40 Burst results for "Avila"
Audio
Day-2-St.-Gertrude-the-Great - burst 1
"A novena to St. Gertrude the Great. Day 2 For the grace of Holy zeal St. Gertrude the Great is held in the highest regard for her unwavering love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus and her profound compassion for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Esteemed by many of her fellow Saints, including St. Teresa of Avila, St. Gertrude's spiritual insights have long inspired the faithful. With reverence, we invoke her patronage and beseech her to intercede for us that we may receive the graces most suited to our spiritual growth and needs. May she also intercede for the intention we bring to this novena.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
Fresh update on "avila" discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"You've been listening to Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lillis. To hear and or to download this conversation, along with hundreds of other spiritual formation programs, visit discerninghearts.com, or you can find it within the free discerninghearts app or on whatever platform you obtain your podcasts. There, too, you can also listen to an audio version of the complete autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. This has been a production of Discerning Hearts. I'm your host, Chris McGregor. We hope that if this has been helpful for you, that you will first pray for our mission, which is to offer authentic and rock solid spiritual formation freely to souls around the world. And if you feel us worthy, please consider a charitable donation, which is fully tax deductible to help support our efforts. But most of all, we hope that you will tell a friend about discerninghearts.com and join us next time for Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lillis.
Audio
Day-2-St.-Gertrude-the-Great
"A novena to St. Gertrude the Great. Day 2 For the grace of Holy zeal St. Gertrude the Great is held in the highest regard for her unwavering love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus and her profound compassion for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Esteemed by many of her fellow Saints, including St. Teresa of Avila, St. Gertrude's spiritual insights have long inspired the faithful. With reverence, we invoke her patronage and beseech her to intercede for us that we may receive the graces most suited to our spiritual growth and needs. May she also intercede for the intention we bring to this novena. We now join with St. Gertrude the Great with the prayer she composed for the Holy Souls in Purgatory. Eternal Father, I offer Thee the most precious blood of Thy divine Son, Jesus, in union with the Masses said throughout the world today, for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory, for sinners everywhere, for sinners in the universal Church, those in my own home and within my family. Amen. St. Gertrude the Great pray for us.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
Fresh update on "avila" discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"What does that look like, Anthony? I mean for somebody out there, how would they be able to recognize that perhaps with an example? If a woman's married and she's relying on a man who's not her husband or a man is relying on a woman who's not his wife, in that reliance, you know, you find yourself occupied with them you can't wait to see them again and they're kind of constantly there in the back of your mind. You're worried about what they think and what they don't think and all of that. Marriage, it binds you to someone in a very particular way. You ought to be thinking like that about your husband or your future husband or your wife or your future wife, that's the way you ought to be thinking about them because that relationship is specifically ordered to that. When it comes to members of the opposite sex and you find that kind of preoccupation going on, the commandments not only around adultery but coveting, you need to kind of examine your conscience and go, you know, what's really going on in my heart? What's really going on here, Lord? If you notice that you are desiring them, and I'm not talking even about sexual right now, I'm just talking about emotional support. You're desiring somebody's presence, somebody's emotional attention, the way you're asking it from them, you're hoping to get it from them, you're longing for it from them, the way that would only really be appropriate from your spouse. I talked about putting a boundary up, I talked about renunciation, it means, you know, not seeing them anymore. It doesn't mean that you, it's cold shoulders and you don't greet someone, but neither do you go out of your way to greet them either. If you run into each other, you run into each other, but you're not going out of your way to spend time with them. You're renouncing that tendency in you to want to seek satisfaction to appropriate this person in a way to give glory to God. And so sometimes that can mean something if you're in a spiritual direction relationship or the confessor confessing kind of thing, it could mean needing to find another confessor or another spiritual director. You just need to tell the person you think this needs to end. I think God's calling you to have another spiritual director. I think God's calling you to go to someone else for confession or God's calling you to go somewhere else to confession and he's going to bless you. I know he's going to bless you because God has a great plan for you and he loves you immensely, but I think God's calling you to do something different. So you let go of the relationship, you surrender it to the Lord and surrendering it to the Lord is going to create new order in your heart and in the heart of the other person that gives him glory. But for him to create that new order for him to do that act of creation, you need to give him space by making the renunciation. I think that's excellent. Just a quick note on that. I think we have to be careful. I'm speaking from my vantage point as a woman that sometimes you can get into relationships with girlfriends, for example, and you're talking and if they're not supporting you in your marriage, right, or if there's something that is disordered out of that, you have to really watch and be careful. It's an easy slide. Instead of helping you to work through problems, to help understand things, to help bolster the relationship, they're discouraging, they're diminishing, all these other things. That's probably not the best place for you to be in. I think it's true that too for couples and you may have friends and you and I are friends, but we also know each other's spouses well and there's a real dignity to how we not only talk to each other, but how we respect and honor them. And if that's missing, if it's disordered, you'll know it because it will take you down a path of darkness and before you know it, dusk has turned into night. You have to be very careful. The final thing here, and I know we're coming to our time, so I'll just kind of end with it, you know, that going back to the witchcraft thing, this is a whole other area that comes into play today because people are turning to magical things to gain control over the world because they've lost their trust in God. And in light of the rise of the use of magic and the recourse to the demonic in our human relationships, these good boundaries that we're talking about are even more important than ever. You're getting emotionally attached to somebody who's playing around with magic. That emotional attachment becomes an open door into your heart. The evil they're dabbling with and playing with gains a foothold in you, and that's extremely dangerous. And they may not even realize the depth of what they may be inviting in. It's not necessarily they're the three witches around a cauldron, and that's very real. That is very real. But those persons may be intentionally opening doors. They may not even realize the attachments, the diabolical, the demonic that they brought into their own life, and now they're giving it to you. This is an extremely important observation today. Dabbling with magic, Ouija boards, tarot cards, dabbling with Reiki and other things like that, opens spiritual doors, and the evil spirits love to take advantage of those openings and make shipwreck out of people's faith. So how important it is to allow the Holy Spirit to guide us in setting up good, chaste, and pure relationships? How important it is not to play around with or goof around with magic or the demonic in any way, but to keep our consciences clear and to love one another in the order that you spoke about inordinate relationships, in the order that God has willed for our lives, loving those whom we've pledged our life to, our spouses, to love them first and to love our children, and then allow other friendships as it gives glory of God to let them into our hearts. Amen. Thank you so much, Dr. Anthony Lillis. It's a pleasure to be with you, Chris. Thank you for this conversation.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
A highlight from LST8 Casting Flowers The Letters of St. Therese of Lisieux with Fr. Timothy Gallagher Podcast
"Discerninghearts .com in cooperation with the Oblates of the Virgin Mary presents The Letters of Saint Therese of Lisieux with Father Timothy Gallagher. Father Gallagher is a member of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, a religious community dedicated to retreats and spiritual direction according to the spiritual of exercises Saint Ignatius of Loyola. He is featured on several series found on the Eternal Word television network. He is also author of numerous books on the spiritual teachings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the Venerable Bruno Lanteri, founder of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, as well as other works focused on aspects of the spiritual life. The Letters of Saint Therese of Lisieux with Father Timothy Gallagher. I'm your host, Chris McGregor. This next letter brings us to just about one year before Therese's death, so she's 23 at this point, and it's a letter to Sister Maria of Saint Joseph, who is 38 years old at this point. Let's read a description of Sister Maria of Saint Joseph. She was a very difficult sister. She had a very difficult childhood. There was a goodness in her, but there was also a violent temper, mood swings, and so forth. And because of that, the sisters tended to avoid her. So this is from Marie, Therese's sister, Marie's deposition in the cause of canonization where she describes Sister Marie of Saint Joseph. The sister was subject to the blackest moods and did scarcely any work. I saw her when Sister Therese was already an invalid come to her to call for the week's linen. Therese had volunteered. No one else wanted to approach the sister, and Therese's heart always went out to the difficult people, to the suffering people. You know, Therese is the patron of the missions, and so her gaze reaches out to those who are very distant from her, wanting to bring them close to Christ. But her gaze also fell on those who were the nearest to her, and she saw the needs, and she would approach them with incredible insensitivity. The follow happens. I saw her when Sister Therese was already an invalid come to her to call for the week's linen, which she had given her to repair. And because Sister Therese had not been able to complete her task, the sister reproached her severely instead of thanking her for what she had done in spite of being so ill. So this is Sister Marie of Saint Joseph. Sister Therese took the reproaches as if they were so much praise. This poor unfortunate sister became the object of Sister Therese's tenderest compassion. One day when I had confided to her how much trouble that sister gave me, the servant of God, Therese, said, ah, if you only knew how necessary it is to forgive her, how much she is to be pitied. It is not her fault she is so poorly gifted. She is like an old clock that has to be rewound every quarter of an hour, just so emotionally needy. Yes, it is as bad as that. Well, wouldn't you have pity on it? Oh, how necessary it is to practice charity toward one's neighbor. And Therese also recognized and appreciated the good qualities that Sister Marie of Saint Joseph had, and they're listed here, tenderness, good memory, fine singing voice. And it pained Therese to see Sister Marie of Saint Joseph ostracized by the rest of the community. And so she resolved to move closer to her. I will say that eventually the mental, emotional mood swings and temper and so forth of Sister Marie of Saint Joseph were diagnosed by a doctor as a form of mental disability that was just incompatible with religious life. And so when she was 51, she was obliged to leave the convent. She lived for another 26 years before her death. And she always remembered Therese with fondness, always followed the cause of canonization, stayed in contact with the Carmel. Well, what Therese did, I think we'd have to say pretty heroically, was she volunteered to help Sister Marie of Saint Joseph in the linen room, which was where she worked alone because no one, they were afraid of her. They didn't want to be the subject of her violent temper and the speech and all that would go with it. And we have a series of the just brief notes that Therese writes to Sister Marie of Saint Joseph, sort of childlike, childish almost language. And Therese really takes the role of a mother concerned for Sister Marie. Is she sleeping well? Striving to take that combative spirit which Sister Marie of Saint Joseph has and to move that towards spiritual combat to help her try to offer her struggles and so forth for the good of souls, for the good of the Church. So this is one of these letters that she writes to Sister Marie of Saint Joseph. And you know, this allows us to highlight one of these qualities of Therese. I think we'll return to this later on. When there were suffering difficult people around her, people that everybody else tended to avoid, she was the one who would take the initiative to approach them. I mentioned they had these recreation times twice a day when they could sit together and just freely converse. It was her practice, the others noted it, and you see it in the cause of canonization, to choose to sit next to the ones that nobody else wanted to sit next to. So much so that one of these sisters convinced that Therese was really a great friend, that they were great friends. Therese did this so naturally, so easily, without any sign of struggle. Well, without any sign of struggle, she's the one of whom Therese said, sometimes the only thing I can do is just leave her because it's just too difficult for me, and then she'd come back when she was more able again. So she writes to Sister Marie of Saint Joseph, I am delighted with the little child. Now this is one of these letters where Therese uses the third person and metaphor. If we notice, for example, when she wrote to her childhood playmate Celine, there's none of that kind of language. It's very direct. It's the kind of language her mother would have written. So Therese, depending on the recipient, will adopt a different style of writing, and here it's that third person and metaphor. I am delighted with the little child, which is to say, I'm really happy with what I've seen in you. And the one who carries her in his arms is still more delighted than I. The Lord just loves what he's seen in you. Ah, how beautiful is the little child's vocation. Who else was speaking to Sister Marie of Saint Joseph like this? She was pretty universally simply avoided, and here is this fellow sister just saying, I'm so delighted to see the goodness in you, and Jesus sees it more than I. It is not one mission that she must evangelize, but all missions, and that is offer your struggles and sufferings for the missions for the apostolate of the Church. How will she do this? So how are you, Sister, with your personal struggles in the laundry room, going to offer something for the far -flung missionary work of the Church? And she answers, how will she do this? By loving, by sleeping, because Sister Marie of Saint Joseph had struggles with that, and Therese will often gently hope and encourage her to get the sleep that she needs. And then this next is capitalized, by throwing flowers to Jesus when he is asleep. Now, there's something very profound behind this, this throwing flowers in the Franca, jeté de fleur, which is a phrase that Therese uses often. And let's just take a moment to look at her, describe what she means by this in the story of a soul, because this is a very profound piece of her little way. So the image is, well, Therese did this as a child. They would, on the Corpus Christi procession, she and the other little girls, they'd be dressed in like their white dresses, and they'd be given flowers, and they would cast these flowers into the air along the road before the priest would come by with the Blessed Sacrament. Therese loved flowers. If you read her letters, flowers come back all the time in her writing. One of her joys was that she thought, in entering Carmel, that she was really giving up any contact with flowers, the flowers that she would go with her father and go walking out in the fields, and he'd be fishing, she'd be picking flowers as a little girl. And then to her delight found that people were constantly making gifts of flowers to the Carmel so that flowers were an abundant presence in her life. Well, she says, the little child, meaning herself, will strew flowers. She will perfume the royal throne with their sweet scents, and she will sing in her silvery tones the canticle of love. Now, what she's referring to here is her own sense of her weakness and her imperfections. Here are the great saints. Think of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross and Francis of Assisi. As she'll say elsewhere, these are the mountain tops, and she sees herself just as a little grain of sand. Her own life is so small. She sees her weakness and her struggles. Well, what can I do then? Well, the little child will throw flowers, will cast flowers upon the throne of the Lord Jesus. So there you get just an image or just a brief perspective on this kind of flowery metaphorical language that Teresa uses. It's always necessary to see what she's saying through that. The language is flowery. It can be sentimental. It can be childish at times, but the reality is rock, is solid, is deep, is rich. So now she explains she's speaking to Jesus. This is in the manuscript B, the second part of the story of the soul. It's now chapter nine. Yes, my beloved, this is how my life will be consumed. I have no other means of proving my love for you other than that of strewing flowers. All right, what does that mean? That is not allowing one little sacrifice to escape, not one look, one word, profiting by all the smallest things and doing them through love. Now, we're right at the heart of her little way here. I can't do great things for you. I'm not in the missions. I'm not being martyred. I haven't written great scholarly works, preached before multitudes. I'm just a humble little 24 -year -old woman living with 20 other women in a caramel that very few people even know of, working in the linen room, preparing meals, helping out in the sacristy, decorating as best I can, sacred objects, painting them. I can't do great things for you, but what I can do is to cast flowers. Now, as I've said so often in these conversations, it doesn't take much contact with Therese to touch the heroic, and it's right here. That is, by not allowing one sacrifice to escape. And her sisters were witness to this, that she, every opportunity that she could find, to go out of her way to help someone, to give up something that someone else wanted, to smile at the last person that she wanted to smile to, and so forth. She took advantage of all of these little occasions. The little way is only little in that the things that we do are ordinary, but it is not little in love, and not little in fruitfulness. It's heroic, actually, in these. What if we could even dream of living like that in our daily life at home or at work or in the parish or in the community, not allowing one little sacrifice to escape? I have a task to do. Here's a person who approaches me with a little sinking of my heart. He or she is going to want some time. What if we didn't allow one even smallest sacrifice to escape? Not one look that could encourage another person.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
Fresh update on "avila" discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"But fortunately, because she was going to confession, fortunately because although she wasn't as pure as she ought to have been, she wasn't dealing with sin the way she ought to have been dealing with it. She was, however, sincere in approaching the Lord, at least to some degree, enough that in following her conscience, she kept up good boundaries, and in keeping up good boundaries, she also cared enough about this priest to get him to surrender to her that amulet, and she threw it into the river. She didn't mess around with that kind of thing. She didn't excuse it. She didn't call it a good thing, or wink at it, or try to ignore it. She kind of took over a lot of courage to confront him, and it took her a lot of patience to get him to trust her enough so that he would give that terrible thing to her so that she could get rid of it. And the beauty of the story is that he goes on to live a converted life, and he breaks the relationship. He goes on to live a converted life. She was an instrument from the Lord to break that, and to help him come into conversion. And this is something that, again, we can do for each other as we go forward. It's just that the less converted we are, the more dangerous it is, those situations are. This will be the beginning of a wake-up call for Teresa. In the midst of her illness, she begins to see how serious life is. She begins to understand that sin is something very dangerous, and you can't be naive about it. And she realizes that a vocation was nearly destroyed because of a man's naivete about sin, and so this plants a seed in her that's going to incline her to the Lord all the more. The power of this particular section is very, very important, because as you said, what he did originally with the person that he was in this, maybe he felt he was the confessor to this woman or spiritual guide, but in the behavior, he opened the door. When you open the door to something that is disordered, when it's different between a priest and a penitent, or a priest and a soul that's looking, as opposed to developing a relationship that is more interpersonal, it's important to have relationships with priests and lift them up. But when it comes to matters of directing the soul, a priest has to be very careful that he doesn't open the doors to affections that are unhealthy and attachments to him that are unhealthy. And I see that happening sometimes not just with single women, but I see that sometimes when married women will go to a confessor or a priest and it is unbalanced as opposed to their relationship with their husbands or maybe their family needs because the priest has taken on a role in their life that, as I said before, is not balanced, it's disordered. Am I opening up a Pandora's box here, Anthony, in this conversation? No, not at all. I think it's a very important thing and we all have responsibilities to keep our relationships ordered. As spiritual relationships and marital relationships require a lot of discipline and keeping up good boundaries and proper discretion and kind of humility and self-awareness. Where is my heart? Why did I just say what I just said? Where are my eyes going right now? This person who I care about, how can I protect them and the integrity of their vocation and help them live out the vocation they're supposed to live out? There's a lot of hard work to be done in that. And so both priest and penitent, spiritual director and the supplicant who comes to them, especially when it's between relationships between men and women are involved, there's profound discretion and prudence and kind of self-awareness that is absolutely demanded and most of all humility before the Lord. Lord help me put up a good boundary here because I don't think this one's good and what can I do so that I'm building this up a little bit? And what do I need to renounce and walk away from? Am I trying to get a need met in my own life? Am I trying to appropriate this person to meet a need that God does not will, does not receive glory if they meet it? There's things that confessor can do in terms of forgiveness of sins. There's things a spiritual director can do in terms of helping someone step out into freedom. But there are also things that a husband or a wife is supposed to do in your, have a role and has authority and sovereignty in your life if you're married and that very particular spiritual role needs to come first and be respected first and this is for people who are married but also for people who are planning to get married. If you're not yet married, you haven't yet found your husband or your wife, keeping yourself for them and avoiding seeking in an impure way emotional satisfactions and relationships that are not purely for the glory of God, you have to be very, very careful of that. And that's what Teresa of Avila means by her relationship with this priest wasn't completely innocent or pure on her part. She was probably driving some sort of emotional benefit. Men and women are very different. This priest was probably looking for some relief for his need for emotional support and he was probably looking for some kind of sister or mother in his life to address his insecurities around his own manhood and what God had called him to. And Teresa for her part, you know, as a woman, there's kind of a deep ache that needs to be filled and she hasn't yet given herself over to prayer in such wise that Jesus is able to fill that for her. So in this relationship, she was probably getting some affirmation and pleasantries exchanged and so forth that were meeting some emotional needs that Jesus wanted to meet. Well, the reason why she has the courage and the fortitude to bring right order to this relationship is she is undergoing extreme suffering at this stage of the game. And with that extreme suffering, there's a wisdom of heart that takes hold. She's so physically sick, she's not able to keep up the discipline of her religious life very well. But the treatment the doctors are giving her is really bad for her. And remember, she prayed for some kind of illness to come so that she'd learn patience. And so it seems like the Lord was granting her this grace in this chapter. She has that suffering and as horrible as suffering is, it's also true that in the midst of great suffering, there's a certain sobriety and wisdom of heart and awareness of death that roots your being. And she was being rooted in that. And so it gave her I think, well, it allowed the Lord to communicate into her enough prudence and fortitude so that she could deal rightly with this relationship.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
BTP-LOT5 Challenges in Suffering, Part 2 The Life of St. Teresa of Avila Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lilles Discerning Hearts Podcast - burst 4
"The interiority of contemplative prayer, the interiority that recollection demands, means allowing the truth of God to come into my heart and cast light on all the broken judgments I've made about myself, about the world, about my neighbor, and about God himself. And as that light is cast upon, I realize there are whole bunches of things that I need to let go of so that I can receive God's judgment into my heart. Insofar as spiritual reading helps us do that, then we want to engage in spiritual reading. Insofar as spiritual reading prevents us from dealing with the repentance, the compunction, the bad judgments that we need to let go of, then that reading is a waste of time, it's not really going to help us enter deep into prayer.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
Fresh update on "avila" discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"We now continue with part two of our conversation. Well, in this particular case for Teresa of Avila, she would tell us that it was 17 years before she was able to find someone who seemed to speak into her experience and to help her, along with other Jesuit fathers that she would talk about later. But there was a particular confessor, a cleric, who was able to help her. There was a Dominican who was of great help because of his learning and his sanctity. When you have learning and sanctity together, you can't get a better confessor than that. Those men do exist, they're hard to find, but they do exist. You have one in your life, cling to them like gold, they're the best. We want to help all our priests become holy and to engage in the sacred study they need to be able to help souls. I was thinking in this chapter, there's another priest that she begins to go to and she has holy conversations with, and that priest kind of is in a very dangerous situation, and so this sometimes happens when you are trying to find a good priest as you're reaching out to people, you find someone who you think can help you, and soon after you've kind of engaged them, you realize that they are as wounded, if not more wounded, than you are. I think this experience that Teresa of Avila has with this young priest, who's basically come under the influence of a witch, is very important for us today. It's very easy for a good intentioned priest in today's climate, in our over-sexed world in which we live, where people have so many psychological needs and wounds that they don't know how to get met appropriately, and so they reach out and they grasp for help that really will never help them. Failures in seminary, we've oftentimes failed to help men deal with the diseases that are all through the human heart. The human heart is a big mess, and you can't deal with it alone. You need to get help. You need to talk to people who are wiser than you and have expertise in areas that you don't have, and if you don't do that, if you don't learn to do that in seminary and you go out and, well, those needs are going to drive you one way or another, and that's what happened to this priest. This priest got into an inappropriate relationship with a woman who cast a spell on him, gave him a magic amulet and told him to put it around his neck, and he didn't realize fully, I think he knew to some degree, but he didn't realize fully that when he did that, he bound himself to her. That being bound to another person that way needed to be broken. Teresa does not say that her own relationship with this priest was as pure as it ought to have been, and that's part of the deal as we get into relationships. We begin to realize that because we're not dealing with sin, it undermines our ability to have good relationships with each other. The more you deal with sin, the better relationships you can have. The less you deal with sin, the more likely there's going to be kind of unrecognized needs and drives, kind of compelling things in a certain direction, and you're not exactly sure why. Now, she never got into serious sin with this priest, but she also says that her own relationship with him wasn't that pure either. Her intentions, her motives were mixed, and she was naive about that, and so were his, and his naivete is kind of evidence in the fact that he was already in another inappropriate relationship that he didn't know how to get free from, and so one inappropriate relationship causes you, disposes you to get in a whole network of bad relationships, and he was about to suck Teresa up into this terrible network of sin, web of sin, you might call it, and catch her up into it, and she wouldn't have even fully realized.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
A highlight from BTP-LOT5 Challenges in Suffering, Part 2 The Life of St. Teresa of Avila Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lilles Discerning Hearts Podcast
"We now continue with part two of our conversation. Now, Anthony, there may be listeners out there who will hear about this experience that she has, that with this good book, The Third Spiritual Alphabet, and they'll say, well, I need to run out and go get that book, and I'm going to need to read that too. What would you advise folks as they begin to hear about the spiritual reading of those great spiritual saints that we get to know? My concern is that we might be resting with something that is really fruitful for us. We might be just running from book to book. I don't know, Teresa might smack me on the head for that one, but what's your thought? I think there's two things. In the beginning of the spiritual life, I think it's really important to do a lot of spiritual reading, a lot of reading of good spiritual books, and Osuna's book is one of the great spiritual classics, so no harm would come from reading it. So that's just true in general. If we want to live a prayerful life, we need to find good prayerful literature. We need to spend a little bit less time watching YouTube and following the latest news stories and a little bit more time learning how to read. This is a big problem we have in our culture today is that we've lost the art of reading, and we have struggles paying attention for longer periods of time. Reading is one of those practices, if it's done prayerfully, that can lead into a deeper recollection, a state of soul that's very, very good for our humanity. So I would never want to discourage anyone from reading. But Chris, you've also brought up another problem that happens. Sometimes somebody gets so into reading spiritual literature, they substitute reading one book after another after another for time that they ought to be wasting with the Lord. I speak about contemplative prayer or this prayer of recollection is in a certain way wasting time with the Lord. You're not achieving anything. You're not learning anything. You're not getting any more information. You're just allowing yourself to rest in His presence, to rest in His goodness, as she says in this particular chapter. And that activity is so important. So here we get to, I think, the meat of your criticism that is kind of an enemy for contemplative prayer. And that is today, especially our souls because of technology, because of the amount of information that is at our fingertips, we're kind of information junkies. And so we need to act against that tendency by doing what you've just said, Chris, and that is discerning carefully our spiritual reading. This is where having a good spiritual friend or a spiritual director or even a priest you can talk to from time to time kind of direct you to literature that will be most beneficial for you so that you're not chasing everything down. Here on Discerning Hearts, again, one of the beauties of this particular resource, Chris, that you have so generously put together for all of us is that it has shows like this where you get to really hunker down into a particular book and read along with these discussions. So if there are those of you who are listening to these podcasts, I highly, highly recommend that you get the book The Life of Teresa of Avila or La Vida de Teresa de Jesus. And I invite you to read along the chapters as we go through these conversations. And the idea of these conversations is to help the text come more alive for you. And so going back to your question, Chris, when we hear about things that Teresa of Avila reads, is it good to kind of note that? Should we look at that? It could be good for us, but I'd bounce it off. Everybody is in such a different place. On the whole, those who are trying to make a good beginning, it's good for you to read a little bit more. And on the whole, for those of you who made a good beginning, but the Lord is inviting for you to spend a little bit more time in silence, you need to be cautious about filling up that time of silence with becoming an information junkie. You need to be surrendered to the love of the Lord. You need to learn to rest in His goodness for this prayer of recollection to bear fruit in your life. I'm so glad you said that, because if you can take into context the time that Teresa is living in, that's the 1500s. Books are now available to people, but not to the extent that they are today. She didn't have a UPS truck drop off a stack that was just purchased quickly on the internet, and I think that's all good. I mean, there is great spiritual reading out there, and there's writing that's happening.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
Fresh update on "avila" discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"DiscerningHearts.com presents Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lillis. Through the years, clergy, seminarians, religious, and lay faithful have benefited from Dr. Lillis' lectures and retreat conferences on the Carmelite Doctors of the Church and the writings of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity. He is an author of several books, including Hidden Mountains, Secret Garden, A Theological Contemplation on Prayer, and Fire from Above, Christian Contemplation and Mystical Wisdom. In this particular series of conversations, we'll focus on the spiritual writings of St. Teresa of Avila, and in particular, her autobiography. I'm your host, Chris McGregor.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
BTP-LOT4 Challenges in Suffering, Part 1 The Life of St. Teresa of Avila Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lilles Podcast - burst 3
"Because she kind of looks back and she she looks back with regret about how little small some of her response was, how she failed to persevere with it. And she's doing this because she's kind of saying, Today, let's not make that mistake anymore. Today, I don't want to have let fear limit me and my lack of trust limit me like I once did before. Today, I want to do something beautiful for God and I'm going to trust Him and I'm going to give myself over to it because He is so good. The idea in her reflections as you read it isn't that she's so bad, although she's aware of it. She's aware of the wickedness that lives in our hearts that His grace is overcoming. That's though not her emphasis. If you read this carefully, her emphasis is, Oh, Supreme Good.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
A highlight from BTP-LOT4 Challenges in Suffering, Part 1 The Life of St. Teresa of Avila Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lilles Podcast
"Anthony, thank you so much for joining me once again. Well, it's wonderful to be with you to discuss the life of Teresa of Avila, Teresa de Jesus. Today we get to talk about chapter 4, when she enters the monastery of the Incarnation. I love the fact that she encourages her brother to kind of travel with her, that he should join to and turn away from the vanities of the world. I think that speaks of the dynamic nature of her personality. Yeah, he, in fact, you know, kind of inspired by her sister, he will eventually become a Dominican. But the journey that she sets out on, it makes it sound like it's much farther than it actually was. Remember, this is the same brother. The two of them, when they were children, tried to go to the land of the Muslims to be martyred. And that was when they were little, and their uncle found them on the hillside and got them back home. And so this time they set out again, the uncle doesn't get to them until she actually reaches the convent of the Incarnation, which is really not very far away from where her uncle found her all those years ago when she was a child. And she enters into the Incarnation, the monastery of the Incarnation, a Carmelite monastery, and she discovers she loves religious life. And this opens up a really powerful reflection on when we go to serve the Lord, and all the fear that comes, and all the hesitations, and what God can do when we face our fears. That is a real challenge, isn't it? Because our fears are a way of trying to protect ourselves. Maybe we've been hurt, or we're trying to protect others, somehow we put up walls. Fear is quite an enemy, isn't it? It is, and there's so many forms of it. She doesn't explore exactly all of what she's afraid of, but to go from a life where it's basically self -centered to becoming a member of the community where you're going to be serving others, to go from a life where there's a lot of excitement, to go into a community where in many ways you'll be hidden and kind of cut off from the former way of life that you were living before. These possibly were part of things. The other part of it that I think that we can't underestimate that maybe applies to our lives is to go from a life where you're kind of in control of, you know, you have command over what you're doing, into a life where you're going to give yourself over to the service of the Lord. What happens if you fail? And I think that was a little bit of her fear, was fear of failure. I can relate to that. I'm sure many people out there who are listening to us can too. But then in this second section of chapter four, this jumps out and I try to hold on to this, Anthony. She says, And the greater the fear it starts out with, the greater and more enjoyable will be the reward afterward. I hold this opinion through experience, as I said, with many very difficult things. And so I would never counsel anyone if there were someone to whom I should have to give counsel to fail out of fear to put a good inspiration into practice when it repeatedly arises. That's it. That if you have something that keeps on coming up in your heart that you ought to do, if you can overcome your fear, the virtue that overcomes fear is courage. If you can master your fear with courage and do it, there's blessings for her. That's the basic message here. Chris, is this something that you found in your own life? Well, I think so. I think so. It takes time to turn around and look back and say, Oh, I'm so glad that happened. Because these type of experiences generally take time, don't they, to kind of play out. And sometimes it doesn't even look at what you may have expected it to look like or experience. And you have been a part of our mission at Discerning Hearts, right? We're supposed to discern. We're supposed to test spirits. We're supposed to give time. And yet what Teresa is saying here in some ways says in that discernment, don't let fear be one of the things that keeps you from moving forward. That's right. In fact, I'm glad you brought up Discerning Hearts because so many of your listeners probably don't realize the amount of courage that it has taken you and your family to provide this apostolate to all of us. When you first set out to do this, this was an unusual thing to do. And you had no idea of all the different challenges and twists and turns that you would face along the way. And yet there was repeatedly this impulse in your heart to do this. And not only to do this, but to do it in a way that makes it available for everyone. You don't have paid subscribers. You just put this out there for everyone to benefit. That kind of boldness and generosity of your time and energy and resources, just going out there and trusting that God will provide what is needed when it is needed. I don't know, Kris, I think you chose the pathway of Mother Angelica. And anyone who chooses that pathway, God blesses them tremendously. Isn't that something that you've experienced? I have. Thank you for saying that, by the way, Anthony. And I couldn't do it without your encouragement and support over the years, particularly spiritually and in great friendship. What I have found, it's a scary type of thing to do something that God is asking you to do. And you have a lot of people around you telling you, well, you should do it this way and you should do it that way. But you know inside your heart, but the Lord wants me to do it this way, especially when it comes to matters in the spiritual life. You can't give what you don't have. And it's difficult to guide people if you don't respond to his promptings. And the reward, as you were saying, you are blessed, but in ways that are better than what you think. You know, sometimes people think, well, if you have tons and tons of subscribers, or you have tons and tons of monetary resources, that's an accomplishment. You're on your way. No, it's the blessings that come from wonderful friendships of people that you know that have been touched by the work of grace that God's working in their life. There are some things that you can't explain why it's so good. And I don't mean to make this about me, but it's an example of the influence of Teresa of Avila. She is one of those saints at the very, very beginning who has journeyed with all of us here at Discerning Hearts and has witnessed in her example, even in this very first time when she's in the Carmel, that you don't be afraid and know how to listen to that voice of God who is trying to lead you because the fruitfulness is. I mean, you can see that example in what she has given the world. Through her own, we can call it ministry, can't we? That's right. The witness of her life becomes kind of a ministry to the Church, a witness of holiness. And this is where for Discerning Hearts to be able to support souls who are also trying to do something beautiful for God, they feel this impulse over and over. I think it was very necessary for you and everyone involved at Discerning Hearts to face the same fears that people who would be listening to even this show today have also faced and are facing. I think there's a whole bunch of young men and women today who God is calling to do something very beautiful with their lives. I think God has called them for greatness. John Paul II said, The world never expects anything from you, but God, He expects greatness because you were made for greatness. And we need to own that and step up into it, which means facing the fears that the world throws out at us. And part of those fears are if you go and do something beautiful for God, what if you fail? What happens? How do you pick up the pieces? And that kind of voice is a voice that's trying to predict the future, and it's not the Holy Spirit. What the Holy Spirit prompts us to do is to be faithful with the inspirations that we've received. And so you received an inspiration to go and do something beautiful for God. In the case of Discerning Hearts, Chris's faithfulness to this, Bruce's faithfulness to this apostolate, her family's faithfulness, really, to this apostolate, has opened up avenues of grace, a source of grace, for people all over the world that I literally, when I travel internationally, run into people, actually run into people all over the world who know about Discerning Hearts and have been edified because Chris had the courage to offer something like she has. And Chris, what you've stepped into is actually a spiritual law. Teresa gives voice to the spiritual law. The greater the fear that you need to overcome when you are being, when the Lord kind of prompts you to do something, and you're afraid to do it, the greater the fear, the greater the reward's going to be, not only for yourself, but for everyone else in the whole world, in the whole mystical body of Christ. So this is a very powerful thing. We need to kind of, in our prayer, be aware of what the Lord's prompting us to do, how He's prompting us to do it. And when we are aware of that prompting, there is going to be an onslaught of fears that just come and try to discourage us and try to make us second -guess ourselves, trying to encourage us away from greatness and into something more modest that we think we can handle. There's going to be all of those fears. And what we need to do as men and women today, no matter our state in life, but especially those of you who are deciding your state in life, you need to not let those fears limit what God has invited you into. Don't let them limit your response, your generous response to God. The more you confront that fear and the more courage you take into your following up the Lord, the greater the blessing is that He wants to give you. And if you live by that always greater, Saint Ignatius would also talk about that, live by this always greater, God is going to bless you with something ever greater. He has never outdone in His generosity.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
A highlight from LST6 The Suffering Holy Face of Jesus The Letters of St. Therese of Lisieux with Fr. Timothy Gallagher Discerning Hearts Podcast
"Discerninghearts .com in cooperation with the Oblates of the Virgin Mary presents the letters of Saint Therese of Lisieux with Father Timothy Gallagher. Father Gallagher is a member of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary a religious community dedicated to retreats and spiritual direction according to the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. He is featured on several series found on the eternal word television network. He is also author of numerous books on the spiritual teachings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the venerable Bruno Lanteri founder of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary as well as other works focused on aspects of the spiritual life. The letters of Saint Therese of Lisieux with Father Timothy Gallagher. I'm your host, Chris McGregor. This next letter takes us to about a year later. Therese is now 19, Celine to whom she's writing is 23. Their father is still in the institution, a letter which also pertains to this correspondence in which Therese is encouraging Celine as she lives with this and is the family person who is there trying to handle all of this. Dear Celine, formerly in the days of our childhood we used to enjoy our feast. Now this letter is written on October 19th which is just a few days after the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila October 15th so that's the feast to which Therese refers here. Our feast because three of them are in the caramel and again in Therese's mind Celine will be joining them when it's possible. We used to enjoy our feast because of the little gifts we mutually exchanged. The smallest object then had an incomparable value in our eyes. Soon the scene changed. Wings grew on the youngest of the birds. Therese slips into metaphor very easily you know even the little flower over and over again she will write with metaphor. Wings grew on the youngest of the birds which is a reference to her entrance into caramel and it flew away far from the sweetness of its childhood and all illusion vanished as we've seen already now. Summer had followed spring, life's reality, the dreams of youth. Celine was it not at that decisive moment that the bonds which joined our hearts were tightened. This is Therese. Here is Celine who is feeling left out. The others are in the caramel. Even the remaining sister Leonie is now attempting yet a third time to enter religious life at this point or she will be shortly and Celine feels as though she's the one left behind and feels as though again she's lost Therese in some sense because of the deep intimacy between them of course changes once Therese enters out of the caramel. So Therese knowing that speaks right to that. Was it not at that decisive moment when I left and entered caramel that the bonds that joined our hearts were actually tightened. Yes separation united us in a way that language cannot express as I've said she'll often say that. Our childlike affection was changed into a union of feelings a unity of souls and mind as a maturity and deepening taking place. Who then could have accomplished this marvel? Ah, it was he who had ravished our hearts. Now she's going to quote from John of the Cross and then from the Song of Songs two sources that are very dear to her. The beloved chosen among thousands the odor alone of his ointments suffices to draw us after him. John of the Cross was very central for her and she says that when she was about 17 and 18 that was really all that she read and as far as we can see she didn't read systematically but by instinct she moved toward the living flame of love and the spiritual canticle. So her focus was less on the ascetical road toward self emptying that leads toward love and her heart just moved immediately right to where her heart was drawn. Most of her quotes from John of the Cross and there are many. In fact a whole book has been written on this. Her understanding of and use of John of the Cross are from the living flame of love and the spiritual canticle. Interestingly enough one Carmelite scholar suggests that that's the proper way to read John of the Cross. Most of us I know I did this myself and I wish I had learned this counsel at the time. I had the project of reading John of the Cross and so I read The Dark Night and The Ascent and found it pretty difficult you know and this scholar's suggestion is no do what Therese did. Start with the living flame of love and the spiritual canticle. See the beauty of the goal and then go back and see the pathway toward it. Well Therese by instinct does that. Jesus has attracted us together although by different ways. Together different ways. I'm in the Carmel. You're still in the world. Together he has raised us above all the fragile things of this world whose image passes away. He has placed so to speak all things under our feet like Zacchaeus. Now you'll see as we go through this letter and it's one reason why I quote it how Therese and now she's just none of this is studied. She's just as she said in the letter to her and I just write as my heart dictates but we'll see that she never goes very long without citing scripture. In fact if you look at a story of a soul you see the same thing. In the Carmel there were hours of personal prayer every day. There was the time of the recitation of the Divine Office periodically throughout the day but there were also hours of personal prayer. Therese at one point was given a book of prayers a part of which contained the entirety of the New Testament. At one point I even drew this out for myself because I wanted to see what this meant. The last 216 pages of this manual for the Christian as it was called contained the entirety of the New Testament. Therese separated that from the rest of the book made it an appropriate cover for it and she always kept that with her. She kept it in a pocket of her habit and she used it and her prayer. In those hours of prayer we can just see her reading the New Testament especially the Gospels but over and over and over again until it became the stuff as it were of her spiritual life. Later even the reading of John of the Cross faded somewhat for her and the Gospels became the single source of reading that she would do. She's a witness to faithful daily absorption of the Scriptures and especially the Gospels. You know how Pope Francis is always asking us have a Bible with have a New Testament with you and you know how to say things like what would happen if we opened the New Testament as often as we open our phones. Therese does this so she has the New Testament with her and she absorbs it profoundly and really you kind of see the roots of Therese as a doctor of the church here. She reads it with an originality she sees meanings in Scripture. Things for example like when she's speaking about love your enemies and she applies that to other sisters in the Carmel who are not her enemies but are just humanly difficult in one way or another for her. She does this consistently she'll see applications of the Scriptures and they open up for her in ways that are very rich and you'll see that in this letter repeatedly. Do we know there if was a favorite of the Gospels you know some tend towards the Synoptics others towards John or maybe Luke Matthew Mark and or was it just a complete package for her do you think? We'd really have to turn to the real scholars to answer that thoroughly. As far as I can say from my own reading I just see her speaking of the Gospels as a unity and then quoting from all of the Gospels whether there was a preference in one way or another for one of the others I wouldn't be able to say you know with precision.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
A highlight from BTP-LOT3 St. Teresa on Being With Good People The Life of St. Teresa of Avila Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lilles Podcast
"Anthony, thank you so much for joining me. It's wonderful to be with you, Chris. Thank you for making all these conversations available. Discerning Hearts is doing such a powerful thing. I've heard from Carmelite friends all over the world about Discerning Hearts and Chris McGregor. I was with the Missionaries of Charity in San Francisco and an old Carmelite priest who was kind of serving as chaplain for them. He came up to me after Mass and he goes, Hidden Mountains, Secret Garden, and he kind of let me know that he had been following some of the conversations going on at Discerning Hearts and I could tell it built up his priesthood. And I think that effect that Discerning Hearts has is something remarkable and a gift to the church all over the place. And so, Chris, we all owe you a big thank you. Well, just praise God. Just giving back what he's offering to all of us. And we're so blessed to have you, Anthony, to be able to break open, or how can I say, unwrap the gift? It's not even break it open. It's more gently to open it up and to be able to view it. And a lot of times what you're showing us is this multifaceted diamond from all the different angles and all the different ways the light kind of penetrates. And ultimately, you know what that diamond is? It's really more of our own human hearts. And in reading Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth the Trinity, Therese, John the Cross, the great Carmelites, but also the many of the great saints, that's ultimately what they're trying to show us, isn't it? Or what they're trying to reveal to us? Yes, that God has created us for this great purpose and there's something wonderful about who we are. When we put ourselves in relationship to him, it's also possible that we betray the gift that we are and it is possible for us to completely ruin it. But that's not what God wants. It's not really what we want either. And so he comes to us in all our insecurities and fears and he kind of breaks through our indifference to him. That's probably the big enemy in the beginning. And he breaks through our indifference to him until we connect with him. And then he opens up beautiful possibilities before us as we see how good he is. Those who see the goodness of God, those who know the goodness of the Father, what they have is hope. Because they realize how good his intention is towards them personally. And that he's inviting them into a great work. And with that hope and with a sense of the future, a soul kind of steps out beyond itself and God is able to reveal his glory through it. People who otherwise are walking in darkness get to glimpse a great light whenever any soul does that. And that's why I'm very excited about our conversations right now on Teresa of Avila and her life. Because she is a soul that had to break through her indifference to God and begin to see his goodness. And the more she sees his goodness and realizes how benevolent his plan is towards us, the more radically she begins to embrace for herself that plan and beyond the plan to embrace God himself. And she unleashes a power in the world that I think has rippled through human history ever since. It's a powerful, powerful movement of prayer that becomes part of an impulse for. And I think this gift of prayer that she advocates in the Church is actually the leading force through which the renewal of the Church will occur. But she doesn't start out a great contemplative. She has to kind of be invited into it. And we can kind of see, well not quite kicking and screaming, but there was a lot of indifference that needed to be broken through. That's I think the real benefit from reading the life of Teresa of Jesus or the life of seeing Teresa of Avila. Because what you will find in the interior castle and even the way of perfection are these wonderful roadmaps in the spiritual journey. While other people were out there mapping the world in that time period of the 1500s, she's really mapping the interior life. But in the life of Teresa, what you're finding is that she's like us. She's almost somebody that is on the journey like we've been on the journey. And in those first couple chapters that we talked about in our previous episodes, we find this young girl who is not only experiencing the loss of her mother, but she is finding a great love for her father, for her family, and a desire to do good. And yet she's challenged by the culture and the things around her. And that also looked kind of good at first blush. And her response to that I think is not unlike so many of us in our earlier years and even some of us in our 30s, 40s, 50s still. And yet she has experiences in awakening. As we come into chapter three, she had a woman who took some time and shared with her. It wasn't so much the woman that ignited the desire for something more, something deeper, something good, something true, but it was maybe more her witness, wouldn't you say, the nun that she would end up meeting. That's a very important element in how we witness, too, isn't it, and how we can help others on that journey. Well, this is absolutely vital, actually. One of the things I do and the work I do is I work with a lot of vocations. And so the first thing that comes out in chapter three that's worth just mentioning is this nun who begins to talk to Saint Teresa about what religious life is actually. And we kind of need that to be recovered in our own time. People who are living a vocation need to kind of step out and reach out to the next generation and let them know that this pathway of Christ, which seems so bizarre, is actually meaningful and leads to a very fulfilling and rich life. This narrative isn't being told. John Paul II, in the first World Youth Day, it was in Poland. It wasn't really called World Youth Day, but a group of young Poles gathered with him. at He stood a naval base that was destroyed by the Nazi Germans. And the story of the naval base was that the Polish forces there never surrendered. They fought to the bitter end. They were invited to surrender, but they refused to surrender. They were going to fight to the end. And John Paul II, kind of referring back on that history, he said, The world will never demand very much from you. The world never demands anything from you at all. But Christ, He demands everything. Just like these people who laid down their life for their country, Jesus is looking for generous souls who will not give up and who will fight to the end. And He's not looking for success, He's looking for faithfulness. Well, when someone in their life begins to hear that for the first time, the enemy's immediate attack is, Oh, but if you do that, you're going to live just an awful life. And it will be too difficult, and you'll never be able to persevere. It will be too hard on you. You hear these kind of things. And this is where the witness, the witness of this nun, as you were saying, is so critical. She could say, Look, I've tried it. It's not so bad. And what was she doing? She was planting seeds. This nun was planting seeds. She knew that Teresa, she must have known that Teresa would not be able to understand or receive everything she was saying. She planted the seeds anyway. In the same chapter, the reason why these mentors for our vocations are so important, there's also an old uncle that she goes to who's a very pious man. And he, again, has her reading books that she would never read on her own, but he has her reading them out loud to him. And again, I think he was very cleverly planting seeds. And she had that experience when you're reading this beautiful literature of not really liking it because it's kind of demanding on your consciousness and on your attention. It makes demands on you so you don't really like it. It's not pleasant or convenient to read. But at the same time, when you read it, it fills you with a kind of sense of hope and desire for greatness. And these things are beginning to stir in her because of first this nun and then her uncle. And so she begins what you might call the vocational journey of her life. And it's an interesting thing. I think she already has some kind of life of prayer. It's very undeveloped. She's backslid since her youth. She's dealing with an illness, too. And that also has to be discouraging. We find in chapter three that she's fainting and just not feeling very well at all. So God comes to us even when we're not feeling well. He sends us people when we're not at our very best. And he plants seed kind of like when we're in a vulnerable place. And I don't know, I think that what we see going on in chapter three opens up maybe reconsidering, you know, how do we discern our vocation? And part of vocational discernment is, you know, who do we let in our lives and who do we talk to? And who do we let challenge us a little bit? We'll return to Beginning to Pray with Dr. Anthony Lillis in just a moment.
Audio
"avila" Discussed on Audio
"A novena to Saint Teresa of Avila, day nine, charity. Saint Teresa, you have said, The blessings gained through true poverty, I think, are many, and I wouldn't want to lose them. I am often aware of a faith within me so great that I think God cannot fail anyone who serves him. I know that there never is or will be any time in which his words will fail, for I cannot persuade myself otherwise, nor can I fear. It seems to me I have much more compassion for the poor than I used to. I feel such a great pity and desire to find relief for them that if it were up to me, I would give them the clothes off my back. I feel no repugnance whatsoever toward them, toward speaking to or touching them. This, I now see, is a gift given by God, for even though I used to give alms for love of him, I didn't have the natural compassion. I feel a very noticeable improvement in this matter. According to Teresa, while interior development necessarily involves continued progress in self-knowledge and self-awareness, it is not egotistical, because it also encourages us to look beyond ourselves to God and to others. Thus, progress in the spiritual life really authenticates itself in charity. God's love, as the evangelist John tells us, is for all, and is so profound that he sent his Son for our redemption. For those engaged in the life of prayer, we must also love with this divine love. It is a transformative love that changes the way we see and approach our fellow men and women. As Teresa illustrates, may we therefore learn to love others with the love that God loves us, that our prayer may be truly perfected. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching. And fire with longing for true holiness, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Audio
A highlight from St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-9
"A novena to Saint Teresa of Avila, day nine, charity. Saint Teresa, you have said, The blessings gained through true poverty, I think, are many, and I wouldn't want to lose them. I am often aware of a faith within me so great that I think God cannot fail anyone who serves him. I know that there never is or will be any time in which his words will fail, for I cannot persuade myself otherwise, nor can I fear. It seems to me I have much more compassion for the poor than I used to. I feel such a great pity and desire to find relief for them that if it were up to me, I would give them the clothes off my back. I feel no repugnance whatsoever toward them, toward speaking to or touching them. This, I now see, is a gift given by God, for even though I used to give alms for love of him, I didn't have the natural compassion. I feel a very noticeable improvement in this matter. According to Teresa, while interior development necessarily involves continued progress in self -knowledge and self -awareness, it is not egotistical, because it also encourages us to look beyond ourselves to God and to others. Thus, progress in the spiritual life really authenticates itself in charity. God's love, as the evangelist John tells us, is for all, and is so profound that he sent his Son for our redemption. For those engaged in the life of prayer, we must also love with this divine love. It is a transformative love that changes the way we see and approach our fellow men and women. As Teresa illustrates, may we therefore learn to love others with the love that God loves us, that our prayer may be truly perfected. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching. And fire with longing for true holiness, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-9 - burst 1
"Saint Teresa, you have said, The blessings gained through true poverty, I think, are many, and I wouldn't want to lose them. I am often aware of a faith within me so great that I think God cannot fail anyone who serves him. I know that there never is or will be any time in which his words will fail, for I cannot persuade myself otherwise, nor can I fear. It seems to me I have much more compassion for the poor than I used to. I feel such a great pity and desire to find relief for them that if it were up to me, I would give them the clothes off my back. I feel no repugnance whatsoever toward them, toward speaking to or touching them. This, I now see, is a gift given by God,
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St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-9 - burst 1
"Saint Teresa, you have said, The blessings gained through true poverty, I think, are many, and I wouldn't want to lose them. I am often aware of a faith within me so great that I think God cannot fail anyone who serves him. I know that there never is or will be any time in which his words will fail, for I cannot persuade myself otherwise, nor can I fear. It seems to me I have much more compassion for the poor than I used to. I feel such a great pity and desire to find relief for them that if it were up to me, I would give them the clothes off my back. I feel no repugnance whatsoever toward them, toward speaking to or touching them. This, I now see, is a gift given by God,
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St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-9 - burst 1
"Saint Teresa, you have said, The blessings gained through true poverty, I think, are many, and I wouldn't want to lose them. I am often aware of a faith within me so great that I think God cannot fail anyone who serves him. I know that there never is or will be any time in which his words will fail, for I cannot persuade myself otherwise, nor can I fear. It seems to me I have much more compassion for the poor than I used to. I feel such a great pity and desire to find relief for them that if it were up to me, I would give them the clothes off my back. I feel no repugnance whatsoever toward them, toward speaking to or touching them. This, I now see, is a gift given by God,
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"avila" Discussed on Audio
"A novena to Saint Teresa of Avila, Day 8, Virtues. Saint Teresa, you have said, I repeat, it is necessary that your foundation consists of more than prayer and contemplation. If you do not strive for the virtues and practice them, you will always be dwarves. And, please God, it will be only a matter of not growing, for you already know that whoever does not increase, decreases. I hold that love, where present, cannot possibly be content with remaining always the same. Teresa writes these words for the end of her description of the interior journey, when the soul arrives at union. Fundamental to spiritual progress is the development of a life of virtue, as virtues and prayer shape one another. In the context of Teresa's definition of prayer as the intimate sharing between friends, virtues are all that we do and suffer for the love of God, our great friend. Therefore, engagement and recollection helps us to cultivate practices to enhance our relationship with God. While the continued exercise of these virtues helps us to be gradually more receptive to interacting with Him. In our prayer today, let us ask for the grace to develop and grow in lives of virtue, that God's love for us may be expressed and nurtured in our love for Him. Saint Teresa speaks to us today, saying, Christ has no body now but Yours, no hands, no feet on earth but Yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which He blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, Yours are the feet, Yours are the eyes. You are His body. Christ has no body now on earth but Yours. Oh God, who through Your Spirit raised up Saint Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. Saint Teresa, pray for us. That we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-8
"A novena to Saint Teresa of Avila, Day 8, Virtues. Saint Teresa, you have said, I repeat, it is necessary that your foundation consists of more than prayer and contemplation. If you do not strive for the virtues and practice them, you will always be dwarves. And, please God, it will be only a matter of not growing, for you already know that whoever does not increase, decreases. I hold that love, where present, cannot possibly be content with remaining always the same. Teresa writes these words for the end of her description of the interior journey, when the soul arrives at union. Fundamental to spiritual progress is the development of a life of virtue, as virtues and prayer shape one another. In the context of Teresa's definition of prayer as the intimate sharing between friends, virtues are all that we do and suffer for the love of God, our great friend. Therefore, engagement and recollection helps us to cultivate practices to enhance our relationship with God. While the continued exercise of these virtues helps us to be gradually more receptive to interacting with Him. In our prayer today, let us ask for the grace to develop and grow in lives of virtue, that God's love for us may be expressed and nurtured in our love for Him. Saint Teresa speaks to us today, saying, Christ has no body now but Yours, no hands, no feet on earth but Yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which He blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, Yours are the feet, Yours are the eyes. You are His body. Christ has no body now on earth but Yours. Oh God, who through Your Spirit raised up Saint Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. Saint Teresa, pray for us. That we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-8 - burst 1
"Day 8, Virtues. Saint Teresa, you have said, I repeat, it is necessary that your foundation consists of more than prayer and contemplation. If you do not strive for the virtues and practice them, you will always be dwarves. And, please God, it will be only a matter of not growing, for you already know that whoever does not increase, decreases. I hold that love, where present, cannot possibly be content with remaining always the same. Teresa writes these words for the end of her description of the interior journey, when the soul arrives at union. Fundamental to spiritual progress is the development of a life of virtue, as virtues and prayer shape one
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"avila" Discussed on Audio
"A novena to St. Teresa of Avila, Day 7, Surrender St. Teresa, you have said, Myself surrendered and given, the exchange is this, my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved, when the gentle hunter wounded and subdued me in love's arms, my soul fallen, new life receiving, this did I exchange, my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved, the arrow he drew full of love, my soul was made one with her creator, other love I want not, surrender now to my God, that my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved. This beautiful poem is a result of Teresa's reflections on Songs 2-16, My Beloved Belongs to Me and I to Him. In her verse, she expresses a fundamental truth of the interior journey. God Himself initiates and sustains a relationship and invites us to surrender to Him in faith. Our efforts of self-renunciation, sacrifice, and humility, about which Teresa constantly discusses in her writings, are our personal response to this love. In renouncing ourselves, we allow the Lord to unite us to Himself. Let us not tire of making our sacrifices of love, but instead take courage, sure in the knowledge that we are already loved. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth, but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes. You are his body. Christ has no body now on earth, but yours. O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who one God forever and ever. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Audio
St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-7
"A novena to St. Teresa of Avila, Day 7, Surrender St. Teresa, you have said, Myself surrendered and given, the exchange is this, my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved, when the gentle hunter wounded and subdued me in love's arms, my soul fallen, new life receiving, this did I exchange, my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved, the arrow he drew full of love, my soul was made one with her creator, other love I want not, surrender now to my God, that my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved. This beautiful poem is a result of Teresa's reflections on Songs 2 -16, My Beloved Belongs to Me and I to Him. In her verse, she expresses a fundamental truth of the interior journey. God Himself initiates and sustains a relationship and invites us to surrender to Him in faith. Our efforts of self -renunciation, sacrifice, and humility, about which Teresa constantly discusses in her writings, are our personal response to this love. In renouncing ourselves, we allow the Lord to unite us to Himself. Let us not tire of making our sacrifices of love, but instead take courage, sure in the knowledge that we are already loved. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth, but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes. You are his body. Christ has no body now on earth, but yours. O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who one God forever and ever. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-7 - burst 1
"A novena to St. Teresa of Avila, Day 7, Surrender St. Teresa, you have said, Myself surrendered and given, the exchange is this, my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved, when the gentle hunter wounded and subdued me in love's arms, my soul fallen, new life receiving, this did I exchange, my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved, the arrow he drew full of love, my soul was made one with her creator, other love I want not, surrender now to my God, that my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved. This beautiful poem is a result of Teresa's reflections on Songs 2 -16, My Beloved Belongs to Me and I to Him. In her verse, she expresses a fundamental truth of the interior journey. God Himself initiates and sustains a relationship and invites us to surrender to Him in faith. Our efforts of self -renunciation, sacrifice, and humility, about which Teresa constantly discusses in her writings, are our personal response to this love. In renouncing ourselves, we allow the Lord to unite us to Himself. Let us not tire of making our sacrifices of love, but instead take courage, sure in the knowledge that we are already loved. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth, but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes. You are his body. Christ has no body now on earth, but yours. O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who one God forever and ever. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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St.-Teresa-of-Avila-Day-7 - burst 1
"Day 7, Surrender St. Teresa, you have said, Myself surrendered and given, the exchange is this, my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved, when the gentle hunter wounded and subdued me in love's arms, my soul fallen, new life receiving, this did I exchange, my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved, the arrow he drew full of love, my soul was made one with her creator, other love I want not, surrender now to my God, that my beloved is for me, and I am for my beloved.
Audio
"avila" Discussed on Audio
"A novena to Saint Teresa of Avila, day six, hell. Saint Teresa, you have said, A long time after the Lord had already granted me many of the favors I've mentioned and other very lofty ones while I was in prayer one day. I suddenly found that, without knowing how, I had seemingly been put in hell. The fact is that I don't know how to give a sufficiently powerful description of that interior fire and that despair, coming in addition to such extreme torments and pains. I didn't see who inflicted them on me, but as it seemed to me, I felt myself burning and crumbling, and I repeat, the worst was that interior fire and despair. Teresa experiences the vision described above within the context of God's salvific action, both universal and personal, in order that she might understand the torments from which she was freed because of His mercy, and also to motivate her to realize her personal vocation of reform. The theme of hell appears often in her writings and underlines humanity's gift of free will and its natural consequences. The redemption wrought by Christ is intended for all, and the divine plan is that all should be saved, but this does not preclude one's possibility to choose. Hell is a result of a lifetime of choices, made of separating oneself from God through sin, resulting in the suffocating experience of being completely bound in the darkness of God's absence without freedom and without hope. Not wanting to see others end like this, Teresa exercised her own free will, dedicating her life to participating in Christ's own saving action via her life of prayer. May we, like Teresa, give thanks to God for the truths revealed to us about eternal life, for our redemption through Christ's blood, and for the gift of free will that allows us to choose and love Him freely. Let us also pray for all those who most need our prayers for conversion of heart today. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, 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. O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Audio
"avila" Discussed on Audio
"A novena to St. Teresa of Avila. Day 5 Humility St. Teresa, you have said, O eternal Father, how much this humility deserves! What treasure do we have that could buy your son? The sale of him, we already know, was for thirty pieces of silver. But to buy him, no price is sufficient. Since by sharing in our nature he has become one with us here below, and as Lord of his own will, he reminds the Father that because he belongs to him, the Father in turn can give him to us. And so he says, our bread. He doesn't make any difference between himself and us, but we make one by not giving ourselves up each day for his majesty. Teresa composed these words as she reflected on the words of the Our Father, Give us this day our daily bread. Her meditation on this phrase brought her immediately to Christ's experience of the Passion and its significance for her and her contemporaries. For her, Jesus is the foundation and model of humility in the spiritual life. Humility plays an important role in interior progress because through it we come to appreciate and understand the beauty of our souls and our limitations to gradually cede control of our lives to God in faith and trust and develop a sensibility for perceiving and carrying out his will to love others properly and to accept and cherish the depth of the love that God has for us. So let us ask for the grace of humility that we may grow in truthful relationship with God, ourselves, and others. St. Teresa speaks to us today saying, 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. O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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"avila" Discussed on Audio
"A novena to St. Teresa of Avila. Day 4. The Soul. St. Teresa, you have said… It is that we consider our soul to be like a castle, made entirely out of a diamond or a very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many dwelling places. For in reflecting upon it carefully, sisters, we realize that the soul of the just person is nothing else but a paradise, where the Lord says he finds his delight. I don't find anything comparable to the magnificent beauty of a soul and its marvelous capacity. Indeed, our intellects, however keen, can hardly comprehend it, just as they cannot comprehend God, but he himself says that he has created us in his own image and likeness. Teresa uses a variety of images to describe the soul, likening it to a beehive, a garden, and in this case, a castle. In doing so, she attempts to explain its innate fecund richness brought about through its creation. Made in the image and likeness of God, our souls mirror the divine in our natural interior profundity and in our capacity to do his loving and saving will. Moreover, our souls are where Christ resides and interacts with us and desires to permeate with his light. The experience of God, therefore, is not something beyond the human experience but intimately connected to it. Indeed, the work of personal transformation takes place in this interior environment. May we learn from Teresa how to appreciate and care for our souls that we may radiate Christ to others and give thanks to God for making us his home. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, 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. O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. St. Teresa, pray for us. That we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Audio
"avila" Discussed on Audio
"A novena to St. Teresa of Avila, Day 3, The Centrality of the Humanity of Christ. St. Teresa, you have said, The thought comes to me now, that our good Jesus showed us the weakness of His humanity previous to the trials, and when He was in the abyss of His sufferings, showed such great fortitude that He not only did not complain, but did nothing that would make it appear He was suffering with weakness. When He went to the garden, He said, My soul is sorrowful, even to death. Yet, while on the cross, for He was already suffering death, He did not complain. Teresa desired to share her reflections on the Song of Songs, a rather daring act for her time. Her ponderings on Songs 1-2 led her to describe the peace and union granted the soul, opening the person to the possibility of accepting trials in the service of God, opportunities that also bring one's weaknesses and limitations to the fore. Desiring to encourage her sisters, she looks to Christ's own experience during His passion. Indeed, the humanity of Christ plays a crucial role in her doctrine on prayer. In His incarnation, He expresses a profundity of God's love for humanity and is the perfect mediator between the two. Moreover, His earthly life serves as the example and guide for our spiritual growth. In this way, He leads us to discover our true selves. Thus, as we continue to pray through the intercession of the saint, let us recognize that she invites us to be in love with Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, May today there be peace within. May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. May you use those gifts that you have received and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of you. O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.
Audio
"avila" Discussed on Audio
"A novena to Saint Teresa of Avila. Day Two. Intimate and Transformative Prayer. Saint Teresa, you have said, Whoever has not begun the practice of prayer, I beg for the love of the Lord not to go without so great a good. There is nothing here to fear, but only something to desire. And if one perseveres, I trust then in the mercy of God, who never fails to repay anyone who has taken Him for a friend. For mental prayer, in my opinion, is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends. It means taking time frequently to be alone with Him, who we know loves us. In order that the love be true and the friendship endure, the wills of the friends must be in accord. On September 27, 1970, Pope Paul VI proclaimed Teresa a Doctor of the Church. In his address, the Pope celebrated Teresa's gift of spiritual doctrine, a fact underlined by the title written on her statue in the Basilica in Avila, Mater Spiritualium, the Mother of Spirituality. She certainly merits this title. Her writings are not theoretical abstracts, but concrete lessons drawn from her own experience and interaction with the Divine. In entering the struggle of spiritual growth, she came to discover some very important truths about the process of prayer, the truth of God, and the realization of self in this context. She realized in a very real and personal way Jesus' words, I call you friends. Learning from Teresa, let us make ample space for prayer, taking time and having the courage to open ourselves to all of the possibilities that lie open to us when we enter this deep and profound relationship, including our own transformation in God and His love. St. Teresa speaks to us today, saying, May today there be peace within. May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith. May you use those gifts that you have received and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love. It is there for each and every one of you. O God, who through your Spirit raised up St. Teresa of Jesus to show the Church the way to seek perfection, grant that we may always be nourished by the food of her heavenly teaching and fired with longing for true holiness, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. St. Teresa, pray for us that we may become worthy of the promises of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"avila" Discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"Particularly Manchin 6, if I'm not mistaken about this Antony, probably is one of the richest mansions that she describes. I mean, she takes a lot of time with this particular part of the spiritual journey. Yeah, that's why it's fitting that we're also taking a little bit of time with it you. While we're preparing for today's section, you coined a new title for saint Teresa of Avila. You referred to her as saint Teresa the great. And I think if there's just a vacation for that, it's because of some of the material we're currently reading. Anthony, the thing about Teresa of avo, and I think one of the reasons why she should have that term, the great attached to her name, is that when you look at her the fruit that comes from that giant tree that roots go so deep, the branches are so strong and spread out if she is just this great gift, particularly as you said when it comes to this particular exploration of the interior of our hearts. Yeah, in this particular passage we begin to see some of the greatness of the insight that speaks into our hearts, her ability to penetrate and help distinguish important experiences in prayer for those who are trying to grow and with previously mentioned their today we live at a time where there's kind of what has been coined by others and I like this terminology. We live in the midst of a lot of spiritual technology where there's methods and techniques of all different kinds being offered us and one of the techniques is our whole series of different kinds of apathetic techniques, which means basically the effort to pray without images without employing your imagination without using your reason that what I mean by a better use of the term apathetic that's in our tradition. But these ways of prayer that are characterized themselves as the VNA negativa or apathetic prayer, they provide a technique for lulling your spirit into a kind of what I would call contrived silence and in that contrived silence kind of presumptuously believe that somehow the lord is helping your soul grow while in reality maybe the lack of activity, the overpass passivity of the soul in prayer can actually be quite dangerous. And in seeing this Chris, what I'm not saying is that there is an a deep silence that the lord can lead the soul into the course there's a deep silence and I think that deep silence the lord gives us he communicates far more into our souls than in all our efforts of prayer and all our active efforts. When I'm speaking against what trace of Avila speaking against more, in the section, is the effort to force yourself to go there and with the presumption that simply because I've arrested the activity of my intellect, my imagination, my intuition, by having arrested that activity, stop that activity. I am therefore in a deeper place of prayer. It's not necessarily the case, and she makes the argument, it has been making the argument argument in this chapter 7 of the 6 mansion that it can even be dangerous, and what she's doing is a kind of a polemic for using your humanity and prayer in your humanity includes your imagination in your intellect and she's going to acknowledge that sometimes you're overwhelmed and we talked about this last time. You're overwhelmed in the midst of prayer by a great movement of the Holy Spirit and you're not able to use your imagination or your intellect because God has begun a new activity. She's fully aware that this is a possibility, but she her message her teaching is that we shouldn't presume upon that possibility. We should be ready and resolved to use our humanity to throw our whole selves into our prayer bodily and but also our intellect and our imagination, we should employ all these powers in the service of God and prayer is the highest service of God we possibly perform, and so that's going to the text itself. Some souls imagine they can not dwell upon the passion, in which case they will be able still less to meditate upon the seat most secret virgin in the lives of the saints, the remembrance of whom brings us such great profit, encouragement. You know, one of the things that I think happens for people of prayer and she's speaking to this at least indirectly and it happens for me is sometimes I'm doing the stations of the cross or I'm looking at a crucifix and there's something in my spirit that doesn't want to think about Jesus crucified. It doesn't want something in me is hostile to pondering what Jesus has done to overcome and bear away my sin. And there's something in my heart that is sluggish in wants to recoil and run away from the love of God and the call it makes on my existence, and that call is what we experience when we start pondering with our imagination with our understanding. When we call to mind with our memory, what Jesus did for us on the cross, but when we called to mind that when he rose from the dead, his hands were pierced and he could tell Saint Thomas to put his hand in his side, the wounded Jesus risen from the dead glorified, calls to us with the love of the father even now while we're talking. In its this Jesus that trees of Avila wants us to encounter, she doesn't believe in and sometimes people who promote spiritual technologies believe in a God whose behind the holy Trinity, the God who is beyond Christ and so you believe in Jesus to bind this kind of impersonal absolute force to is kind of beyond the doctrines of our faith and that that's a more authentic or more real experience of God. She doesn't believe that. And in fact, I can't think of a single saint or doctor the church in our whole tradition that believes that. Jesus Christ is the revelation of God the father and he's that revelation for us because he became flesh. Which means that because he's become flesh, the powers of our imagination and our understanding can be into dwell on his humanity. And what he bore for us out of love and devotion to the father and also concern for our Salvation we can begin to ponder that and as we do, it inclines our spirit to prayer and the prayer that we have is for the God kum Jesus Christ, the son of the father, the image of the invisible God, gives us access to. In fact, the kind of access that we have we find in the letters letter to hebrews, it's called bold access. Jesus Christ, through a sacred humanity, gives us bold access so that even our feeble, weak, sometimes very wounded, natural powers. Can be employed in the work of prayer. And that's our dignity, our dignity is that when we employ the natural powers of our soul, our voices, our intellects, our imagination, our bodies and prayer, weak and feeble as they are, wounded by send as they are God the father hears us because by faith we're joined to Jesus Christ. And trees of abala firmly believes this. And it's a unique claim in all the world religions, no other world religion claims the access to God that we have. In trace a stakes or claim right there, and that's why she's arguing about the souls that imagine that they can't dwell on the cross or the blessed virgin. They deprive themselves of great benefit. I can not conceive what they are thinking of for though angelic spirits freed from every thing corporeal may remain permanently and kindled with love, this is not possible for those of us who live in this mortal body. We need to cultivate and think upon in seek the companionship of those who living on earth like ourselves have accomplished such great deans for God. The last thing we should do is to withdraw of set purpose from our greatest help and blessing, which is the most sacred humanity of our lord Jesus Christ. So I had gone on a little bit of a diet tribe there, Chris, but I think this is such an important point. I wanted to return to it. We need to recover in our time, a devotion to the humanity of our lord Jesus Christ. We'll return to beginning to pray with doctor Anthony lillis in just a moment. Did you know that discerning hearts has a free app in which you can find all your favorite discerning hearts programming? Father Timothy Gallagher, doctor Anthony lillis, deacon James Keating, Mike aquilina, doctor Matthew bunson, and so many more are found on the discerning hearts free app. Did you also know that you can stream discerning hearts programming on numerous streaming platforms such as Apple podcasts, Google Play, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, stitcher, tune in, and so many more, and did you know that discerning hearts also has that YouTube page? Be sure to check out all these different places where you can find discerning hearts. Saint Teresa speaks to us today, saying let nothing disturb you, but nothing frighten you. All things are passing
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"avila" Discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"If that mother does her best to honor her state in life, right? And she does her best, so she's not undisciplined, when she sleeps when she rises is often dictated by the children, but in so far as whatever is under her control, she seeks to order to God. And let's say she can only get 15 minutes of mental prayer in a day, and it's interrupted by having to nurse while she's doing it, which I've heard can be a very beautiful experience. She will not be deprived of the grace. To reach the heights of contemplation. That's this is just the beauty and the blessing of our God. So a carmelite nun has to pray four hours a day and live by a pretty strict rule and never eat meat and use the discipline every Wednesday and all of these. But that's the vocation that they're called to. So you can have a carmelite nun on one hand praying four hours a day, and a good holy mother, imperfectly, working on discipline to the degree that she can, and she's doing all that she can, they will ascend similarly by the mercy of God, and I just love that. I love that about our faith that it's not just like this like in the early first early centuries of the church, you had the gnostic heresies where it's just this only this elite group. This is saying this idea in all of its construct is nonsense. Dan Burke, father, husband, you know, Chris McGregor, wife, mother, can be a saint, and God has given us everything we need to do. We'll return to saint Teresa of Avila, spiritual warfare in the progress of the soul with Dan Burke in just a moment. Did you know that discerning hearts has a free app in which you can find all your favorite discerning hearts programming? Father Timothy Gallagher, doctor Anthony lillis, deacon James Keating, Mike aquilina, doctor Matthew bunson, and so many more are found on the discerning hearts free app. Did you also know that you can stream discerning hearts programming on numerous streaming platforms such as Apple podcasts, Google Play, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, stitcher, tune in, and so many more, and did you know that discerning hearts also has the YouTube page? Be sure to check out all these different places where you can find discerning hearts. A love song by saint Teresa of Avila. Majestic sovereign timeless wisdom your kindness melts my heart, cold, soul. Handsome
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"avila" Discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"But I remember the usually the spaceships have some kind of big shield on Yelp that this sort of invisible sphere that protects them from onslaughts of the enemy. And then there's the strength of the vehicle itself. Humility and self awareness are like that big shields around the outside. God were self awareness. When that is there, it's hard to get in. No, the devil has no power over a perfectly humble soul. None, and I do mean that. He has no direct ability to manipulate that soul. Because there are no handles, there are no, I mean, it's just that souls would purified so much. So, and humility and self humility and God were self knowledge are symbiotic virtues that strengthen one another and, you know, like how does it work practically? Well, living by a rule of life, which we also talked about in the last last show. Testing yourself in a daily exam and against that rule so that you can't delude yourself into, you know, I weigh myself every day. So there's not it's not possible for me to say, but I've been eating so well what's happened, you know? That's just not possible. What's only possible is that I that I'm diluting myself to thinking I'm eating well. When I'm really not. And I'm not remembering well, but true awareness in being awake is being in the presence of God and saying, lord, I want nothing but you show me what is deficient in me. And those who are those who are practicing a healthy spiritual life every night do an examination almost very often in the letters of the hours or a formal exam and then every day reset the compass when they get up, okay? And that helps to keep you awake along with the other spiritual disciplines that we've talked a lot about the sacraments that sort of thing. But that keeps awareness high and humility high because you're constantly going, okay. You need to adjust that. Okay, a little off here, lord help me. I don't want that to happen again tomorrow wasn't so kind. I don't want that to happen again tomorrow. 8 was a little gluttonous. I want that happening again tomorrow. It just keeps you from these trends of self destruction. And that's what in the 5th mansion in the higher orders you have to guard against, you know, I had a, I deal with a lot of different convents and religious and all of that. And there was one who there were cloistered nuns, and they would run the. Delay people that support them crazy, finding just the right jelly. And there was very insistent that even though there was one form of jelly that they must have from one store and another form of jelly across the town they must have from another store, they must have them. This is an example and it may seem very trifling. We can get attached to the most insignificant things. Like, so these women are so holy. And sleep on straw mats, even today. Like these are, this is not easy stuff. They don't have shoes. You know, all of this, but the soul is always, you know, the broken part of us is always moving toward two things. One is God, I think, naturally, but also attachment, you know, if we don't, if the pieces of us that are not fully his are always looking to grab onto something that gives us the comfort that really should only come from God. And if we're aware and awake, we'll be free of those things. Eventually. You've been listening to saint Teresa of Avila, spiritual warfare, and the progress of the soul with Dan Burke. To hear and or two download this conversation along with hundreds of other spiritual formation programs, visit discerning hearts dot com. Or you can find it within the free discerning hearts app. Also, you can view the video of our conversation by visiting the discerning hearts YouTube channel. This has been a production of discerning hearts. I'm your host, Chris McGregor. We hope that if this has been helpful for you, that you will first pray for our mission, which is to offer authentic and rock solid spiritual formation freely to souls around the world, and if you find us worthy, please consider a charitable donation which is fully tax deductible to help support our efforts. But most of all, we hope that you will tell a friend about discerning hearts dot com and join us next time for saint Teresa of Avila, spiritual warfare and the progress of the soul with Dan Burke.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"avila" Discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"Presents spiritual warfare and the progress of the soul. Madam Burke, who is the founder and president of the Avila institute for spiritual formation. And hosts the divine intimacy radio show with his wife, Stephanie. He is the author and editor of more than 17 books on Catholic spirituality, including devil in the castle, saint Teresa of Avila, spiritual warfare in the progress of the soul. The book on which this series is based. Spiritual warfare and the progress of the soul with Dan Burke, I'm your host, Chris McGregor. Dan, thank you again for joining me. I'm so grateful for this time, especially with one of the busiest men on the planet. Well, you know, your ministry is really important to the church. And discerning hearts is the fact that we have so many people who love what we do in love what you do. So it's a real blessing to be with you and contribute to the great work that you're doing. I consider it a great compliment complimenting ministry. We compliment each other. And I think that's how the Holy Spirit works. That's a great sign. Unity. Yeah, and I think what's cool about it is, you know, when we can do things like this, there's not a territorialism, right? It's just if I left you up and you lift me up, then everybody wins, you know, and so it's a beautiful thing when different organizations who have who have similar missions, but unique expressions can collaborate in a way that really lifts all rising tide. Lifts off. Love that. It's not global warming either. It's just heartwarming. Heartwarming. Right. Oh, anyway. And I was so grateful when the devil in the castle, saint Teresa of avala, spiritual warfare, and the progress of the soul came out. I've got, I've had to take some of my tabs out because they lose their meaning after a while when you have so many in there and you're just yeah, I've got a lot of tabs in my own copy too, so. Oh, and because it brings to us and aspect of the castle, we talked about this last time, but it brings about aspects of the castle that is contextualized with a lot of other great teaching, but brings forward how the enemy will work in the castle. And again, it will in our interior life affect us in so many different ways outside too. And that's not spoken often about in relation to the anterior castle, is it? No, it's been an ignored aspect of her teaching. I think only touched upon peripherally at times. And that's when I wrote the book as I did it. So that could be brought out and people who are moved by her work could be helped. But also to introduce the broader church to the understanding of her unique contribution to how the enemy works at different stages of the spiritual life, certainly you can find that in John as well, John of the cross. A little bit in ignatius, I know you've had some great shows with father Gallagher because the first rules one through 14 or ten to be in the purgative way in the second rules tend to be normative in the limited way. But Theresa gives a very thorough treatment of every stage really from the beginning of the interior life to union, she gives the most thorough, I think description and experiential description, which is helpful to help us understand what's coming, you know, as we travel the narrow way into the castle. We can understand what's coming, maybe better understand what we're experiencing now and then more effectively correspond or yield or follow the lord's wisdom as to how to fight and how to make progress. Well, I think the thing that helped me the most when I went back and through Europe guidance in this in the book, you said, go back and bring the interior castle with you. So you can kind of cross reference things. Yeah. And so it was helpful not only did you say it, but she also reiterated the importance of realizing that the interior castle is actually something that's in within us. To say, in this, I love this, that you have to say, I need to go into a room, but you're already in the room. Yeah. Yeah, and we talked about that last time. We don't realize that, do we? Yeah, I mean, the kingdom of goddess within us and I think it's something I honestly have struggled with. It's easier for me and maybe it's maleness. I don't know. It's easier for me to conceive of the narrow way of this external road that I'm walking up. But no, I mean, it's why no matter where we are, we can be with him. It's why we can always draw upon his presence and strength because he is in some mysterious way. Within us. And so in the interior castle is, you know, it's weird. I kind of like to conceive of it as both insight and outside of us. And this may be confusing, but I just had this vision as we're talking about it. But, you know, as we enter in, now we are, it is within us, right? And then as we go deeper, it's more fully within us, you know? So that's that helps me to conceptualize because it's hard for me to envision the entire castle being interior, but then as I move more deeply in, it's more fully present. And that's certainly true and has been spoken of by the mystics and even in iconography. I love the orthodox icon of Jesus. Where you see him in a circle, you know, as a baby, but in his. Godly form too, in her womb and I always think of the more filled we are with Jesus. The bigger that space, he occupies in our soul. And so those kinds of images help me understand the mystery a little bit. I mean, it's a mystery because it escapes our ability to fully grasp and understand at any given time. But it is a beautiful analogy that I think at the very least helps a person to understand the average Catholic understand that my Catholic faith is not about, I go to church on Sunday and I go home. It's way bigger than that. And I think the mystics in particular help to illumine a world and a life that we would have never otherwise conceived of if they hadn't shared their heart like saint Teresa's done in the interior
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"avila" Discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"With doctor Matthew bunson. In looking at how she was able to embrace that, I think it really helps us to take a look at her life within her own family before she left the order. She had a great love for her father, didn't she. She did. And she writes about the fact that she was fascinated from an early age with the lives of the saints. And so much that she wanted to be a martyr for the faith. And as she ran away with her brother Rodrigo, to try to be put to death by the Moors, but they were stopped as a little kids off and are by a sensible family member. I think it was an uncle. Who found them and brought them back. And she continued, though, to love the lives of the saints. But what we see in these early years, the tension that plagued her for some time, and that was on the one hand, she could see what she was being called to. She could see the prayer life, the mystical life that was there. But she was also held back by what she referred to as a worldliness by an interest in material things. Including her deep and abiding shame for what she thought was an obsession with her own appearance, the sin of pride to her. I think was something that we had very heavily on her. And so when she was sent to study with the augustinian nuns that Avila, she suffered deeply is often the case with those who live in this kind of terrible tension. And to the point where she was in a coma, she's been years in abject misery. And yet emerged from this, she was able to fight back these weaknesses. And felt that call to enter the carmelite monastery. Now, her father was not especially thrilled with the idea. And nevertheless, the age of 20, she entered the carmelite monastery, the incarnation also Avila. And took the name Teresa of Jesus. But again, there was that tension. And she felt so ill that she was in a coma for four days as she recounts looking as though she were dead. And yet again, she fought that weakness. But then as she's in this cloister, she's in this carmelite. Systematically, her family was lost to her. Her father died in 1543, followed then by her siblings who either died or left for America. And this is a drama then of domestic loss combined with her own spiritual development. And it really culminates in 1554 during lent. Here she was she was 39 years old. And discovered the statue of the passion of our lord as she wrote to grievously wounded, that helped to change her life around. And again, she felt that close connection to the confessions and as she wrote in her autobiography, feeling of the presence of God would come over me unexpectedly so that I could in no wise doubt either that he was within me or that I was wholly absorbed in him. And that inner reform of Teresa. Could not stay purely within her. And she always says that those who receive blessings invariably must take those blessings that others might benefit from that. So what does she start? She begins the process of reforming the caramel. The carmelites and Avila, and in this task she had the support of her bishop Don Alvaro de Mendoza. And as well as a support of the order superior general of the time Jean Baptiste frosty. I mention this because the reform that you wanted to bring to the carmelite so very much paralleled and mirrored the internal reform and the spiritual life that she was herself now undergoing. So it needed to have that external expression in that incarnational sense that we see with so many of the saints and so many of the doctors of the church. Again, I think that is so key that you see not only with those doctors of the church that have received a subtitle as it were of mystical doctor, but you see it in almost, well, you actually see it in every life of not just the doctors of the church, but the fathers of the church of the saints of holiness that what is happening to them interiorly is manifested by the gift that's given to the church and their exterior expression. Yeah, because they understand deeply that it's not about them. And Theresa saw a round her and was probably appalled by the laxity, the lack of seriousness, and I don't mean to condemn the carmelites of the time. But like so many great congregations and needed. From time to time in the history of any community. And Theresa saw a round chart, the need for that reform and exactly as she saw it in herself. And as a consequence of that, she wanted to go back to the foundations. To be faithful to that original terrorism of the caramel. The prayer life, the discipline, the simplicity that total commitment to Christ. And as a result, she was given permission to begin establishing these new carmelite communities. And of course, who did she meet along this way, but St. John of the cross. And of course, in 1568, she established with him the first convent of what became known as a dyscalculia carmelites. Not too far outside of Avila. And then came the permission to expand this community. To have a more formal structure for it is a kind of autonomous province. We can date from around 1580 then the starting point for the discounts caramelly order. What does she have to do though? She, again, had to go through the process of validation of study of those who doubted the sincerity, the authenticity of this. And here we were just talking about the inquisition. But Teresa and John of the cross faithfully submitted themselves to this process, they didn't fight it. They didn't try to get around it. They didn't leave. They accepted the rightful authority of the church in making these decisions, and they were validated. And she gave her life to continuing to express the mystical life that she led while at the same time pushing forward with the manifest expression of that reform in this new dyscalculia carmelite community. In this new order, that she had helped bring about. And so she could die.
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"avila" Discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"Catholic social communications and education, including writing, editing, and teaching on a variety of topics related to church history, the papacy, the saints and Catholic culture. He is the faculty chair at the Catholic distance university, a senior fellow of the St. Paul center for biblical theology, and the author or co author of over 50 books, including the encyclopedia of Catholic history, and the bestselling biographies of saint Damien of molokai and saint kateri tekakwitha. He also serves as a senior editor for the national Catholic register, and is a senior contributor to ewtn news. The doctors of the church, the charism of wisdom, with doctor Matthew bunsen. I'm your host, Chris McGregor. Matthew, thank you so much for joining me again. The great privilege to be with you, Chris, especially about such a remarkable doctor of the church. And that's saying something given many of the people we've talked about. She is incredible in so many ways. Well, that's exactly right. In 1970, Pope Paul the 6th did declared her among the first to the women doctors of the church, in fact, you can make the argument that she was the first. Because Catherine of Siena was named about a week later. So it's a statement of the importance that Paul assigned to her in the church. But also the teachings that I think he wanted the church to be able to reflect on. In her life and her writings, her contributions to our understanding of the mystical life, but also her understanding of prayer, not connected as it is to the mystical life, but we think of Teresa Avila as one of the greatest mystics in the history of the church, so she's accomplished something in her lifetime that's unattainable for us. When in fact, and I know that we'll be talking about this. Teresa vavila makes it possible for all of us to understand what prayer is. And how then to take that prayer life. And this is true for all of us into the heights of mystical contemplation. So as we have talked about doctors at the church previously, we can talk, for example, about Francis de sales and others. Always stressing the fact that holiness is for everyone that that life of prayer that deep relationship that we can have with our lord. Isn't for just a few, the elect, some elite group, but it is for all of us. And in that sense, then, Theresa vavila as the doctor of prayer. Is a very important figure in the history of the church. Oh, tremendous blessing was given to the church in that the life of saint Teresa of Avila was chronicled with her own hand. Yeah, the life of Teresa of Jesus, her autobiography, written to help her nuns as so many of these great books often start, I think, of terrorism as you, for example, deeply honest in itself appraisal. And in that sense, it's value is that it is so Frank and so honest. How does she begin her book, but she says, I had a father and mother who were devout and feared God, our lord also helped me she wrote with his grace, all this would have been enough to make me good if I had not been so wicked. That's her own self appraisal. And she has wonderful insights into her family life. She knows, for example, that her father was very much given to the reading of good books and so she said that he had them in Spanish that his children might read them. And right there in that just a little opening paragraph for her, we begin to appreciate her own spiritual development, her own intellectual development. But also how valuable an autobiography like this can be. I'm reminded, of course, and there are a number of parallels between Theresa Avila and Augustine. Now, Augustine was sort of a world class center prior to his magnificent transformation, his incredible conversion. But Theresa Avila considered herself also a horrible sinner in different ways. And in that sense, then her autobiography is also a lesson in the style of the confessions. In that a soul is willing to bear itself for the betterment of others. To lay forth this descends and failings that almost everyone else, all of us would be so inclined to either gloss over or to omit certain pertinent details about our own lives out of pride out of shame out of a reluctance to have ourselves our inner selves exposed, and yet Theresa Avila discerned the importance of that honesty. Because she needed to be able to tell her audience of her journey. And in that sense, then, too, her autobiography is not quite unique in that it's frankness is so valuable. But it's unique in that we get to make this journey with her. Much as we did with Augustine. She was born at such an incredible time when it comes to the dissemination of this material. This is the time when the printing press makes available books to the common man. I mean, so that you can have it in your home. So not only was she when she sat down to write this, you're right. I mean, she was writing it for her sisters. She never I doubt dreamt that it would one day be put into print and then disseminated into the hands of men and women throughout all of Europe and then eventually throughout the world. Yeah. Exactly. Here we're seeing someone who put together her life for her sisters. Which itself is the fruit of years of reflection and a spiritual journey. And it was written in the caramel for her sisters, but at the same time, she had submitted her soul to what that the
Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"avila" Discussed on Discerning Hearts - Catholic Podcasts
"You know? What you've just described? I mean, again, here we go back. This is what a mother does. A mother is the great encourager. Come on, kids. Get back into this school. You can go back that day. You can go try again. Let's keep growing. And she doesn't necessarily say it exactly like this, but I think it's expressed this way. And I think you really help us to bring it forward, make it workable in our current lives, is the recognition of temptation. And again, I'm not talking about an overarching theme that will break open more in future conversations. But that temptation, especially that comes from a relationship. Which relationship are you going to choose? And a man that I admire so much and I know that he's someone I believe that you hold in a high regard too as father Dennis McManus, who? Oh, yes. Who talks about how we have to understand that the angels are beings of relationship because they too were created in the image of God. And he's a God of relationship. Just look at the Trinity. But anyway, the fallen angels, even though they're falling, they're still beings of relationship. And they want, if you invite them in, if by your behavior by your choices, the things that you do, you open that door, you're saying, come in, and they take you. They do. And we have to guard against that and doesn't Theresa, Dan, I mean, throughout the whole book is like, how do you recognize and say, no, to those many, many pitfalls and pratfalls that people who are in sick relationships with those beings how to break free from that and why you should. Yeah, I mean, in the first mansion, you know, as we've talked about what is required in a sense to enter in, she talks about the demons in the outer court and how, at this stage, you're going from good to better to use ignition terms, which is good. But you're still rather far from the center of the castle and you're pretty close to sin and probably at this stage you're going to have commonly habitual mortals, habitual beings and those sorts of things. So what is the devil? How does he tempt you at this stage? He tempts you with all aspects of the world of flesh and the devil, right? Lust to the flesh, pride of life, things that appeal to your sensual nature to your pride, all of these things. Because we're not yet really entering into a deeper kind of purification. We're not yet. We're more in the stage of fighting sin than we are acquiring virtue. I mean, they can work hand in hand, but the early stages is very difficult. And it's where and the demons actually observe more effort in her description at this stage because of the fear of they know if Chris McGregor gets near Jesus. I'm lost. The closer Chris McGregor gets to Jesus, the less control of the enemy has. So if he wants to get you, he wants to get you at the beginning because he's smart, where you're weak. That's the other problem in the beginning and his first mansion because of habitual sin and send darkens the intellect and weakens the will. And so we have this sort of circle the drain problem of I sin, I'm weaker. I'm saying I'm weaker. I sin, I'm more in control of the enemy than of God, even though I desire God. And so in this stage, the enemy goes all out and, you know, maybe for me, one of the temptations in my early Christian walk was that I was my home life was so bad, but I was very good at business. And so he tempted me to think of business in ways that drew me away from my primary state and life, like my role as a father, you know, that's where I'm spending time with children. Attempted me into ambition, right? And accomplishment. My first book was a business book, which is very hard to get published. I can comparison to Catholic material. And you know, I had that goal. When I reached the goal, I thought, wow, this is a total worthless endeavor because I had been already advancing with Jesus and it was a long, hard, difficult thing to do. And then I accomplished it and realized this means nothing but the enemy was saying, but if you do this, people will hold you in the steam and you'll get better jobs and all of that. So whatever it is your weaknesses, it could be sex, it could be drugs, it could be whatever. For me, it was primarily business. He will amplify opportunities. He will bring people in your life, you know, if you struggle with drugs as an example, and I'm working with somebody who has a cocaine addiction right now, and so the first big break was to get away from the relationship with his dealer who was his best friend, right? Really hard to do. Great relationship. Right. In their mind, so the enemy is doing all that to say to try to draw you back, you know? And so I think it may be the most important contribution in this book has to give. Is to so many of those people who are in the pews who have never been ignited for Jesus, right? It feels to me like, you know, discerning hearts, all of your ministry is about igniting hearts, you know? But once they get ignited, the gifts she brings is, okay, now be aware. This is what's going to happen. And if you're aware and you understand, you'll know how to take action. I know that's Nick nation framework, not a carbohydrate. But it's all applies, right? It's the same all the way up. It's across the board, isn't it? I mean, isn't that what you teach your kid? Yeah. So that's the gift of what she does is, okay, I'm going from good to better, what's going to happen? Okay, it's going to happen. Okay, now I wow, I see it happening. So then I'm not a victim to it as much. You know, we're still still have weak will. We still have compulsions that are destructive to us. But when you're awake and aware you can fight and she gives us the tools to fight. We'll return to saint Teresa of Avila, spiritual warfare in the progress of the soul with Dan Burke in just a moment. Did you know that discerning hearts has a free app in which you can find all your favorite discerning hearts programming? Father Timothy Gallagher, doctor Anthony lillis, deacon James Keating, Mike aquilina, doctor Matthew bunson, and so many more are found on the discerning hearts free app. Did you also know that you can stream discerning hearts programming on numerous streaming platforms such as Apple podcasts, Google Play, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, stitcher, tune in, and so many more, and did you know that discerning hearts also has that YouTube page? Be sure to check out all these different places where you can find discerning hearts. A love song by saint Teresa of Avila. Majestic sovereign, timeless wisdom. Your kindness melts my heart, cold, soul. Handsome
The Chad Prather Show
"avila" Discussed on The Chad Prather Show
"Say not today armed national. Go by the way of national guard. We saw them to their down there. But they're they're more innovative passive rule. I want them in any enforcement rule with a capacity to detain people. But i don't even wanna try to detain them. I want them to be stopped at the line. What would happen. Want them to do it. One day come together and stand on the line and and what would that coyote. That's coming across in that raft. Going to going to do with the people say you're not coming anymore. That message is going to be sent like a wildfire immediately to the cartels and everyone. They didn't let these people in one day. Let's see what happens because right there in that county if the if the cartels making twenty five million dollars a week. That's a hell of a week. That's going to reverberate when you me. My my load didn't get through. What do you mean. It didn't get through but you know what's going to happen. The bureaucracy is going to hear about it here in in in washington and the phone going to be ringing off the hook. Why the hell did you. They just did their job. It wouldn't be breaking any law whatsoever other than just follow law that is legislative been passed along time ago and it's called immigration federal law. The sheriff he said not gonna happen. It's not going to happen now. We met with share of an and the county attorney in kinney county just east of there. They're at a point now where they have gone after a deep and said and governor abbott has said. We have everything you need. We've got we got dogs we got. We got equipment. We got everything you need. And it's not there. It's not their greg. Abbott has said we the year. Dps has all of these things. But it's not there so they're giving the state one more opportunity to to do what they're saying they're going to do and if not they're going to hire private contractors private security contractors the same folks that that that we use in the middle east these contractors over there. They're going to hire them to protect their county. They're going to put up the technology. They're going to put up the cameras down by their sixty miles because they're they're taking it into their own hands because no one else is doing it for them. And so that's what they talked about. So they'll put up the post they'll put up the detection Technology which these private security companies have and they're gonna start detaining people down there and i want to talk a little bit about the logistical nightmare of this You know governor. Abbot saying he's an arrest people for criminal trespass easier said than done right. We heard this. Oh six weeks ago. When he declared it the first time he said it and now it's a ripple effect into the president senator that you said there's been built. It's going to open sometime next week. It's going to process these individuals that they're predicting two hundred a day. I think it's going to be more than that. And they're to take him to dilley. Texas which is three and a half hour drive from there and they're going to zoom calls. They're going to be charged with an aggravated criminal. Salt criminal trespass into the state of texas and these people are going to be arrested. The sheriff things it's gonna last and it'd be good enough capacity to do it for ten days ten days if it's at two hundred a day and then it's going to be over where you're going to put the rest of the people you mentioned eleven hundred a day and that's again just this area loan not even counting kennedy county and going to bring them..
The Chad Prather Show
"avila" Discussed on The Chad Prather Show
"The you say well you know greg. Abbott said he's going to build a wall right in the state of texas. He said he's gonna finish the wall. Everybody you can't build a wall everywhere across the southern border. You take texas geography. Some of. it's a natural that area where we're that ranch you. You can't build a wall along that reservoir. They're just not that's a natural barrier that lake. Okay the there's certain areas you can't you just can't do it I want you to play of. I want you to play number. Four sought number four real quick so down here on southern border. Not that we're going to play that one. You can cut that one. Sorry about that as my volt. Play to play number two. That's one quick federal government. Here's here's wall..