A reflection for Thursday within the Twentieth Week after the Octave of Pentecost — S. Teresiæ Virginis, III classis (15 October)
The Mass of St. Teresa opens with a wedding song. The Introit is taken from the forty-fourth psalm, the royal epithalamium of the King and His bride: Dilexisti iustitiam, et odisti iniquitatem: propterea unxit te Deus, Deus tuus, oleo lætitiæ præ consortibus tuis — “Thou hast loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows” (Ps. 44:8). Its verse is the psalmist’s own overflowing: Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum: dico ego opera mea regi — “My heart hath uttered a good word: I speak my works to the king.”
Two words in that Introit carry the whole day. The first is oil: the oil of gladness with which the bride is anointed, which will reappear in the Gospel in the vessels of the wise virgins. The second is the King: the one to whom the bride speaks her works, not to the crowd, not to herself, but to Him alone. The Gradual continues the psalm, Audi, filia, et vide… concupivit rex decorem tuum — “Hearken, O daughter, and see… the king shall greatly desire thy beauty.” The Offertory brings the virgins in procession in templum Regi Domino, into the temple of the Lord the King. And at the Communion the Church sings the very hinge of the Gospel: Media autem nocte clamor factus est: Ecce sponsus venit: exite obviam Christo Domino — “At midnight there was a cry made: Behold the Bridegroom cometh; go forth to meet Christ the Lord.”
This is the Mass of the Common of Virgins, Dilexisti. The Church gives it to St. Teresa of Jesus with a Collect of her own, and it fits her as if it had been written for her: a nun who spent nearly twenty years with her lamp burning low, and who, when the oil was finally supplied, became the teacher of a whole Church in how to keep it.
I. Qui gloriatur, in Domino glorietur: the Epistle
“But he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord. For not he who commendeth himself, is approved, but he whom God commendeth. Would to God you could bear with some little of my folly: but do bear with me. For I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God. For I have espoused you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.” (2 Cor. 10:17-18; 11:1-2)
Glorying in the Lord. St. Paul is quoting the prophet: In hoc glorietur qui gloriatur, scire et nosse me — “Let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me” (Jer. 9:24). He had already used the same sentence to the Corinthians in his first letter (1 Cor. 1:31), and he returns to it here because the church at Corinth was being troubled by men who recommended themselves: false apostles who measured themselves by themselves, and found the measurement flattering. Against them St. Paul sets a single principle. Approval is not something a man confers on himself. Non enim qui seipsum commendat, ille probatus est; sed quem Deus commendat. The word probatus is a metal-worker’s word: the coin that has been tested and found true. No coin assays itself.
St. Thomas, treating the vice of vainglory (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 132), does not condemn the desire for glory as such. Glory, he teaches, is the manifestation of some good, and it is right that good should be known. The disorder lies in seeking it from the wrong source or for the wrong end: from the opinion of men, who can be deceived, rather than from God, who cannot; or for one’s own exaltation rather than for His honour and the good of one’s neighbour. The man who glories in the Lord is not the man who has no excellence. He is the man who knows where his excellence came from and to whom it is owed.
The folly of the Apostle. Then comes a strange turn. St. Paul, having just condemned self-commendation, asks the Corinthians to bear with a little of his insipientia, his folly, because he is about to boast. And the boast, when it comes later in the chapter, is a catalogue of shipwrecks, scourgings, hunger and nakedness, and finally of his weakness (2 Cor. 11:23-30; 12:9). St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage, admires the delicacy of it: the Apostle calls his own self-defence foolishness even before he begins it, so that no one may think he enjoys praising himself, and he only speaks at all because the faith of his children is at stake (Hom. in II Cor. 23). His boasting is a kind of holy folly, undertaken for the sake of others, and its content is not his strength but Christ’s strength in him.
Hold that word folly in mind. The Gospel is about to show us another kind.
The jealousy of God. Æmulor enim vos Dei æmulatione. St. Paul is not jealous of the Corinthians for himself. He is jealous for them, as a father is jealous for a daughter promised in marriage, and the jealousy is God’s own: the same zeal with which the Lord, in the prophets, guards Israel His bride from the adulteries of idolatry. Chrysostom draws out the image: the Apostle presents himself as the one who has arranged the marriage and must hand over the bride unspoiled, and he fears not for his own honour but for her fidelity (Hom. in II Cor. 23).
The Greek word here is zēlos, zeal. It is the same word the Septuagint places on the lips of the prophet Elias on Horeb: Zelo zelatus sum pro Domino Deo exercituum — “With zeal have I been zealous for the Lord God of hosts” (3 Kings 19:10). The Order of Carmel, which honours Elias as its father, carries that sentence on its shield. On the feast of Carmel’s great reformer, the Church reads to us an Apostle burning with the zeal of Elias, for the purity of a bride.
One husband, one virgin. Despondi enim vos uni viro virginem castam exhibere Christo. The whole church of Corinth, married and unmarried, men and women, is called a virgin. St. Augustine builds his treatise on holy virginity on exactly this verse. The whole Church, he says, is a virgin espoused to Christ, a virgin in the integrity of her faith, her hope and her charity; and those who consecrate their bodily virginity to God hold in their flesh what the whole Church holds in her faith (De sancta virginitate 2). St. Ambrose, in the books he wrote for his sister Marcellina, calls the consecrated virgin a bride who has already given her dowry to the Bridegroom and awaits Him (De virginibus I). Virginity, in this sense, is not first a matter of what is abstained from. It is a matter of to whom one is given.
St. Thomas teaches accordingly that virginity is praiseworthy not because of the bodily integrity in itself but because it is chosen and preserved for God, propter Deum, in order to be free for the things of God (II-II, q. 152). A virgin who kept her body and gave her heart to herself would be, in his sense, no virgin at all. That is the precise danger the Gospel is about to describe.
II. Ecce sponsus venit: the Gospel
“At that time Jesus spoke this parable to His disciples: The kingdom of heaven shall be like to ten virgins, who taking their lamps went out to meet the bridegroom and the bride. And five of them were foolish, and five wise. But the five foolish, having taken their lamps, did not take oil with them: but the wise took oil in their vessels with the lamps. And the bridegroom tarrying, they all slumbered and slept. And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold the bridegroom cometh, go ye forth to meet him. Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise: Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out. The wise answered, saying: Lest perhaps there be not enough for us and for you, go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves. Now whilst they went to buy, the bridegroom came: and they that were ready, went in with him to the marriage, and the door was shut. But at last came also the other virgins, saying: Lord, Lord, open to us. But he answering said: Amen I say to you, I know you not. Watch ye therefore, because you know not the day nor the hour.” (Matt. 25:1-13)
The Church reads at Matins today, in the Common of Virgins, the twelfth homily of St. Gregory the Great on the Gospels, and it is the key that opens this parable.
All ten were virgins. Gregory begins with the detail that unsettles us most. The foolish are not harlots or unbelievers. They are virgins, they have lamps, they go out to meet the bridegroom, and they sleep and rise exactly as the wise do. The kingdom of heaven here, he says, is the Church of this present time, in which the good and the bad are mingled, and in which both can look, from the outside, exactly alike (Hom. in Evang. 12). The number five, he observes, recalls the five bodily senses: each group has kept itself from unlawful pleasures of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch, and so both may be called virgins. The difference lies elsewhere.
Lamps and oil. The lamps, Gregory explains, are good works, according to the Lord’s word: Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works (Matt. 5:16). Both groups had lamps; both did good. But the oil signifies the brightness of glory, and the vessels are the hearts in which it is kept. The wise carry oil in vasis suis, in their own vessels: they keep the glory of their works hidden in their conscience, before God. The foolish carry no oil with them, because they look for their glory outside, in the mouths of those who praise them (Hom. in Evang. 12).
Here the Gospel meets the Epistle exactly. The foolish virgins are those who commend themselves, or who are content to be commended by men. Their lamps are real and their works are real, but the light is fed from outside, from reputation, from approval, from the regard of others. Non enim qui seipsum commendat, ille probatus est. When the Bridegroom comes, that oil is not to be found, because it was never in the vessel.
Those that sell. The wise send the foolish to them that sell. Who are they? Gregory answers without hesitation: the flatterers, who sell the oil of praise. Whoever does good in order to be praised is buying his oil from them, and at midnight the shop is shut (Hom. in Evang. 12). St. Augustine, preaching on the same parable, wrestles at length with what the oil can be, and settles on charity, noting that oil rises above every other liquid poured with it, as charity is the more excellent way that surpasses every gift (Sermo 93; cf. 1 Cor. 12:31). St. John Chrysostom reads the oil as mercy toward the poor, and the sellers, in his reading, are the poor themselves, from whom in this life we may buy oil by our alms, and from whom after death we can buy nothing (Hom. in Matt. 78).
The Fathers do not contradict one another here. They converge. The oil is the interior substance of a life given to God: charity, mercy, and a pure intention that seeks His approval and not men’s. Gregory names what is lacking; Augustine names what it is; Chrysostom names where in this life it is bought. All three agree that it cannot be borrowed at the last hour. Ne forte non sufficiat nobis et vobis. The refusal of the wise is not selfishness. Charity in the soul is not a commodity that can be poured from one vessel to another at midnight; each must have acquired it for herself, by her own cooperation with grace, while there was time.
They all slept. Both wise and foolish slumbered. Gregory and Augustine alike read this sleep as death, which comes to the holy and the careless without distinction (Sermo 93). The wise were not distinguished by never sleeping. They were distinguished by what they had in their vessels when they lay down.
Lord, Lord, open to us. The foolish call Him Lord twice, and still the answer is Nescio vos. Gregory hears in it the most fearful sentence in the Gospel: not “I condemn you” but “I do not know you.” He does not recognize as His bride the soul that lived for another’s eyes. And the parable ends with its moral, Vigilate itaque. Watch. Not “be anxious,” not “count the hours,” but keep the oil.
III. A lamp that burned low
St. Teresa of Ávila is the right saint for this Gospel precisely because she was, for a long season, very nearly a foolish virgin.
She entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation at Ávila in 1535, against her father’s wishes, and made her profession in 1537. She was intelligent, charming, much loved, and much visited. The Incarnation of that age was a large, mitigated house with an open parlour, and Teresa became one of its most sought-after conversationalists. In her own account of her life she is unsparing about these years. She describes how she abandoned mental prayer for a long period, telling herself that a soul as unfaithful as hers was unworthy to speak so intimately with God, and she later recognized this as a false humility that was the devil’s cleverest snare (Libro de la Vida 7-8). Her lamp was lit. She kept her vows; she did her duties; she was esteemed. But the oil was running down, and she knew it, and she lived for nearly twenty years in that divided state: unable, as she put it, either to enjoy God or to enjoy the world.
The grace that changed her came in 1554, before an image of Christ covered with wounds, brought into the convent for a feast. She fell down before it, she writes, with a great outpouring of tears, begging Him to strengthen her once for all so that she would not offend Him again, and from that day she dated her true conversion (Vida 9). She was nearly forty.
What followed is the history of the oil being supplied. The life of prayer she had abandoned became the centre of her existence. She described mental prayer, in words that have become famous, as nothing other than an intimate sharing between friends, taking time often to be alone with Him who we know loves us (Vida 8). The graces of contemplation followed, and with them the zeal that is the Epistle’s word for today. In 1562 she founded the convent of St. Joseph at Ávila under the primitive Carmelite rule: small, enclosed, poor, and silent, so that her daughters might be free for God alone. Over the next twenty years, in poor health, by mule-cart over the roads of Castile and Andalusia, she founded seventeen convents of the reformed Discalced Carmelites, and with St. John of the Cross she carried the reform to the friars as well. She met opposition from her own Order, from bishops, from the nuncio, and from the Inquisition, which examined her writings; and she submitted throughout to the judgment of the Church.
Her writing on the spiritual life is a long commentary on the oil in the vessels. In the Interior Castle she pictures the soul as a castle of many rooms with the King dwelling at its centre, and she says plainly that the door by which one enters it is prayer (Moradas I.1). She insists again and again that humility is nothing else than walking in truth: knowing what we are of ourselves, and what we have from God (Moradas VI.10). That is St. Paul’s principle, qui gloriatur, in Domino glorietur, in the vocabulary of a Castilian nun.
And she reached the end the Epistle names. In the seventh and innermost dwelling of the Interior Castle she describes the spiritual marriage, in which the soul is united to God as rain falling into a river, and she says that its fruit is not repose but works: the purpose of that union is to give birth to works, always works (Moradas VII.4). In one of her accounts of conscience she recorded that in 1572 the Lord gave her this grace and told her that from then on she was to be zealous for His honour as His true bride (Cuentas de conciencia). The bride of the Epistle, espoused uni viro, and the zeal of the Epistle, æmulatio Dei, met in the same moment of her life.
She died at Alba de Tormes on the night of the fourth of October, 1582, the very night on which the Gregorian reform of the calendar suppressed ten days, so that the morning after her death was the fifteenth. It is for that reason that her feast falls today. The tradition of her last days records that she thanked God repeatedly for having made her a daughter of the Church, and that she longed to see her Bridegroom. She was canonized by Gregory XV on the twelfth of March, 1622, on the same day as St. Ignatius, St. Francis Xavier, St. Philip Neri and St. Isidore the Farmer. Her body rests incorrupt at Alba de Tormes.
IV. The Mass as a whole: from the lamp to the wedding
St. Thomas teaches that all things go forth from God and return to Him, and the shape of today’s Mass is the shape of that return as a marriage.
Everything goes forth from the Bridegroom. The oil of gladness is His before it is ours: unxit te Deus… oleo lætitiæ. The Introit, which speaks of the King anointed above His fellows, is first a psalm of Christ (Heb. 1:9), and only by participation a psalm of the virgin. The lamps, too, are His gift; no one lights a lamp who has not first been given fire.
The return is the procession of the Offertory: Afferentur regi virgines, the virgins are brought to the King. And the Epistle and Gospel together tell us what makes a soul fit to walk in that procession. Not the lamp alone, for all ten had lamps. Not outward virginity alone, for all ten were virgins. Not even vigilance in the sense of never falling asleep, for all ten slept. What carries a soul through the door is the hidden oil: charity kept in the heart, works offered to the King and not to the crowd, glory sought only in Domino. The Apostle’s holy folly and the virgins’ fatal folly are the two paths. One boasts of nothing but Christ’s strength in weakness. The other trusts in what can be seen.
St. Teresa walked from the second path to the first, and the Church places her before us today to say that the passage is possible, even after twenty years, even at forty, even for a soul that has grown comfortable in the parlour. The door is shut only at midnight. Until then, the oil may still be bought.
V. The Collect
Exaudi nos, Deus, salutaris noster: ut, sicut de beatæ Teresiæ Virginis tuæ festivitate gaudemus; ita cælestis eius doctrinæ pabulo nutriamur, et piæ devotionis erudiamur affectu.
“Hear us, O God our Saviour: that as we rejoice in the festival of blessed Teresa Thy Virgin, so we may be nourished by the food of her heavenly doctrine, and be taught the affection of loving devotion.”
The Collect asks for two things, and they correspond to the lamp and the oil. We ask to be fed by her doctrine: the clear teaching on prayer, humility and union that she left in her books, which is light for the mind. And we ask to be taught the affection of devotion: not merely to know about prayer, but to have the interior warmth, the readiness of will, that fills the vessel. It is significant that the Church, centuries before she was formally named a Doctor, already prayed on her feast to be nourished by her cælestis doctrina. Her teaching was received as heavenly food from the beginning.
VI. A word for practice
Examine. Where does my oil come from? Of the good I do, how much would I continue to do if no one ever saw it or thanked me for it? Is there a work in my life that has quietly become a lamp fed from outside, by reputation, by approval, by the regard of family or colleagues?
Do. Take up St. Teresa’s remedy where she herself took it up: mental prayer. Set aside fifteen minutes today, alone, before the Blessed Sacrament if possible, or in a quiet room before a crucifix, and simply speak with Our Lord as with a friend who loves you. If you have abandoned this practice because you feel unworthy of it, recognize that excuse for what she discovered it to be, and begin again. And do one good work today in secret, so that the oil in the vessel is known only to God.
Pray. The Collect of the day, slowly, attending to the words piæ devotionis affectu. Or St. Teresa’s own little verse, found after her death in her breviary:
Nada te turbe, nada te espante; todo se pasa, Dios no se muda. La paciencia todo lo alcanza; quien a Dios tiene nada le falta. Sólo Dios basta.
“Let nothing trouble thee, let nothing frighten thee; all things are passing, God does not change. Patience obtains all things; whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices.”
Aspiration. Misericordias Domini in æternum cantabo. “The mercies of the Lord I will sing for ever” (Ps. 88:2), the verse St. Teresa loved above all others.
Devote. It is the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, and linger on the first, the Agony in the Garden, where Our Lord found His disciples sleeping and asked, Could you not watch one hour with me? (Matt. 26:40). It is the same summons as the end of today’s Gospel: Vigilate.
If you wish to go deeper: the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up mental prayer step by step, following St. Teresa’s own counsels in the Way of Perfection and the early dwellings of the Interior Castle. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the Carmelite reform, with St. John of the Cross, and with the great canonization of 1622. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the theology of virginity and of vainglory following St. Thomas, and the classical distinction between ascetical and mystical theology that St. Teresa’s writings did so much to shape.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia 12; St. Augustine, Sermo 93 and De sancta virginitate 2; St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Matthaeum 78 and Homiliae in Epistolam II ad Corinthios 23; St. Ambrose, De virginibus I. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, qq. 132 and 152. St. Teresa of Jesus, Libro de la Vida 7-9; Moradas del castillo interior I.1, VI.10 and VII.4; Cuentas de conciencia. St. Teresa is given in paraphrase throughout, with the exception of the verse Nada te turbe, given in her own Spanish with a translation.
Sancta Teresia, virgo et mater, ora pro nobis.