November 17, 2009
Interior Castle, part 7
We’ve reached the end of our journey through the mansions and arrived at the center. Where, Teresa describes the spiritual marriage that takes place between the soul and God. After briefly covering this mansion I’ll talk about my reflections of the book overall.
In this section Teresa wants to make a distinction between what she has been describing as spiritual union vs. spiritual marriage. She says that union is much like a betrothal. Two people are committed to being with each other, they’re lives are intertwined, but they are still separate and able to pull apart before the marriage is complete. She describes spiritual marriage as
But spiritual marriage is like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming one and the same liquid, so that the river and rain water cannot be divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the ocean, which cannot afterwards be disunited from it.
This is the highlight and pinnacle of our journey to unity with God in our souls. To be so completely one with Him that we can no longer be separated, but are His for all eternity. It is in this state that the soul finds its rest and peace for all time with Him.
I want to spend a few moments to share a few thoughts on my experience of reading this work. As all have noticed, my entries have become much shorter as the book has gone on, and I apologize for that. However, I need to admit that finishing this book was like pulling teeth. There was very little desire to see this book to the end, and this was due to a couple of overarching problems. First, the writing craft was terrible. Perhaps a great deal of this was the translation, but the amount of random tangents, only to return to the topic paragraphs later really distracted from me learning the message of this book. In almost every chapter there was some path off into some other topic that she would start rambling about before finally saying, “Oh ya, where was I…” This alone made the book a burden to get through.
Secondly, in the area of the content, it was hard to relate to where Teresa was going as we got deeper into the mansions. The initial topics seemed to have a real relevance to our external life as believers, but once we hit mansions 4 or 5 it started to focus almost exclusively with the interior meditative life. This is all well and good, and a fruitful thing, but it’s not something that most of us can relate to, or even strive for.
So even though this hasn’t been quite what I intended it to be for my column here, it has been an ‘experience’. Her thoughts on the issue of redemptive suffering were good and are a topic that I think we don’t talk about as much as we could today. However, I think I might look at some other authors for my readings about spiritual life, such as St. Francis de Sales work called Introduction to the Devout Life.
Written and posted by Jamison on November 17, 2009, 11:09 am.
Filed under: General Discussion, Reflections
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