I first studied Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle twenty or so years ago, after many years of efforts to understand, live, and communicate what the spiritual life portrayed in the Bible was meant to be.

St teresa of avila castle interior