Of Tea and Friendships

On our first night here as we discussed over dinner the following day, Audrey asked about tea and where the kettle was. I realised then that this one cultural difference had been forgotten, Spanish homes don't usually have kettles.  Most people drink coffee cooked on the stove in a mocha (think Italian espresso but larger) rather than tea. The British love of proper tea, similar to the Latin love of coffee, meant a mission was set: Audrey set out yesterday in search of a kettle.  Later we set out for the Monastery of the Incarnation where St Teresa lived for 30 years of her life and where she had her conversion. The topic of love kept coming up and it all seemed so very connected.

The first reading this past Monday was from Ephesians 4:32-5:8, in which God calls us to be friends with each other and to love one another as God has loved us. For St Teresa, friendship was fundamental to the spiritual life because of our relationship with God is a deep friendship that gives birth to all of our human friendships. The friendship with God is one of profound love and this love then radiates out to others.

God is Love itself and St Teresa experienced how God's Love is beyond all human description. Love spurs us in efforts that we possibly never thought we would undertake. It spurred St Teresa on to reform her order so as to live ever closer to God. St John Paul II commented on the fruits of this Love when he visited the Monastery of the Incarnation. He said that there at the Incarnation, where Teresa had had her conversion and experienced total consecration to Christ has been a place that had irradiated new monastic foundations and had been the seedbed for the contemplative life.

At the Monastery of the Incarnation, a Chapel with the Blessed Sacrament has been built over St Teresa's cell where she experienced the transverberation. This moment in her life has been made especially famous by Bernini's sculpture in the Santa Maria Vittoria in Rome. Fr Matt pointed out that the sculpture picks on an important point, which is that the experience of God that Teresa had had became part of her consciousness after she had experienced it. The angel in the sculpture is holding the arrow after it has pierced her heart. Teresa wrote about this experience after it had happened and this is the only way that any of us can be conscious of our experience of God. The direct experience of God is not something we are aware of at the time, much less are we able to articulate it into words. We become conscious of it afterwards as it bears fruits and it is only in these fruits that some words can be used. St Teresa made it clear in her writing, God's love was something that went beyond human comprehension and language. Human language is very really cannot express it and will always fall short but it can find an expression in how we love one another.

Audrey amazingly found a kettle and it made me wonder, how much our love of something or of someone will motivate us into action. Imagine what the experience of God could do to us, what it could spur us on to, the peace that could reign in the world if we gave ourselves to God's love as wholeheartedly as Teresa did.