Seeking God
I recently gave a talk about St Teresa of Avila in a new online series about saints (it was recorded and the video is here). She was a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun, a friend of St John of the Cross, and a powerful advocate for women and for contemplative prayer at a time when the Church was in turmoil. She wrote an autobiography describing her ecstatic visions of God, and The Interior Castle, a manual for prayer. I’ve been interested in her writing for a long time, and over Eastertide decided to read The Way of Perfection, which she wrote for the nuns in the Carmelite convent of St Joseph that she founded. In it I’ve found real hope, peace, and insight about the love of God and the importance of being patient and still even in very difficult times.
A couple of days ago, the psychologist Sylvia Gosnell wrote an article that really seemed to resonate with the links between the sixteenth-century saint’s approach to life and our own circumstances in lockdown. She says,
‘It is difficult not to notice that, whether by prudence or government mandate, these times lead us inside: into our interior spaces — physical, emotional, spiritual. As our physical movement in the exterior world is curtailed, we can sit more — and more deeply — with ourselves and with our closest relations. For many of us, habituated as we are to the incessant doing that our culture demands, it is an anxiety-ridden proposition. A cloistered nun noted recently that “People say that they want peace and quiet. Then, when it is thrown in their lap, they panic.” As a result, we sometimes flock online as a compulsive escape from the fear of simply being— of being inside and being with those with whom we share a dwelling place.
Yet at times we also go online out of our deep hunger to go deeper into the life of the One in whom we live and move and have our being… the One who is love and, being love, is always seeking “the other.” Seeking us. We yearn to respond, to bridge the spatial divide and be in closer relationship with God and with our worshipping communities…’
St Teresa of Avila wrote beautiful poetry, and it’s worth putting this poem in conversation with Gosnell’s insights about longing to be with God, and longing to be with each other too. This poem is called ‘Seeking God’:
Soul, you must seek yourself in Me
And in yourself seek Me.
With such skill, soul,
Love could portray you in Me
That a painter well gifted
Could never show
So finely that image.
For love you were fashioned
Deep within me
Painted so beautiful, so fair;
If, my beloved, I should lose you,
Soul, in yourself seek Me.
Well I know that you will discover
Yourself portrayed in my heart
So lifelike drawn
It will be a delight to behold
Yourself so well painted.
And should by chance you do not know
Where to find Me,
Do not go here and there;
But if you wish to find Me,
In yourself seek Me.
Soul, since you are My room,
My house and dwelling,
If at any time,
Through your distracted ways
I find the door tightly closed,
Outside yourself seek Me not,
To find Me it will be
Enough only to call Me,
Then quickly will I come,
And in yourself seek Me.