A poignant and powerful spiritual memoir about how the lives of the saints changed the life of a modern woman.
In My Sisters the Saints, author Colleen Carroll Campbell blends her personal narrative of spiritual seeking, trials, stumbles, and breakthroughs with the stories of six women saints who profoundly changed her life: Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Faustina of Poland, Edith Stein of Germany, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Mary of Nazareth. Drawing upon the rich writings and examples of these extraordinary women, the author reveals Christianity's liberating power for women and the relevance of the saints to the lives of contemporary Christians.
My Sisters the Saints: A Spiritual Memoir - chapter 1
COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL
A poignant and powerful spiritual memoir about how the lives of the saints
changed the life of a modern woman.
Party Girl
I still remember the sundress I was wearing that morning; it was black,
scoop-necked, and short. Its thin fabric hung loosely on my frame, thanks to
punishing daily workouts and a scrupulously fat-free diet, but I felt
uncomfortably warm. Perched on the windowsill of our fourth-floor apartment, I
dangled my legs in mid-air. I couldn't believe it was late October. Milwaukee
was usually chillier by now, already beginning its slouch toward the
interminable Wisconsin winter. As the sun baked my skin, still bronze from
dutiful visits to the tanning salon, I squinted and squirmed. I didn't want to
be here.
I had just come home from the night before and was suffering the start of a
monster hangover. My head throbbed and my itchy skin begged for a shower. Tom
Petty was wailing from the stereo speakers: I'm tired of myself/Tired of this
town. In the parking lot below, I spotted empty beer bottles and stray partiers
trudging home from after-hours revelry and drunken couplings.
Behind me, a couple of my still-drunk college roommates were singing and
dancing like banshees before the large open windows in our living room. The
place stank of stale beer and cigarettes from a party we had thrown the first
week of our junior year and from the many rowdy weekends that had followed.
Although we were only two months into the fall semester, our brand-new apartment
complex already bore vomit stains on its hallway rugs and fist-sized holes in
its plaster walls ? proof of how most of its student tenants spent their
weekends.
I liked this vantage point, looking down from a distant perch. It made me
feel removed from the chaos. I always had felt somewhat separate from the campus
party scene, even as I indulged in many of its pleasures. I was a scholarship
student carrying a near-perfect GPA, on track to land a prestigious summer
internship in Washington, DC, and serving as editor-in-chief of the campus
magazine. I had a resume packed with honor society memberships and evidence of a
properly raised social consciousness.
As for the Catholic faith that had dominated my life in elementary and high
school, well, that had taken a backseat to other priorities. I still considered
myself a better-than-average Catholic. Since my freshman year, I had been active
in all the right social justice organizations, devoting at least one afternoon
or evening each week to busing tables at a nearby homeless shelter or feeding
vagrants through a campus meals-on-wheels program. I attended Mass every Sunday.
When it came to sex, I abided by the letter of the law I had been taught in my
Catholic home ? no sex outside marriage ? though not its spirit. My true zeal
was reserved for more concrete concerns, like obsessing over my body to make
sure I stayed thin and fit. Unlike the other party girls who devoured late-night
pizzas and hid their beer guts under loose-fitting flannel, I told myself, I was
in control.
But lately my pride at compartmentalizing my life so completely ? being a
good girl on Sunday morning and a wild one on Saturday night ? had begun to give
way to something new, a dawning realization that I was as immersed in the chaos
as anyone. Maybe I was even worse, because I was leading a double life. At least
the potbellied partiers down the hall were consistent. They were not spending
their lives keeping up appearances and juggling personas, playing the role of
perfectionist honor student for one crowd and reckless reveler for
another.
Looking back over my shoulder into our apartment, I saw my roommates
sprawled on the couch, now drowsy and listless after a long night of carousing.
I realized that living with them, and living like them, no longer made me happy.
Nor did my relationship with the brooding rugby player who routinely rounded up
his friends to meet me at whatever bar my friends and I were patronizing that
night. I could not call our random meetings dates, and I could not call him my
boyfriend. There were no names for such romantic entanglements, no rules of
engagement, and most of the time my friends and I had no idea what to make of
the men in our lives. We were unconstrained by customs of courtship or social
norms. We could do whatever we wanted. Yet the awkwardness, confusion, and
disappointment that marked our encounters with men made me wonder: Was our
unfettered freedom just a trap in disguise?
This was not what I had envisioned when I set off for college. I had
thought I would spend my Saturday nights discussing Aquinas over coffee and
dating the kind of men who send roses, open car doors, and pay for dinner. I ran
into a few of those men during my college years, but I had become so inured to
the anti-dating ethos of campus life by then that I quickly dropped them and
rejoined my friends on the party circuit.
Returning my gaze to the bleak scene beneath my window, I realized how much
things had changed ? how much I had changed ? since I first arrived at my
freshman dorm that muggy August move-in day. I had lost something. I didn't know
what it was or how to get it back. I only knew that this aching emptiness in the
pit of my stomach had grown unbearable.
Suddenly aware that I was shivering, I swung my legs back into the living
room. I stood up, slammed the window shut, and strode past my roommates, now
sleeping soundly despite the earsplitting music.
It was time to shower, to eat, to put on something warmer. It was time for
a change.
Blame It on Patriarchy
I did not know it at the time, but I was taking the first steps on a
journey upon which many women in my generation have embarked, women asking the
same questions that I asked that morning: What is the source of that gnawing
sensation inside me, and why does my pursuit of pleasure and success only
intensify it? Is it true that there are no real differences between the sexes,
or does my femininity ? and female body ? have something to do with my desires
and discontent? If the key to my fulfillment as a woman lies in maximizing my
sexual allure, racking up professional accomplishments, and indulging my
appetites while avoiding commitment, why has following that advice left me
dissatisfied? Why do my friends and I spend so many hours fretting that we are
not thin enough, not successful enough, simply not enough? If this is
liberation, why am I so miserable?
About a year after I first began pondering these questions, I enrolled in a
course on feminist thought. I knew that the women's liberation movement had
played a large role in shaping the world that my friends and I inhabited, so I
wanted to know what its leaders said about what makes a woman distinct from a
man and how a woman can find freedom and fulfillment.
I had never given feminism much thought before that course. It was simply
the air I breathed as a girl growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and coming of age
in the 1990s. Like most women in my generation, I was wary of associating myself
too closely with the passe image of man-hating, bra-burning radical feminists.
Yet I vigorously supported the basic feminist premise of equal rights for women.
I was drawn from a young age to stories about heroines and suffragettes and had
embraced the feminist conventional wisdom that I should spend the first few
decades of adulthood establishing myself in a career and squeeze in marriage and
motherhood when I found time. As for differences between the sexes, I always
sensed that they existed but avoided acknowledging them aloud, lest that
acknowledgment be perceived as a sign of weakness or an excuse for
underachievement.
Why do my friends and I spend so many hours fretting that we are not thin
enough, not successful enough, simply not enough? If this is liberation, why am
I so miserable?
Now I was ready to take a closer look at sex differences and feminism
itself. In my course, I eagerly devoured the first few readings we were given,
manifestos of early feminists who demanded equal educational opportunities, the
right to vote, and humane working and living conditions even as they
acknowledged the uniqueness of women. As the semester progressed and we worked
our way through more contemporary feminists, though, I grew increasingly uneasy
with the theorists we were reading. Many seethed with resentment at men. Others
raged against their own femininity. The more I read, the more I found myself
bristling at their views of men and women, marriage and motherhood, and
God.
I had met my share of chauvinists, and I knew that I enjoyed opportunities
denied to earlier generations of women, including the chance to take courses
like this one. I also knew that feminism comes in many forms. Yet most of the
feminist writers we studied struck me as shrill and hyperbolic, with their
denunciations of housewives and stay-at-home mothers as "parasites," as Simone
de Beauvoir called them, or inmates in a "comfortable concentration camp," as
Betty Friedan put it. It bothered me that so many theorists we read succumbed to
one of two extremes: Either they allowed their insistence on the equality of men
and women to obscure the differences between the sexes, or they allowed their
emphasis on the differences between the sexes to obscure the equality of men and
women.
Neither extreme made much sense to me. Nor did I find in what I was reading
any viable blueprints for happiness in the real world. A friend who took the
course with me felt the same way. "If all else fails," she would groan as we
walked out of class together, "blame it on patriarchy." She was a convinced
atheist and I was a churchgoing Christian, but we agreed that the theories we
were learning did not address our most pressing questions and concerns.
There was another problem with the secular feminist thinkers we studied.
For all of their criticism of men's fixation on money, sex, power, and status,
most of these women obsessed over the very same things. They harped on which
perks and privileges men had that women did not. I could see the logic behind
some of their complaints, but their materialistic worldview felt stifling. There
was no transcendent horizon, few references to truth, beauty, goodness, or God.
It was all about what you could see, taste, and touch. I found nothing that
spoke to the thirst inside me that material pleasures had failed to slake.
An Open Door
Near the end of the first semester of my senior year, I found myself
standing in the back of the cavernous neo-Gothic Church of the Gesu on Marquette
University's campus, wondering where to turn next for answers. It was a Sunday
night and I had dragged my new graduate student boyfriend to the "drive-through"
6 p.m. Mass. It was a popular one, tailored to the many students too hungover to
make it to morning Mass, too apathetic to worship for a full hour, and too
guilt-ridden to skip their Sunday obligation altogether.
Attending Mass with a boyfriend was new for me. Having a boyfriend also was
new, as I had dismissed my last real boyfriend midway through the first semester
of my freshman year. This current relationship had taken root not because of any
great reformation on my part but simply due to my growing boredom with the
campus party scene, from which our weekly dates ? at real restaurants, complete
with real conversations ? relieved me.
Like nearly every man with whom I had been involved in the previous three
years, this one was a nominal Catholic but practical atheist. On this particular
night, he initially had agreed to attend Mass with me, then begged me to skip it
and lounge on the couch with him instead. In the end he succeeded only in making
me fifteen minutes late for a thirty-minute Mass.
There were no seats left by the time we stepped through Gesu's massive
wooden doors, so we huddled in the back of the nave with the rest of the
stragglers. As my boyfriend leaned in to whisper a wisecrack to me, I brushed
him away and strained to see over the crowd and catch a glimpse of the altar. We
had missed the Gospel reading, missed the priest's abbreviated homily, and now
he was well into the Eucharistic prayer. Feeling flushed and irritable, I
wondered how my once-ardent childhood faith had been reduced to this. Was there
a connection between the malaise that had settled over my spiritual life and the
nagging discontent I had first noticed on that window ledge?
It had been a year since I recognized that emptiness, and I still had no
clue what to do about it. My feminist theory class had not helped. Nor had the
series of cosmetic changes I had made recently: switching apartments and
roommates, cultivating a more temperate group of friends and an older boyfriend,
devoting more attention to my freelance writing career and an application for a
Rhodes Scholarship and less attention to aerobics classes and barhopping. I had
worked hard to get my life into better order, to make myself into the kind of
woman who indulges her desires with discretion and never feels as lost and
desolate as I did that October morning.
Still, I could not shake that aching feeling in the pit of my stomach. As I
stood in the back of church that night, I realized that my lingering melancholy
might be connected to the intimacy with God that I had abandoned shortly after
arriving at college.
For more than three years, I had given God the scraps of my time and
attention, put him last on my list of sources to turn to for answers and
fulfillment. Now, after having chased my every whim and put everything and
everyone before God, my spiritual life consisted of just that: scraps.
When Mass ended a few minutes later, I found myself caught up in the herd
of students barreling down the church stairs and into the frigid night air. My
boyfriend and I were halfway down the snow-lined block before I stopped and
turned to him.
"I need to go back into church," I told him. "I left something
behind."
"Okay," he said. "I'll go with you."
"No!" I snapped, a little louder than I intended. "Just go ahead. I'll
catch up with you later."
His brow furrowed and I could feel him staring at me as I turned and began
pushing through the crowd to get back inside. I probably looked crazy, and I
didn't care. My eyes blurred with tears as I fought my way up the stairs, this
time moving against the tide of surging bodies. When I finally cleared the crowd
and stepped inside the empty, unlit nave, I did not quite know what to do.
Feeling a mixture of anger and despair, I knelt in a nearby pew and let the
darkness engulf me.
I waited in the silence for some divine confirmation of my resolution, but
nothing came. So I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, stepped out of the
pew, and shuffled down the church stairs for a second time.
I lingered there for fifteen minutes, allowing myself to feel the full
force of that hollowness I had been trying to paper over and outrun for more
than a year. So this is it, I thought, as the tears ran down my cheeks. This is
life without God. Something about the frank desperation of it all felt good. I
was no longer sleepwalking. I finally felt awake.
Words slowly began to come, silent pleas from a soft, vulnerable voice I
had not heard in years: "I want you, Lord. I want to know you. I know there's
more to life than this. There's more to you than this. There must be. But you
have to show me. I'm opening my eyes, finally, but you have to show yourself to
me."
I paused, waiting for a thunderbolt or a warm wave of consolation. I got
neither.
Minutes passed and my mind began to wander. I found myself thinking about
my parents, about their various trials and tribulations through the years. They
never had enough money; they were always struggling to make ends meet thanks to
jobs in the charitable sector and with the church; and lately Dad had been
acting particularly odd, forgetting things and driving Mom crazy around the
house. Yet they were joyful together, full of laughter and love and confidence
about the future despite their crises. They always seemed sure that God would
care for their needs. And in the end, it seemed, he always did. I envied their
deep-down, joyful peace. I wanted it for myself. I had experienced it throughout
my childhood, but now it seemed to have disappeared. How could I get it
back?
I thought of the spiritual disciplines I had seen my parents cultivate
through the years: faithful attendance at daily Mass, daily contemplative
prayer, and regular reading of scripture and spiritual books. I thought: I can
do that. I will do that. I won't tell anyone, of course; I don't want anyone
thinking I'm a religious nut. I'll seek God again after all these years, but
I'll do it on my terms ? in secret.
I waited in the silence for some divine confirmation of my resolution, but
nothing came. So I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, stepped out of the
pew, and shuffled down the church stairs for a second time. I strolled out into
the black November night with no answers, no miracle solutions, none of the
can-do energy that had spurred me on after my earlier experience on the window
ledge. I felt nothing at all, aside from a vague sense of anticipation. I had
opened the door to God. The next move was his.
Saints and Superstars
Over the next few weeks I haphazardly hewed to my new resolutions, catching
a weekday Mass here and a few minutes of prayer there, with precious little
spiritual reading. My life did not otherwise change. I still partied every
weekend, ranked my social life far ahead of spiritual pursuits, and continued an
increasingly intense relationship with my boyfriend despite my sense that it was
pulling me farther from God.
My Sisters the Saints: A Spiritual Memoir
by Colleen Carroll Campbell
When Christmas break rolled around, I found myself marooned with my parents
in St. Louis, a city they had moved to after I graduated from high school and in
which I knew no one. Boredom as much as spiritual longing led me to accept my
father's invitation to join him each day for Mass at Saint Louis University's
Saint Francis Xavier College Church, a neo-Gothic structure in the heart of the
city that looked a lot like Marquette's Gesu. Unlike the spectacular sanctuary
above it, the underground Chapel of Our Lady where Dad and I attended 5:15 p.m.
Mass was a simple space with a sole wooden crucifix and a few dozen
wood-and-wicker chairs facing a plain altar. Its sparseness seemed to mirror
something happening inside both of us, a stripping process spawned for Dad by
his recent retirement from work as a lay hospital chaplain and for me by my
experience in Gesu a month earlier.
During our drives home from Mass, Dad would rave about the biography he was
reading, Marcelle Auclair's Saint Teresa of Avila. On Christmas Day he gave me a
copy. "It makes Teresa come alive," Dad told me, leaning forward in his chair as
he shook the fat red paperback before me, trying to convey its value. "Reading
it, you feel like you really know her."
I thanked him and tried to look interested as I scanned its staid-looking
back cover. Dad probably knew that I was more excited about the sweaters and
jewelry my mom had bought me and the bouquet of red roses my boyfriend had sent.
He was right. I still had a fairly anemic appetite for spiritual reading, and
this book looked far too dry for vacation reading. I planned to toss it onto the
same dust-collecting shelf where I had relegated all the other religious books
Mom and Dad had given me since I left for college.
It wasn't that I didn't appreciate their gifts. It was just that they were
always gushing about their favorite saints: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross,
Therese of Lisieux, and dozens of others. Dad and Mom read the saints' lives
again and again, swapped dog-eared tomes about mystical prayer, and cheered
whenever one bought the other some obscure book on one of their beloved holy
people. From my earliest years, I remember seeing my parents huddled together,
talking animatedly about new saints they had discovered or new insights on
scripture that they had gleaned from people they referred to simply as "John,"
"Teresa" or "the Little Flower." Images of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph adorned every
room in our home, and our bookshelves bulged with titles by and about saints and
servants of God. The names on the spines were as familiar as old friends:
Augustine, Ignatius, Francis de Sales, Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, Dorothy
Day.
As a little girl, I had shared my parents' attraction to the saints,
particularly women saints. Sainthood seemed to me to be the premier career
choice. Rather than being merely a successful writer or actress or artist or
lawyer, I could be something infinitely more glorious: a person who enjoyed
eternal bliss with God in heaven while being revered as a Christian superstar on
earth. If I were a saint, I reasoned, I could someday do favors for my family
and friends when they petitioned me from earth to intercede with Jesus on their
behalf. And I could enjoy a level of renown far superior to the fleeting fame of
a Hollywood starlet or bestselling author, since the esteem enjoyed by saints
lasts for centuries, even millennia.
My favorite childhood saint was Rose of Lima, a stunningly beautiful
Peruvian woman whose pint-sized biography in my children's book of saints was
tattered from repeated readings. Rose practiced extreme penances to conquer her
vanity, including rubbing her face raw with pepper so it would not inspire so
many compliments. That struck me as a little creepy, but I admired Rose's love
for Jesus and zeal for combating a character flaw that I recognized in myself. I
also liked the sound of her name, which is why I chose Rose as my patron saint
for confirmation in eighth grade.
Like so much else in my spiritual life, my interest in the saints had
fizzled in college. Fixated as I was on final exams and Friday-night plans, the
last thing I wanted to read was some sugary tale about a snow-pure saint whose
biggest sin paled in comparison with what transpired in the first five minutes
of the average kegger. But Christmas-break boredom can make a college student do
desperate things, and that December it made me crack open a forty-five-year-old
biography of Teresa of Avila.
Once I did, I was hooked.
Meeting Teresa
The story of Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada begins in the early sixteenth
century, with a pious Spanish childhood saturated by God's presence. Willful,
bright, and passionate, little Teresa dreamed of sainthood and even convinced
her younger brother to run away from home with her so they could fight the Moors
and die as martyrs. Their plan was foiled by a vigilant uncle, who spotted the
pair leaving the city. So the aspiring contemplatives settled for building
homemade hermitages instead, where they prayed and read stories of the saints
together.
As Teresa grew into adolescence, her beauty and vivacious personality
blossomed, but her religious zeal withered. She lost her mother in her early
teens and started spending more time with cousins whose superficiality fanned
the flames of her vanity. A party girl with the gift of gab and no shortage of
male admirers, Teresa became preoccupied by beauty regimens, romance novels,
fashion, and gossip.
Her devout father noticed the change in his daughter and sent her away to a
convent boarding school, where her faith began to flourish again. Although she
initially felt little attraction to religious life, the idea of becoming a nun
gradually grew on Teresa and she resolved to pursue it despite her father's
objections. After returning home and enduring a debilitating, life-threatening
illness for the remainder of her teen years, Teresa recovered and ran away from
home again ? this time to join a Carmelite convent.
The preoccupations with vanity, praise, and flirtations that had
characterized Teresa's teen years resurfaced after she became a nun. Life in the
convent was soft; sisters there freely mingled with men and women from the town,
and the wealthier sisters enjoyed many of the same material comforts and perks
they had known at home ? from plush suites to in-room pets. Hailing from an
aristocratic family and possessed of a keen ability to charm others, Sister
Teresa of Jesus followed the relaxed rules of her order but focused her energy
on winning honor from other people rather than honoring God. "I was fond of
everything to do with the religious life," she writes in her autobiography, "but
I could not bear anything which seemed to make me ridiculous. I delighted in
being thought well of."
Teresa paid little attention to avoiding sin aside from the most obvious
offenses, happy to take the advice of lax confessors who told her not to sweat
her faults. She performed external acts of devotion "with more vanity than
spirituality," she writes, "for I always wanted things to be done very
meticulously and well." Her prayer life soon withered. As she recounts,
I began, then, to indulge in one pastime after another, in one vanity after
another and in one occasion of sin after another. Into so many and such grave
occasions of sin did I fall, and so far was my soul led astray by all these
vanities, that I was ashamed to return to God and to approach Him in the
intimate friendship which comes from prayer. This shame was increased by the
fact that, as my sins grew in number, I began to lose the pleasure and joy which
I had been deriving from virtuous things. I saw very clearly, my Lord, that this
was failing me because I was failing Thee.
The spiritual autobiography of this fourth-century playboy-turned-saint who
spent years struggling with sensuality and sinful habits resonated with
her.
After suffering a series of illnesses and the death of her father, Teresa
encountered a devout Dominican priest who convinced her to resume her prayers
and pay closer attention to her sins. She did the former, though not the latter,
and the result was a torturous feeling of living in two worlds: "My life became
full of trials, because by means of prayer I learned more and more about my
faults. On the one hand, God was calling me. On the other, I was following the
world. All the things of God gave me great pleasure, yet I was tied and bound to
those of the world. . . . I spent many years in this way, and now I am amazed
that a person could have gone on for so long without giving up either the one or
the other."
Teresa spent nearly two decades locked in this dual existence, yearning for
God yet clinging to the worldly pleasures, people-pleasing habits, and shallow
conversations that kept him at a distance. A profound and frustrating emptiness
gradually engulfed her as she grew weary of vacillating between her competing
desires. She was living, she writes, "one of the most grievous kinds of life
which I think can be imagined, for I had neither any joy in God nor any pleasure
in the world. When I was in the midst of worldly pleasures, I was distressed by
the remembrance of what I owed to God; when I was with God, I grew restless
because of worldly affections."
A breakthrough finally came when Teresa was thirty-nine. She walked into
the chapel one day and came face-to-face with a statue of the suffering Christ,
bloodied and bound as he awaited his Crucifixion. The image startled Teresa. She
found herself overcome with regret for the years she had wasted serving herself
instead of God. "I felt as if my heart were breaking," Teresa recalls, "and I
threw myself down beside him, shedding floods of tears and begging him to give
me strength once for all so that I might not offend him." Although she had shed
repentant tears before, this time was different "because I had and was placing
all my confidence in God." Teresa told Jesus that she would not get up from the
floor until he had given her the help she needed. "And I feel sure that this did
me good," she writes, "for from that time onward I began to improve."
Teresa's prayer life began to deepen, and her desire to spend time with God
intensified. Around the same time, someone passed her a copy of Saint
Augustine's Confessions. The spiritual autobiography of this fourth-century
playboy-turned-saint who spent years struggling with sensuality and sinful
habits resonated with her. She was particularly moved when she came upon
Augustine's account of his spiritual turning point in the garden, where he heard
a child's voice inviting him to "take and read" a nearby Bible. Augustine opened
the book and read the first lines he saw, from Saint Paul's Letter to the
Romans: "Let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and
drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy.
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the
flesh" (Rom. 13:13-14).
Augustine did not need to read any further; he knew God intended those
words for him. Reading his story, Teresa felt the same way. She writes, "It
seemed as if the Lord were speaking in that way to me," welcoming her into the
freedom from sin and intimate relationship with him that had eluded her for so
long.
Teresa began to make swifter progress on her spiritual journey. Her prayer
life grew richer and more rewarding, and her attachment to pleasure seeking and
winning the admiration of others steadily declined. Her ascent to holiness did
not happen overnight: The road to her famed prayer experiences, like her
decades-long spiritual awakening itself, was paved with struggle. In the early
years of her prayer life, Teresa writes, "I was more occupied in wishing my hour
of prayer were over, and in listening whenever the clock struck, than in
thinking of things that were good." She found that the times she persevered in
prayer despite her natural inclination to do otherwise were those that left her
with "more tranquility and happiness than at certain other times when I had
prayed because I had wanted to."
Through her struggles, Teresa discovered the wisdom of the Catholic
teaching that our bodies, and what we do with them, matter. She came to
understand that while God wants us to treat our bodies with respect, excessive
focus on perfecting our bodies or indulging their insatiable desires ? including
the desire to busy ourselves with good works to avoid the discomfort of solitude
and silence ? distances us from God. The same goes for social status,
popularity, and professional achievement, things that are not evil in themselves
but that can wreak spiritual havoc when we value them more than we value
God.
Once Teresa broke free of such idols, she redirected to God the passion she
had frittered away on the quest for material pleasures and social approval. Her
intense love for Jesus and profound prayer life gave her the strength to launch
a historic reform of her religious order, endure severe persecution from civil
and religious authorities who resisted her efforts, and pen several classics of
contemplative spirituality. Battling critics both inside and outside her order,
Teresa refused to back down in her quest to transform her Carmelite convents
from havens for spoiled socialites to places of genuine simplicity and prayer.
She adhered faithfully to her religious vow of obedience, however, forgiving her
detractors and attracting followers inspired by her to live for God alone.
By the time of her death, Teresa had established dozens of Discalced
Carmelite convents, sparking a renewal of religious life that rippled across the
Catholic Church and helped revitalize it in the wake of the Protestant
Reformation. She became one of the church's greatest saints and mystics, a
trailblazer in faith as well as works. In 1970, Pope Paul VI named her a Doctor
of the Church, an honor previously granted only to men. The distracted, vain
woman who spent the first four decades of her life obsessed with looking good in
the eyes of others evolved into a spiritual powerhouse who heroically lived the
words of her famous poem:
Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.
A Desire Enkindled
Reading Teresa's story helped me understand for the first time why my
parents had returned to her works so often and spoken of her with such
affection. In Teresa, I found a woman of passion and purpose whose journey was
all the more compelling for its detours.
Teresa's spicy, messy, and meandering spiritual journey cast my own
struggles in a new light. Perhaps the discontent that had dogged me for the past
year was not a spiritual dead end or a signal that I needed to work harder at
tidying up my life. Maybe it was the opening chapter in a love story like the
one Teresa had lived, a story in which a divine protagonist pursues his beloved
with reckless ardor and ultimately wins her heart. Reading about Teresa's
ecstatic prayer experiences ? in which she felt Jesus consuming her with a love
so sweet and piercing that she thought she might die on the spot ? I felt a
desire for divine intimacy kindled within me.
I also felt inspired by the discovery that Teresa's ardent faith had not
squelched her natural boldness and originality but purified and intensified
both, allowing her to use her gifts for a higher good. For Teresa, faith was a
source of liberation, not oppression. She surely was a product of her times; her
apologies for "womanly dullness of mind" make that clear. Yet Teresa defended a
woman's calling to the same heights of mystical prayer to which God calls men
and praised women for the special love and faith they showed Jesus while he was
on earth. In an early draft of The Way of Perfection, she laments that the
all-male ranks of judges in her day see "no virtue in women that they do not
hold suspect," and she looks forward to the day "when everyone will be known for
what he is . . . these are times in which it would be wrong to undervalue
virtuous and strong souls, even though they are women." Slapping the feminist
label on Teresa may be a stretch, but this trailblazer's single-minded focus on
God's will led her to embark on adventures and undertake risks that would have
intimidated most men of her day ? and most secular feminists of ours. Through it
all, Teresa retained her Spanish wit and zest for life, encouraging her nuns to
join her for laughter, music, and dancing during recreation periods and
delivering spiritual insights in an earthy, intuitive voice that reveals a
uniquely feminine spiritual perspective.
Meeting Teresa marked a significant step in my nascent spiritual journey,
though I did not understand its full significance until years later. Teresa was
the first woman saint I discovered as an adult; she was the first to model a
mixture of faith, femininity, and freedom that I could admire and appropriate
for my own life. I had no plans to join the cloistered Carmelites and no
illusions that my mumbled daily prayers would morph into ecstasies anytime soon.
It did not cross my mind that I should forgo plunging necklines or an extra beer
on my girls' nights out, much less don a hair shirt or maintain monastic
silence.
For all the differences between Teresa's life and mine, though, I could see
strong parallels: an aching hunger for meaning, boredom with worldly pleasures
and success, a passionate and often prideful intensity that could be used for
great good or great folly. In Teresa, I saw the kind of woman I might become if
I ever took God seriously enough to try. And I found a friend to whom I could
turn in prayer, someone who could give Jesus an extra nudge on my behalf when I
needed help overcoming the temptations of superficiality and sensuality that
Teresa knew well.
A Way Forward
The immediate upshot of my encounter with Teresa was a change in my New
Year's Eve plans. Ever since we parted ways for Christmas break, my boyfriend
had been making daily long-distance calls from his home in Boston to convince me
to join him there for the holiday. I thought it sounded fun at first, but the
more absorbed I became in Teresa's story, the less the trip appealed. I knew
that it would be an occasion of temptation, as his plan entailed me staying at
his house, and I knew that he saw my visit as a way to cement our status as a
serious couple. He recently had started quizzing me about his various
postgraduation career options to see if I considered them lucrative enough to
make him a good husband and provider. His affection was genuine, and I could
tell that he had big plans for us. My cross-country trek would signal that I
shared those plans.
Still, something important already had happened by the end of my college
years: I had learned that the very saints I once considered irrelevant to my
search could prove indispensable guides.
The more I listened to my heart, and to God's voice speaking in it, the
more I realized that I did not want to make long-term plans with a man who
regarded God as a competitor for my loyalties and faith as something best kept
on the margins of life. I had taken up with such men before, and I knew I would
be tempted to do so again. Here and now, though, I had a choice: I could
continue clutching this man as a placeholder until I found someone or something
more satisfying, or I could surrender the relationship and take a chance on God
instead.
I decided not to go to Boston for New Year's. And three days after I
returned to campus in January, I broke up with my boyfriend. I offered a lame
excuse about needing to spend more time with my friends because I was too
cowardly to give the real reason, lest word get out that I had become a
religious fanatic. I knew that on a Catholic college campus like mine, having a
little faith was commendable. But having too much ? the sort that led you to
dump perfectly good boyfriends, spend your lunch breaks at noon Mass, or take
controversial church teachings too seriously ? was a recipe for social isolation
or at least ridicule. Better to be labeled shallow, stuck-up, drunk, or
debauched ? anything but devout.
After the breakup, my life did not change overnight. In fact, anyone
watching from afar that semester would have noticed little change at all. I
became more diligent about attending daily Mass and carving out time for daily
prayer and spiritual reading, but I kept those habits hidden from even my
closest friends. It had not yet occurred to me to return to the sacrament of
confession. And though I felt a shaky sense of peace taking root in my heart,
whatever was happening inside me was still not strong enough to curb my vanity
and vices. It just made me enjoy them less.
Even the breakup brought me little comfort. I had assumed that my bold if
badly executed act of obedience to God's will would result in a shower of
blessings. Instead, I received some devastating family news shortly afterward
that left me reeling with sadness and missing my boyfriend, who had since taken
up with another coed, who looked like a shorter, skinnier version of me. I spent
the rest of my final semester occupied by a down-to-the-wire job hunt that
collided with my overloaded class schedule to make the spring unusually
stressful.
After four years of doing whatever I wanted, I finally was trying to follow
God's lead. And things seemed to be getting worse, not better. Reading Teresa's
writings and tales from her life, as I did voraciously that semester, I felt a
pang of painful recognition when I came across a story of the sick and exhausted
reformer traveling to one of her besieged convents amid a fierce rainstorm. Her
horse-drawn cart hit a pothole, and Teresa hit the mud headfirst. "Lord, if this
is how you treat your friends," she quipped to Jesus, "no wonder you have so
few!"
My awkward first attempts at resuscitating my relationship with God were
not entirely fruitless. I later would come to see them as baby steps that helped
me get my bearings before I tackled a host of more complicated problems relating
to love and freedom, marriage and motherhood, the mystery of suffering, and my
role as a twenty-first-century woman in a two-thousand-year-old church. My
search for answers would span fifteen years, take me to places I never imagined
I would go, and force me to reconsider nearly everything I thought I knew about
what it means to be a liberated woman. It would be years before I recognized my
efforts as a quest to understand my feminine identity in light of my Christian
faith and contemporary feminism, to grasp the essence of what Blessed Pope John
Paul II called the "feminine genius." Still, something important already had
happened by the end of my college years: I had learned that the very saints I
once considered irrelevant to my search could prove indispensable guides.
Teresa was the first. Although I still had no answers to most of the
questions I had asked on that windowsill eighteen months earlier, Teresa's
example convinced me that my journey to understand who I was and how I should
live as a woman was inextricably bound with my journey toward God. Seeing her
transformation from a party girl who chased pleasure and status with abandon to
a saint who marshaled her prodigious talents and energy for service to God, I
felt hopeful that my own natural intensity could find a nobler outlet than
barhopping and resume building. Teresa's squandered youth and stumbles on the
path to sanctity reminded me that no matter how much time I had wasted in
starting my interior journey, it's never too late to take the first step.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Colleen Carroll Campbell. "Party Girl." chapter one from My Sisters the
Saints: A Spiritual Memoir (New York: Image, 2012): 1-24.
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