Oct/080
St Teresa of Avila
Last night I stumbled on another good quote for life's little frustrations (road-rage, kids yelling in restaurants, that guy who keeps making silly mistakes at the office):
Though we do not have our Lord with us in bodily presence, we have out neighbour, who, for the ends of love and loving service, is as good as our Lord himself.
That one comes from St. Teresa of Avila whose autobiography included her thoughts on prayer:
Teresa depicts different stages of the life of prayer in metaphorical terms taken from the manner of securing water to irrigate a garden. The "first water" is laboriously obtained from a well and carried in a bucket to the garden; this is in reference to beginners who, liberated from the more flagrant mortal sins, apply themselves to discursive prayer of meditation, although they experience fatigue and aridity from time to time. After speaking at length of meditation in its stricter meaning, Teresa made a brief reference to "acquired" contemplation before beginning her discussion of the "second water." In this second stage, the gardener secures water through use of a windlass and bucket; here Teresa refers to the "prayer of quiet," a gift of God through which the individual begins to have a passive experience of prayer. The third method of irrigation is the employment of water from a stream or river; the application made by Teresa is to the "sleep of the faculties." Although Teresa considered this an important stage in the evolution of prayer when she wrote her autobiography, she later relegated it to a simple intensification of the "prayer of quiet" in the Interior Castle. The fourth method of irrigation is God given: the rain; Teresa employs this metaphor to describe a state of union in prayer in which the soul is apparently passive.
Me...? I'm still at the "first water" phase it would seem.
