October 15

Saint Teresa of Ávila

Memorial · Remembered by Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans

Restless Carmelite reformer who taught ordinary Christians how to pray

Teresa de Ahumada was born in Ávila, Spain, in 1515, into a large family. At twenty she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in her hometown. For years she struggled with serious illness and with a prayer life she later described as half-hearted. Then, around forty, an image of the wounded Christ moved her deeply and turned her life around.

In 1562 she founded St Joseph’s, a small, poor convent in Ávila where nuns could live a simpler, stricter life of prayer. Many opposed her, and church authorities examined her writings. Still, travelling Spain’s rough roads in covered carts, she founded more than a dozen convents. With John of the Cross, she helped begin a similar reform among the friars. She died at Alba de Tormes in 1582.

Christians still read her books, such as her Life and The Interior Castle, as frank and often funny guides to prayer as friendship with God. In 1970 she became the first woman named a Doctor of the Church.

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a fount of water springing up to eternal life.”

John 4:13–14 · BSB

A prayer

Faithful God, you drew Teresa from a divided heart into a deep friendship with you, and gave her courage to begin again and to build communities of prayer. Teach us to speak with you honestly, to keep going when the road is hard, and to find in you the living water our hearts long for. Amen.