Sunday was the Feast Day of St Teresa of Avila, a Catholic Carmelite nun who lived in Spain in the 16th century.

If you’ve followed along with my devotionals for any length of time, you’ll see that I’ve been greatly inspired by her and her spiritual director, St John of the Cross. I would say that they both are my heroes of prayer. Do you have any heroes of prayer — people who inspire you to keep on with the great and holy privilege of loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Who inspires you to love God more?

We celebrate heroes of achievement, heroes of business and enterprise, people who’ve accomplished great works of mission, justice, humanitarian work, etc. and I’m all about that — but I also want to celebrate heroes of prayer. People who’ve truly given their lives to the Great Commandment and whose legacy tells the story of a life given to love God.

For the next four weeks, I want to highlight four things that St Teresa of Avila has taught me about prayer, and try to relate it to simple ways we can pray in response. The first is this:

Growing in Prayer is Possible.

Teresa is perhaps most famous for her book The Interior Castle, which describes the human heart as a 16th-century Spanish castle. In her metaphor, we are a castle in the middle of which God, the King, lives. (Her attention to the indwelling Holy Spirit most charismatics and Pentecostals would do well to pay attention to — so focused are many of us on outward works of healing and power!)

She describes seven rooms, or Mansions, which are metaphors for stages of growth in God. The Seventh Mansion is where God lives, and the result of growing in prayer is the full unity of a person with God. She describes reaching the Seventh Mansion in her later years as evidenced by a continual and effortless awareness of God’s presence. In other words, when we first start learning how to pray, we have to bring God to mind, but when are mature in prayer, we never forget that He is here.

Each Mansion contains an increasing death to self, an increase in attention to and awareness of the indwelling Holy Spirit, and an increase in favors and graces that God grants to help one love God more. Above all, growing in prayer is about deepening our relational knowledge of the Person of Jesus.

She writes:

For Teresa, we are a castle because the King dwells within us, and prayer is a journey of reaching for, turning towards, and getting to know that King, whom Teresa affectionately calls “His Majesty.”

For many, prayer is often talked about as something we either do or don’t do — as if it’s as simple as saying the Lord’s prayer or picking up your Bible and reading it. And in many ways that’s true — I often say that prayer is as simple as showing up — and Teresa reminds her nuns similarly that she is “not asking [them] to do anything more than look at Him.” (Way, 26:3). Prayer is as simple as looking at God!

Yet, for many, if we talk at all about growing in prayer, it often centers around skills we learn and try — centering prayer, harp and bowl, breath prayer, lectio divina, the prayer of examen, fasting, etc. In these conversations, if one has problems in prayer, one might think all they need is to learn a new skill, or just do it more, and their problems will go away!

Anyone who has seriously tried to build a prayer life (i.e. carved out a time on the calendar and committed to it for more than a month) knows that prayer is both as simple as showing up and complex enough to take a lifetime to learn. It is so much deeper, richer, truer, and infinitely more frustrating and complex than simply “doing it” or learning a new skill. There is a frustrating mixture of boredom, adventure, answered prayer, unanswered prayer, a sense of God’s undeniable nearness, and frustrating seasons where you wonder if you ever felt God at all.

Teresa describes prayer neither as a simplistic activity nor as a skill set to learn. Note: She does give brief attention to skills similar to what we would call ‘centering prayer’ in her discussion of the First Mansion — but she views prayer skills merely as the door to the room rather than the room itself. 

In my own words, I would describe Teresa’s vision of prayer as the art of relating to a Person. And growing in prayer is growing in the creative act of learning to love Jesus more and more throughout one’s whole life.

She views prayer as a fundamentally creative act — i.e. it requires ingenuity, time, flexibility, risk-taking, and openness. She also views it as a fundamentally relational act — we are growing in our experiential knowledge of God. We’re learning how to talk to Him, hear Him, and feel Him. We’re growing in love.

Thus, growth in prayer is possible not because we are learning new skills but because we are learning a Person. And I hope with all my heart, in the legacy of St Teresa, to know and love him more at age 90 than age 29!

I bless you today to be creative in your pursuit of loving Jesus and building a prayer life.

And I bless you today to learn how to relate to Jesus as the real Person that He is — to feel His heart, to know His likes and dislikes, and to experience Him feel yours in return.

Pray this today:

Lord Jesus, I want to know You more. Would you give me the gift of creativity as I seek to grow in my knowledge of You? Would you give me the gift of consistency as I show up again and again to learn You? And would you give me the gift of love, mine for You and Yours for me?