Santa Teresa: An Appreciation: With Some of the Best Passages of the Saint's Writings — John Shaqi
Santa Teresa: An Appreciation: With Some of the Best Passages of the Saint's WritingsWhyte, Alexander
Religion
Santa Teresa: An Appreciation: With Some of the Best Passages of the Saint's Writings
Whyte, Alexander
Teresa, of Avila, Saint, 1515-1582
Sixteen Augustinian _Exclamations after having Communicated_: sixty-nine
_Advices to Her Daughters_, and a small collection of love-enflamed
_Hymns_, complete what remains to us of Teresa's writings.
Teresa died of hard work and worry and shameful neglect, almost to sheer
starvation. But she had meat to eat that all Anne Bartholomew's
remaining mites could not buy for her dying mother. And, strong in the
strength of that spiritual meat, Teresa rose off her deathbed to finish
her work. She inspected with all her wonted quickness of eye and love of
order the whole of the House into which she had been carried to die. She
saw everything put into its proper place, and every one answering to
their proper order, after which she attended the divine offices for the
day, and then went back to her bed and summoned her daughters around her.
'My children,' she said, 'you must pardon me much; you must pardon me
most of all the bad example I have given you. Do not imitate me. Do not
live as I have lived. I have been the greatest sinner in all the world.
I have not kept the laws I made for others. I beseech you, my daughters,
for the love of God, to keep the rules of your Holy Houses as I have
never kept them. O my Lord,' she then turned to Him and said, 'the hour
I have so much longed for has surely come at last. The time has surely
come that we shall see one another. My Lord and Saviour, it is surely
time for me to be taken out of this banishment and be for ever with Thee.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart,
O God, Thou wilt not despise. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and
take not Thy Holy Spirit away from me. Create in me a clean heart, O
God.' 'A broken and a contrite heart; a broken and a contrite heart,'
was her continual cry till she died with these words on her lips, 'A
broken and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.' And, thus, with the
most penitential of David's penitential Psalms in her mouth, and with the
holy candle of her Church in her hand, Teresa of Jesus went forth from
her banishment to meet her Bridegroom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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