St Teresa of Ávila, the Second Conversion and the Total Gift of the Heart
Jean Khoury
15 October 2026
Summary: Teresa of Ávila loved water, and the Church gives her the Gospel of the Samaritan woman on her feast. That image tells her whole story. For almost twenty years of religious life (from the age of nineteen to thirty-nine) she was a fervent, observant, prayerful nun who practised contemplative prayer for fifteen uninterrupted years, and the divine Water did not flow. This article argues that the explanation of that blockage, and not any method of prayer, is the heart of Teresa’s message and the true ground of her doctorate. Her heart was not given totally to Jesus. She kept part of her affections for herself, in the name of Christ, and this was invisible in the external forum, unnoticed in confession and untouched by direction. Jesus, who respects human freedom so far that He waited twenty years for Teresa and three centuries for the Church, could give Himself only in proportion to the gift she made of herself.
Reading Way of Perfection as the pedagogy of this discovery, the article sets out the golden rule of the spiritual life (the more we give ourselves, the more He gives Himself), defines human cooperation without any trace of Pelagianism, and answers a formator’s question on whether Teresa’s struggle in the parlour belonged to the Dark Night. It then draws the theoretical consequences for the theology of grace, for spiritual theology and for ecclesiology, and the practical consequences for formators, spiritual directors and every baptised person.
Keywords: Teresa of Ávila; second conversion; gift of self; Way of Perfection; grace and freedom; internal forum; Dark Night; John of the Cross; spiritual formation; Samaritan woman.
1. Introduction
There is a fact in the life of St Teresa of Ávila that remains central to understanding her, and it is reflected even in the choice of the Gospel for her feast day. Teresa loved water, and, closely associated with it, the episode of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in the fourth chapter of St John’s Gospel.[1] For her, “water” represents God’s grace, the water of the Holy Spirit; in other words, contemplation, the most life-giving part of prayer, the “juicy” part of prayer.
This image of water tells us the entire story of St Teresa. She discovered God’s grace, loved it, and understood that we can block its flow. She paid dearly for that lesson during the first part of her life. Having learned it, she spent hours describing how we receive this water, what it is like, and how we can come to receive it. She showed us the way. Way of Perfection, her pedagogical masterpiece, could well have carried the subtitle The Perfect Way to Receive the Divine Water in Abundance.
That is precisely what Teresa herself failed to experience during almost the first twenty years of her religious life. One might have expected a person as committed, prayerful, spiritual and zealous as she was to have had this water flowing from the very first day. It was not so. Here lies the sorrowful aspect of her story, and here lies the lesson God offers us through her life.
The thesis of this article is simple and radical. Teresa’s conversion, and what was truly at stake in it, is the centre of her message. She was not a negligent person. She was a cradle Catholic from a good family, observant, spiritual and fervent. Something was missing, and what was missing was so fundamental that the way was blocked for the torrents of grace. The missing thing was not a technique of prayer, nor a further virtue, nor more zeal. It was the quality of the gift of herself to Jesus. Jesus waited. He waits still, for each of us, and the handle of the door is on our side.
The article proceeds in six movements: the observation of Teresa’s life and of what her conversion reveals (section 2); a discussion, prompted by a formator’s question, of how the second conversion relates to the Dark Night and to the vocabulary of St John of the Cross (section 3); the theoretical consequences (section 4); the practical consequences (section 5); and a conclusion (section 6).
2. Teresa’s Lesson
2.1 The meaning of her life: twenty years and twenty years
After so many years of reading, engaging with, teaching and writing about Teresa, of research, reflection and gaining perspective, I see with increasing clarity, even if the substance remains more or less the same, that Teresa’s conversion is absolutely central. She does not spend three years dragging her feet. She spends almost twenty years doing so! That is no small matter. Measure the time before her conversion (from twenty to thirty-nine years of age) and the time after it, up to the writing of The Interior Castle (from thirty-nine to sixty-two): just under twenty years on the one hand, just over twenty on the other.[2]
If we look closely at Way of Perfection, at its content, its structure and its internal dynamics, we find that it reflects the problem that lay hidden beneath her lack of conversion.[3] Before her conversion she practised virtue. She was spiritual. She practised contemplative prayer for fifteen uninterrupted years. She had learnt recollection and she preached it, putting books about it into the hands of others. She gathered spiritual people together to talk about God and about contemplative prayer. And the graces, the divine Water, were not flowing. Her consecration, her love of God, her love for the spiritual life and for prayer were not sufficient for growth, for transformation and for the reception of sanctifying grace. In this she reflects the Church of her time, which had been longing for renewal for three centuries and had been unable to achieve it.
Once she understood the crucial point, the graces began to pour forth. Jesus had been waiting. For years He had been waiting to pour out His graces. He was waiting for her to do something, to open the door. She thought she had opened it. In fact, it was closed. This is a major lesson, and she would spend the rest of her life explaining it and putting it into practice. In this way she reforms the spiritual life within the Church. But she also reforms religious life: she offers the living heart of the reform of religious life.
2.2 The patience of Jesus
What is astonishing is Jesus’ patience. He does not force things. He sends signals. But He cannot move forward or make things progress. Thinking of the Church in general, He even waited until the disaster of Luther’s undertaking, and He did not stop it. The losses for the Church, in graces, in growth, in everything, were enormous.[4] Jesus waits three centuries for the Church. Jesus waits twenty years for Teresa! He is capable of waiting! This is something we do not understand! As long as we have not done what we must do, that is, as long as we have not played our part, nothing happens. And we content ourselves with this version of the faith, of the Gospel, of the Church. We think that it is all right, that this is how things are supposed to be.
Let us say it again: we are not dealing with a negligent person. This is not a matter of the first conversion. She is Christian, Catholic, a cradle Catholic, from a good family, religious, observant, spiritual and fervent. And despite all this, something is missing, and what is missing is so fundamental that the way is blocked for the torrents of grace to flow.
2.3 From the external stronghold to the internal stronghold
There is a kind of necessity to cross the threshold from the visible to the invisible, to enter the heart. This is the modern age, in which the human soul opens up and must be explored. What takes place secretly within the human heart must be brought to light. It is like science moving from the level of visible things to what is invisible to the naked eye. Suppose I am trying to explain to a child the discovery of the atom and its composition. I have to use examples, because the atom is not visible to the naked eye, and the stages of its discovery involved feeling one’s way forward. The stages in the discovery of the human soul, of the unconscious, also involve feeling one’s way forward.
Teresa takes us into the world of the atom, so to speak, into the subatomic world of its composition. She crosses the threshold that separates the visible from the invisible. She crosses the red line between the external forum and the internal forum. The Lord gives her a magnifying glass with which to see. We move from the external stronghold, visible, tangible and quantifiable, to the internal stronghold, inward, hidden, invisible to others: the heart.
Note on the external forum and the internal forum. The external forum refers to the public, observable dimension of a person’s life, including their actions, conduct, responsibilities and relationships insofar as these can be assessed externally. The internal forum refers to the person’s interior life, particularly the movements of conscience, intentions, desires, attachments and personal relationship with God. In the Church the distinction also has a specific canonical meaning: the external forum concerns matters that can be established and addressed in the Church’s public governance, whereas the internal forum concerns the person’s interior conscience and relationship with God, including matters addressed in spiritual direction and, in a distinct and confidential way, in sacramental confession.[5] These two forums must not be confused, although they are not unrelated. A person’s external conduct may be entirely correct while the interior disposition from which it proceeds still requires purification and conversion. Conversely, an interior struggle cannot always be adequately understood or assessed from external conduct alone. Teresa’s teaching is particularly important in this respect: she directs our attention beyond the observable practice of virtue to the hidden movements of the heart, where the quality of our response to God’s grace is revealed. It is in this interior domain that we must examine not only what we do, but how and why we do it, what we love, what we cling to and whether we are giving ourselves to Jesus without reservation.
When we think about it, this is what Jesus Himself does when He sets out His primary teaching, the teaching about the heart and the circumcision of the heart: the Sermon on the Mount. “You have heard that it was said of old”, “but I say to you”. A movement back and forth between the external law and the interior law.[6] Jesus crosses the barrier between the visible and the invisible. Indeed, this is His central, or essential, reproach to the Pharisees: you concern yourselves with what is external.[7] The challenge He sets before us is a formidable one.
The Gospel is always the same, right up to the present day. Theology, however, quantifies. The explanation of the faith that we offer also quantifies. It still operates within the external stronghold, quantifying, and does not seem willing to deploy the tools needed to explore the internal stronghold; it does not dare to enter the inner world. Theologyacknowledges that this world exists, but it does not truly enter it. It remains at the level of the outer shell. Exegesis takes the place of the spiritual sense of the text, as though speaking about the spiritual were dangerous, vague or deviant. Of course it is interior experience. But that, apparently, is not for theology.
Note what is missing and what suffers. The most important dogmatic course in theology is missing: Pneumatology, the Holy Spirit. The course suffering the most is Spiritual Theology and its dependencies, particularly Spiritual Direction. The course that suffers too, though without saying so too loudly, believing itself to be in good health, is Mariology. But once we open up the inner world, everything opens up. Christology, Redemption: how does it take place? What does Christ accomplish on the Cross? How does He save us?
The great temptation for every Christian is to reduce the Gospel, to dilute its salt. To quantify. To “externalise” it, that is, to turn towards what is external. “The body is important!” “We are not angels!” The objections come thick and fast. And Christian life is reduced to charity, to service. “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me,” the Lord says. “Yes, yes, but He is present in the poor!” Yes, of course!
Let us return to Teresa. Her lesson will escape us. We will remain focused on what she did externally, and on a fascinated spiritual reading of her writings, but we will not allow ourselves to be grasped by the heart of her message, which is bound up with her conversion. We will end up imitating the spiritual life she pursued for almost twenty years without making progress. And we will wonder why religious life no longer flourishes today, especially in the Western world.
I think there is no worse deaf person than one who does not want to hear. Such a person will wait three centuries, or another twenty years! By then it will be too late, and the damage will be very difficult to bear. Meanwhile the Lord has His arms full of graces, and no one understands why He cannot manage to give them to us!
2.4 Understanding Jesus: what Way of Perfection is really about
If she was zealous, fervent and committed, how come Jesus was not giving her His water? Let us go deeper and learn from St Teresa the secret of Jesus: how He works and what He expects from us.
The explanation of her conversion, of what was at stake, of why her spiritual life was blocked for so many years, and of the interior dynamism of her Reform, is laid before us in her book Way of Perfection. Notice its starting point. Her daughters, gathered in small numbers in the first reformed monastery (St Joseph’s, Ávila), ask her to tell them about contemplation, that is, the graces we are supposed to receive when we pray. They wanted the “juicy bits”. Fair enough. One can have a pure reason for asking for them, because they transform us, sanctify us, make us grow and make us love God more. They are needed. The grace of God is not optional. God wants to give us His grace (not the feeling of His grace!), to each one of us, all the time and abundantly.
So what is the secret we need to know in order to start receiving these graces? Teresa did everything she had to do for twenty years. She was spiritual, committed, zealous, obedient, a “good nun”, and yet she never received the abundance of graces God wants to give us. Why? In her book she explains why it did not work, and how we can make it work.
Instead of diving immediately into the description of the reception of the graces (forms of prayer and contemplation), she spends almost half of Way of Perfection explaining the difference between having a spiritual commitment and having a perfectly spiritual commitment. The difference is between what is spiritual (we think this is enough, good enough) and what is perfectly spiritual. This is why the book bears the word perfection in its title. She does not let us imagine what perfection is, what our mind and imagination might take “perfection” to be. She goes deeper. She enters into the subtle movements of the heart, movements that only God can see. They are difficult to see from the external forum, difficult to spot in confession, not always easy for the mistress of novices to spot (even if St Thérèse did spot them), rather neglected in our examination of conscience, and not often mentioned in the ordinary teaching of the Church. This is really the core of her teaching, the centre of her mission in the Church as a Doctor of the Church.
St Teresa is not a Doctor because she first teaches prayer. Many taught it before her, and she learnt it from them! She read about prayer in the works of Francisco de Osuna, a Franciscan. The movement of the Recollects (Los Recogidos), people who practise contemplative prayer and explain it, began in Spain at the end of the previous century, many decades before Teresa’s reform, and some Franciscan monasteries were already practising three hours of daily contemplative prayer.[8]She was born into a fervent Catholic Spain, where prayer was very much one of the main subjects. Many orders had undergone a spiritual reform long before hers.
Note. No one can deny that she is an unparalleled master of contemplative prayer, and that contemplative prayer is an essential part of her message. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to lose sight of the paradox this article seeks to emphasise.
As shocking as it can seem, her mission is not, first and foremost, to teach us prayer. Her method itself is very flexible, suitable for many, unlike the Ignatian one. If you read her carefully, you will notice that she does not impose a rigid form. She opts for presence, consideration (who is God, in whose presence am I right now?), recollection, conversation, friendship with Jesus. She offers not one but different forms of approach, to the point that some say there is no systematic “method” as such. She states clearly that Jesus is at the centre of our being, and that this completely changed her prayer life, because she no longer had to overstretch her imagination, travelling to the Holy Land to find Jesus. But her method, if we can even use the word, is flexible because it is based on freely enacting a relationship. Love does not need instructions; we find them spontaneously. Her way is not first about thinking and imagining, but about loving, giving oneself, keeping true company to Jesus.
2.5 The golden rule: the quality of the gift
The heart of her message and teaching lies in Way of Perfection. It is at the heart of prayer, at the heart of Christian life, at the heart of religious life: the trigger of all graces. Throughout her book she tells us that Jesus’ secret is, in fact, the secret of love. He wants to give Himself to you, but in order to receive Him and be received by Him you need to give yourself totally and unconditionally to Him. Everything depends on the quality of the gift of yourself. He takes what you give Him, and if you give Him a little, He takes it, but He can only give Himself accordingly: a little.
The golden rule of the spiritual life, which cost her twenty years of her life to learn, the golden rule for reforming our spiritual life, the golden means of receiving abundant graces, is to give oneself totally to Him, every day, throughout the day. She knows from experience that we are slow to give ourselves; she has her own bitter experience. We are full of fears, worries and emotions, and full of ourselves! These are tremendous obstacles to the gift of ourselves, to true love.
Here is the heart of her message. The equation, so to speak, is simple: you give yourself and, as a consequence, He gives Himself (He gives His graces, that is, contemplation). In other words, Jesus, who is standing at the door of our heart and knocking, yearning to enter into us and pour His graces into us, waits for us to open the door.[9] “Opening the door” depends on us. The handle of the door is on our side, not His! A big discovery, is it not? He always gives us the general preparatory grace we need in order to open it. How do we open it? By giving ourselves. We give ourselves totally, we commit ourselves totally, we come out of ourselves, we forget ourselves for the sake of His love, the door opens and He comes in immediately. If we open it only a little, He can only come inside a little. If we leave the door ajar, He waits. He can wait twenty years! Bitter experience. Ignorance! The subtleties of our heart. But also the truth of our heart and the truth of God, the truth about Jesus’ behaviour!
This is the mystery. God is God, the Creator, the one who holds the universe in His hands and sustains it in being and life. This God, who possesses everything, does not possess our heart! Worse still, He respects our choice, our free will, to the point that this respect can block our relationship for twenty years! The Church had three centuries of desire for reform before St Teresa of Ávila. It even reached a breaking point that triggered the Protestant Reformation, which, in fact, is not a reformation, since it did not reform but deviated from the faith and diminished it. Teresa remains in the Church and reforms it from within. And this is the lesson she learnt bitterly: Jesus wants to give His graces abundantly to all of us, but He respects our free will and waits.
So the entire first part of her book, her guidebook for reform, is dedicated not to virtues and their practice. Many taught this before her. No, not at all. She was practising these virtues, and for twenty years! What was lacking was the quality of that practice, the “giving it all”. It was the way we practise virtue that was lacking. It was not what she calls “perfect”.
The first half of the book is not about the practice of virtue! It is much more precise than that. It is about the immense difference between being spiritual (that is, practising virtues) and practising virtues perfectly, that is, with the perfect gift, commitment and surrender of ourselves to Jesus, retaining nothing for ourselves. There is a radical (yes, radical) difference between practising a spiritual virtue, say loving our neighbour, and practising it with the perfection Jesus expects. The determination, the “determined determination” of which Teresa speaks, is the determination involved in the gift of oneself, that is, the quality of the gift to Jesus. Is it complete? Is it determined? Is it unconditional?[10]
We can walk in the spiritual life, that is, practise it, in a nonchalant way, almost as though taking a pleasant walk on the beach or through a lovely field or forest. This way of walking does not involve the full gift of oneself, the purity of heart, the total commitment, the dedication of all our energy to Him, the coming out of ourselves. Quality here is radically important.
Again and again: she received the sacraments regularly, she was spiritual, committed to religious life, zealous, gathering people to talk about God and to spread contemplative prayer. She even wanted to reform her order. But none of this triggered the graces Jesus wanted to give her, just as He wants to give them to each one of us. Why? Her heart was not totally given to Him, and to Him alone. She enjoyed conversations about God and the spiritual life, and the friendship of the people she gathered. “Nothing wrong with all of that,” all of us would say (and no priest spotted it in confession!). Indeed, she thought she was doing fine! But her heart was not totally given to Jesus. She kept some of her human emotions and affections to herself, using them in her own way. Jesus wanted everything!
2.6 The Samaritan woman: where is your heart?
If we give ourselves to Him royally, He gives Himself to us royally, as an immediate result. He communicates His graces, that is, contemplation. And when we say that Jesus gives Himself to us royally, we mean royally: abundantly, in such a way that He quenches our thirst for Love. Remember Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman: whoever drinks from the Water He gives will not thirst again![11]
But to drink from His water, Teresa had to answer the same question Jesus asked the Samaritan woman: where is your heart? Where are your attachments, your emotional attachments? Jesus, of course, did not put it in these terms. He said, very succinctly but radically: “Go, find your husband and come back.” It is by entering into our heart that we can see the real attachments of our emotions and desires (the “husband”!). It is by examining our heart and the way we love that we can “find our husband”. This will open our heart to its real destiny: Jesus is the Bridegroom! He needs all my heart, unconditionally, with the gift of myself repeated every day, throughout the day.
But in reality, am I giving Him all my heart? Is all my heart given to Jesus? Am I keeping some part of it to myself? Jesus respects this and will not move… for twenty years! A hard lesson, but the truth. Do we love the truth? The truth of Love? True love?
2.7 Human cooperation: giving ourselves to Jesus
We now need to understand more precisely what this human cooperation means. If Jesus wants to give us His graces abundantly, if He is waiting at the door of our heart, and if opening the door depends on us, what exactly are we supposed to do? How do we cooperate with His grace? How does His grace work? What does it mean to give ourselves totally to Him?
First of all, let us be clear: we do not produce grace. We do not earn it. We do not oblige Jesus to give Himself to us by making greater efforts. God always takes the initiative. He loves us first. He comes towards us, calls us, awakens our desire for Him and always gives us the grace we need in order to respond. This is called the general help of the grace of God. Even our desire to give ourselves to Him is already touched by His grace. We must never forget this. Otherwise we would turn the spiritual life into an achievement of our own, as though we could reach God by our own strength. No! Everything begins with God, everything depends on His grace, and everything is directed towards receiving His gift.
But when we speak about grace, we need to distinguish two types: the general one and the particular one. The general one is understood as the preparatory grace of St Thomas Aquinas.[12] It is always given to us (like the blood in the body) and we need to use it (like activating a muscle) to correspond to God’s call or initiative, God’s extended hand. If we do not use it, nothing will happen. This means that we have something to do, leaning on this grace that is always given to us (we do not need to ask for it). The Lord says: ask and you will receive. To ask, we use the general preparatory grace. What we will receive is the personal and direct intervention of the Holy Spirit.
God has created us with freedom, and He takes our freedom seriously. He does not force us to love Him. He does not impose Himself upon us. He wants us to respond, to consent, to open our hearts and welcome Him. This is where our cooperation becomes essential. We cannot replace God’s action, but neither can God make our free response in our place. He constantly gives us the grace to respond, and we must actually use it to respond; if we do not, nothing will happen. This is the mystery of our relationship with Him. Even if we are prisoners of a sin, we can always ask for God’s help: “God, help me, free me, give me your healing…” We do not say to ourselves: “I do not have the grace to ask.” We just ask. Why? Because He constantly gives us the general help of His grace.
What does this response involve? It means giving ourselves to Jesus, not merely in words, not merely through our religious practices, not merely through our commitment to prayer or our desire to become holy, but in the concrete reality of our lives. It means allowing Him to become the centre of our existence, the one to whom we give our heart, our desires, our affections, our decisions and our future. It means no longer reserving a part of ourselves, as though there were areas of our lives in which we wished to remain in control, deciding for ourselves how we would love, whom we would love and where we would place our affections.
This is precisely where the difficulty lies. We can sincerely love Jesus and yet remain attached to ourselves. We can practise virtue and still practise it in a way that leaves us in possession of ourselves. We can pray, serve others, live a religious life, gather people to speak about God and even desire to reform the Church, while still keeping something of our heart for ourselves. We do not necessarily see this. We may even be convinced that we have given everything. Teresa herself thought so. This is why we need to enter into the interior world, to examine our heart and discover what is really happening within us. The question is not simply whether we are doing good things, but how we are doing them, what moves us, where our heart rests and whether we are truly allowing Jesus to become everything for us.
Human cooperation, therefore, is not simply a matter of doing more. It is a matter of giving ourselves more completely. We do not necessarily need more activities, more prayers, more commitments or more external demonstrations of zeal. We need to discover the quality of our response to Jesus. Are we practising virtue because we have decided to follow Him, while still keeping our own preferences and attachments intact? Or are we practising virtue as an expression of our total gift of ourselves to Him? There is a radical difference between the two. The external action may be identical, but the interior disposition can be very different.
Here is what St Teresa says about the perfection of the practice:
“But, unfortunate that we are, rare are those who must achieve it! However, the one who guards against offending God and has entered into religious life believes he has done everything. Oh! how many worms have gone unnoticed, like the one that gnawed at Jonah’s ivy! They have gnawed away at our virtues through self-love, personal esteem, our judgments of others, even through small things, our lack of charity towards others because we fail to love them as ourselves; for if we manage, slowly, to fulfil our obligations so as not to commit a sin, we are still far from total union with God’s will.” (Fifth Mansions, III, 6)[13]
We have also a striking example given by Blessed Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus, OCD, in I Am a Daughter of the Church:
“Such a person walks carrying out his duty, calmly, without apparent fervour or cowardice; his actions are good but weak. Another, his neighbour, is barely distinguished outwardly, but her awakened fervour sustains a diligent fidelity to purify her intention and to add to her actions that little something which ensures perfection: her actions are good and intense. This last one, and she alone, practises in love. The years pass in a communal life that unites and differentiates them outwardly only slightly. However, the second has attained union of will, while the first, perhaps more gifted, has fallen asleep in an ease and routine that have halted all progress.” (p. 183)[14]
The two figures do the same things, in the same house, under the same Rule.[15] One of them is giving all, and the other is giving something. The difference cannot be seen from outside, and it decides everything.
Take, for example, the love of our neighbour. We can love our neighbour sincerely, perform acts of charity and fulfil our duties, yet still remain attached to the satisfaction we derive from doing so, to the affection we receive in return, or to the image we have of ourselves as good and generous people. None of this necessarily makes our actions worthless. But it shows us how much our hearts need to be purified and transformed. Jesus wants us to love, but He also wants to transform the way we love. He wants our charity to become an expression of His own love in us, rather than remaining simply a good human action that we perform with our own resources and for our own satisfaction. The same applies to prayer, obedience, service and every other spiritual practice.
This is why we must not confuse human cooperation with human effort alone. We can make tremendous efforts and still remain centred on ourselves. We can be zealous and yet not surrender. We can be generous in certain areas of our lives and still protect others from God’s action. The real question is whether we are consenting to His work in us, even when it touches the things to which we are most attached. Sometimes this consent requires a decisive act of the will; sometimes it requires a long process of purification in which we gradually discover and surrender what we had not even realised we were holding back. In both cases grace remains at work. We are not asked to transform ourselves independently of God, but to cooperate with the transformation He is bringing about.
We must also understand that this surrender does not mean despising our humanity, suppressing every natural affection or pretending that we no longer have emotions and desires. God created our humanity, and He wants to redeem and transform it. The problem is not that we love people, enjoy friendships or experience legitimate human affections. The problem arises when these become attachments that we refuse to surrender to God’s will, or when we use them in ways that prevent us from loving Him and others as we should. Giving ourselves to Jesus means allowing Him to order our loves, purify our affections and teach us how to love. It means that nothing in our lives should be placed beyond His reach.
And here we return to the mystery of grace. Jesus wants to act in us; He wants to give us His grace on a daily basis (“give us this day our daily bread”). Jesus wants to give Himself to us. By loving our neighbour as He wants us to love him, we trigger His grace. Hear what St John of the Cross says about it:
“Here it must be noted that God places His grace and love in the soul only according to the soul’s will and love. Therefore, the good lover must strive to ensure that this is never lacking, since by this means, as we have said, he will stir God to love him more (if one may speak in this way) and to delight in his soul. And to continue in this charity, it is necessary to practise and exercise what the Apostle says: ‘Charity is patient, it is kind, without envy, without malice, without pride, without ambition; it does not seek what is in its own interest, it is not provoked, it thinks no evil, it does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; it endures everything that must be endured, it believes everything that must be believed, it hopes for everything, it bears everything that is fitting for charity’ (1 Cor. 13:4–7).” (SCA 12,11)
He says also: “Therefore, it is a matter of great importance for the soul to exercise acts of love in this life, so that, becoming perfect in a short time, it may not remain for long, here below or above, without seeing God.” (LF I,6,34)[16]
John 14:21: “He who loves me will be loved by my Father.” He who loves the Body of Christ, his neighbour, will be loved by my Father; that is to say, God will give Himself to him. He will receive divine joy; he will receive God within himself![17] The more a stretch of river gives downstream (at a lower level), the more God gives Himself upstream (from above).
It is urgent to practise love, the love of Christ. This prompts God to give Himself to us! We ask God to give us His Spirit so that we may love His Body, and, as a consequence, God gives Himself to us even more! It becomes a snowball effect! In this way we come to “prompt” God to love us more. This is what St Teresa explains through the example of the chess game, checkmating Jesus, that is, triggering His grace.[18] Very important.
If, on the one hand, God remains free in the way He gives Himself, He is deeply and divinely yearning to give Himself. Yet we can place obstacles in the way of His transforming action by resisting His grace, refusing to respond to His invitations or clinging to things that He is asking us to surrender. Our cooperation does not create His generosity; it is our free response to the generosity that is already being offered to us.
This also means that we must be patient with ourselves and with others. We cannot simply look at someone who has not experienced a particular grace and conclude that the person has refused to give himself or herself to God. We do not know the interior work of grace in another person’s soul, nor can we measure the relationship between God’s action and a person’s response from the outside. Teresa’s lesson is not a formula for judging others. It is an invitation to examine our own hearts, to stop being satisfied with the external appearance of our spiritual lives and to ask Jesus to show us what still needs to be surrendered.
The great discovery is that our freedom matters enormously, because our relationship with Jesus is a relationship of love. He does not want merely our activities, our virtues or our religious observance. He wants us ourselves. He wants our heart, and He wants it freely. He gives us the grace to make this gift, accompanies us as we learn to make it and continues to transform us through our cooperation. The more we learn to consent to His action, the more our entire life can become an expression of our belonging to Him.
This is the lesson Teresa learnt through her own bitter experience. We can spend years living a sincere and committed spiritual life without yet understanding what it means to give ourselves to Jesus without reservation. We can be close to the things of God and yet remain unaware of the deeper attachments of our hearts. But once we begin to understand, the whole spiritual life takes on a new meaning. Prayer is no longer simply something we practise; it becomes the place where we learn to belong to Jesus. Virtue is no longer simply something we acquire; it becomes the expression of a heart being transformed by His grace. Religious life is no longer simply a way of living; it becomes the concrete form of our total gift of ourselves to Him.
So let us return to the question that lies at the heart of Teresa’s story. Jesus wants to give us His grace. He has already come towards us, and He continues to call us. He does not wait because He is reluctant to love us, but because He respects the freedom through which we must respond to His love. What, then, are we still holding back? Where are our hearts attached? What are we unwilling to surrender? And are we prepared to let Jesus show us the truth?
These are not questions we can answer once and for all by making a grand declaration. They belong to the daily reality of the spiritual life. Every day, in our prayer, in our relationships, in our decisions and in the practice of virtue, we are invited to respond to the grace we receive. Every day we can learn to give ourselves more completely. And every day we can ask Jesus to do in us what we cannot do by ourselves.
3. Discussion
3.1 A formator’s question: the parlour and the Dark Night
A formator, writing in response to these reflections, put a precise question. Was the struggle between prayer and socialising in the parlour a part of Holy Mother’s Dark Night, or only its precursor? The poem itself says, “my house being now all stilled”, which indicates that all disordered sensual attachments have been detached. If that is so, the precursor to the Dark Night could be a very, very long period, if it means that all our appetites and desires must be severed. For Teresa it lasted nineteen years. This matters for formators, who may think they are already in the Dark Night (and, from the questioner’s own experience as a formator, many do), whereas in reality they could still be in the struggling and purifying stage before the Dark Night of the Sense.
Two challenges stand in the way whenever we read Holy Mother and Holy Father together. First, we need to understand, on a practical level, from the point of view of experience, what each of them is talking about. We need to understand his or her language and coined expressions, and what they mean for us in our personal experience and journey, so that we can benefit from their advice and grow spiritually. The goal is to grow in love, to be transformed, to do what God is waiting for us to do, so that He can work in us more and better and so that we can correspond more fully to His grace.
Second, we need to understand and “see” how, in fact, they speak of the same realities, each from his or her own angle, experience, doctrine and perspective. Each has a distinct way of expressing things: language, concepts, coined expressions, focus. Yet they describe the same things, the same action of God in us, the same road we walk. The way to begin is to describe different experiences that are easy for us to identify, and then to see what our Holy Parents say about them.
3.2 The second conversion: what it is and where it is found
One experience that both know well, and saw around them, but for which they do not use the expression we would use today, is the second conversion. This is key. It is also key that we agree on what it is, from the point of view of experience, and where to find it in their writings. I identify Holy Mother’s conversion as the “second conversion”. “Second” because she is already Catholic and consecrated. The first conversion is to become Christian or Catholic, to convert from atheism, from another religion, and so on. We find her account of her second conversion in her Autobiography, before and after the section dedicated to the four ways of watering the garden.[19]
What is at stake in this second conversion? Is it purification? A purification? A stage in the purification? To be honest, I would not put it this way. What was lacking was the total gift of herself to Christ. This is the real trigger for the reception of all the graces. Her heart was divided. She did not want to listen to Jesus, who warned her. She did not want to listen to a nun in the monastery who warned her. And no priest, whether confessor or spiritual director, was able to “see” the problem. In fact, it is not first a need for purification. I would rather use her own expressions: she was not giving all her heart to Jesus; she was not giving Him all her emotions and desires; she was not putting all her “pleasure” in Jesus. It is about being determined in the total gift of oneself, and this depends on us, not on God, since He constantly gives us His grace.
She was not determined to give her whole being to Jesus. She chose to keep part of her heart or emotions for something else. It was an attachment: in the name of Christ she was satisfying and pleasing herself. This was difficult for a spiritual director to see because it is hidden in the heart, in the emotions, in the internal forum. With regard to the external forum, I would personally assume that she was totally obedient. The laws of the time were loose. They allowed these meetings. She did not commit a visible sin, visible in the external forum. Perhaps there was a little excess in the amount of time spent in these encounters. But that was allowed then, as it is allowed in many non-Carmelite monasteries today, simply because the style of life is not that strict.
The entire book of Way of Perfection illustrates this precise issue and explains the meaning of her Reform. What was lacking in her life was not the practice of contemplative prayer. She had practised it for fifteen solid years before her second conversion. What was lacking was the exact core of her conversion: her heart was not given totally, “to perfection”, to the Lord. God was not absent. Jesus was not absent. His grace was not absent. But He was not able to work in her life; He was not able to give Himself to her and shower her with all His graces.
Once she understood that she was keeping part of her heart to herself, once she decided to give herself totally to the Lord, and once she decided to work heroically on the virtues, she started to receive an abundance of graces. All that we know about her is the Teresa who emerged after her conversion. All the abundant graces she received were liberated by her second conversion! Her total commitment allowed the Lord to give Himself. The Lord is constantly at the door of our heart and knocks. If we hear His knocking and understand it, if we open the door of our heart, that is, if we decide to give ourselves totally to Him, and if we renew this total gift of ourselves, then He enters and dines with us, giving us His abundant graces. And this generates steady spiritual growth.
This is why she repeats the fundamental golden rule of the spiritual life: the more you give yourself, the more the Lord gives Himself. And vice versa. Paradoxically, Jesus’ grace depends on us. When the sisters gathered at the newly reformed monastery of St Joseph ask her to talk about the graces they are supposed to receive, that is, contemplation, she structures her book so as to show how to receive contemplation. She spends the entire first half, so to speak, explaining the conditions for the reception of the graces: practising the virtues to perfection, not just being spiritual and practising them spiritually. She explains the difference between walking in a nonchalant way, as it comes, lukewarm, and the perfection of the practice of the virtues. For me, if this is not understood, the key to the reformed life is not understood, spiritual life is not understood, Jesus Himself is not understood, and the workings of the Holy Spirit are not understood.
3.3 Translating between Teresa and John of the Cross
We are not talking here about all the coined expressions of St John of the Cross: night, contemplation, passive, active, sense, spirit. But we understand perfectly what is at stake: the quality of the gift of ourselves, renewed every day. Remember what St Thérèse read at the beginning of her Carmelite life: “it is of the utmost importance to practise love, to make acts of love”, i.e. love of the neighbour. Is this not the core virtue among the three? Is it not this virtue alone that is re-explained in the Fifth Mansions to show us what will realise our first step of major transformation? Purification of the sense achieved, the rational part in us now commands the sensual part: it is the union of the will.
Here is how the two vocabularies correspond. All the effort towards this perfection is called by St John of the Cross the active purification of the sense, the active night of the sense. The grace to finally overcome the sensual part and to have the rational part command, offering us a stable life, is called the passive purification, or the passive night of the sense. Union of will is the result and fruit of the practice of perfection.
When does the second conversion occur? When we move from the Third to the Fourth Mansions. This is when the “supernatural things start”, as we read at the very beginning of the Fourth Mansions.[20] It is important to understand that contemplation starts already from this moment. It is not perfect contemplation yet; it is not pure; it is contemplation with a human modality. But it is still supernatural. It is only much later that we see the first drops of pure contemplation, when we move from contemplation in a human modality to pure contemplation.
Often, as a result of her new style of life and her fervour, a novice will quite rapidly notice changes in her prayer. The tastes, the “consolation”, in contemplative prayer diminish. She has to practise the virtues in a determined and perfect way, and this is what makes her grow spiritually! The Lord leans on this effort and on its quality. The first victory is the “house” of sensuality, which is now all stilled. The upper half of our being, the rational part, has received the grace of having an “empire” over the sensual part, controlling it, possessing herself, being regular, not leaning on consolation, and having a rather arid, calm prayer. We are not yet near the deeper purification. This is a first victory.
St John of the Cross seems to place the second conversion before the two purifications, the purification of the sense and the purification of the spirit. It is visible in the structure of the Spiritual Canticle: it begins with the wound of love, the second conversion. Then follows the purification of the sense, the lower level of contemplation, and then the purification of the spirit, purer contemplation.[21] From the point of view of experience, we can see in this way all the elements of our spiritual life, the meaning of Way of Perfection, and the stages of growth.
Applied to the formator’s question, the picture is clear. The struggle in the parlour is the very thing the second conversion resolves: a divided heart that has not yet given itself totally. It is not the passive night of the sense, which is the grace that follows the long active effort, nor a stage of purification in the strict sense. This is why a formator may easily mistake aridity, or the quiet loss of consolation, for the Dark Night while the heart is still not wholly given. The criterion is not what we feel in prayer. The criterion is the quality of the gift of ourselves, renewed every day.
3.4 Objections and clarifications
Is this Pelagianism? It is not. Everything begins with God, and everything depends on His grace. The general help is always given; even the desire to give ourselves is touched by it. What God does not do is to make our free response in our place. To say that the handle of the door is on our side is to say that the grace to turn it is always given and must actually be used. Nothing is earned, and no one is obliged. Teresa’s lesson is that we must learn to receive, not to purchase.
Does this make the spiritual life a heroic, anxious perfectionism? It does not. Teresa does not let us imagine what perfection is, nor does she impose a rigid form. She goes to the heart, to the subtle movements of love. Love does not need instructions, and her method is flexible because it is the free enactment of a relationship. The perfection in question is the quality of a gift, and the quality of a gift can be renewed every day, in the smallest things.
Does this despise our humanity? It does not. God created it, and He wants to redeem and transform it. Friendships and legitimate human affections are not the problem. The problem arises only when they become attachments we refuse to surrender, or when we use them in ways that prevent us from loving God and others as we should.
Does this license us to judge others? It does not. We cannot conclude from the outside that someone has refused to give himself or herself to God, because we cannot see the interior work of grace. The lesson is first an invitation to examine our own hearts.
Why was the problem not seen? Because it lives in the internal forum. It was difficult to spot in confession, difficult for the mistress of novices, rather neglected in our examination of conscience, and rarely mentioned in the ordinary teaching of the Church. Teresa’s own case proves it: a sincere, observant, fervent nun, a confessor and directors around her, and still the problem remained hidden for nineteen years.
4. Theoretical Consequences
First, a theology of grace as relationship. If Jesus gives Himself in proportion to the gift we make of ourselves, then grace is never a scarce resource that God rations. God yearns to give Himself abundantly, all the time, to each one. What varies is our reception. The doctrine of the general and the particular help of grace, and of the preparatory grace that is always given and must be used, receives its experiential content in Teresa’s twenty years: the grace to respond was present every day, and it was not used to the full. This takes the freedom of the creature seriously, to the point that God’s respect for it can block the relationship for twenty years, and it does so without ever making grace a human achievement.
Second, the second conversion as the interpretive key to Teresa. Way of Perfection, the Life and The Interior Castle are read as one itinerary once we see that the decisive hinge is the conversion of the heart, between the Third and Fourth Mansions, where union of will begins and the supernatural things start. Teresa’s doctorate is not founded on her teaching of prayer, which she received from others. It is founded on her discovery, at the price of twenty years, of the exact thing that blocks the flow of grace, and on her pedagogy for removing it. Her method of prayer is flexible precisely because the weight of her teaching lies elsewhere.
Third, a common language for Teresa and John of the Cross. What Teresa describes as the total gift of the heart, and what John calls the active purification of the sense, are the same effort seen from two angles. The passive night of the sense is the grace that crowns that effort, and the second conversion stands before both purifications, as the structure of the Spiritual Canticle shows. Spiritual theology can therefore stop treating the two Carmelite Doctors as rival systems, and can teach them as two vocabularies for one experience.
Fourth, the internal forum as a proper object of theology. The passage from the visible to the invisible that Teresa makes is the passage that theology has been reluctant to make. A theology that quantifies remains in the outer shell. Reopening the inner world reopens the questions that depend on it: Christology and Redemption (what does Christ accomplish on the Cross, and how does He save us?), the spiritual sense of Scripture, which exegesis has displaced, and the three courses that suffer when the inner world is closed: Pneumatology, Spiritual Theology with Spiritual Direction, and Mariology. This is a call to restore them to the centre, not to the margin.
Fifth, an ecclesiology of reform from within. The Church wanted renewal for three centuries and could not achieve it, and the delay ended in a rupture that deviated and diminished the faith rather than reforming it. Teresa remains in the Church and reforms it from within, by reforming the heart. This means that the renewal of the Church is a question of the quality of the gift of its members, and the loss of graces, growth and vocations in a given age must be read, among other things, as a question put to the quality of that gift. The Church’s renewal is carried by those who open the door completely.
Sixth, a Christology of the Bridegroom. Jesus asks the Samaritan woman for her husband, and asks the same of Teresa: where is your heart? Where are your emotional attachments? The Bridegroom needs all the heart, unconditionally, and the gift is repeated every day. Love of neighbour is the concrete trigger of the Bridegroom’s own gift (“he who loves me will be loved by my Father”), and the dynamic is cumulative, a snowball: the more we love the Body of Christ, the more God gives Himself, the more we are able to love.
5. Practical Consequences
For every Christian. Stop being satisfied with the external appearance of the spiritual life. Ask every day, in prayer, in relationships, in decisions and in the practice of virtue: Where is my heart? Is all of it given to Jesus? What am I keeping for myself, and in what way? Use the general grace that is always given, ask, and give, and renew the gift throughout the day. Do not mistake effort for surrender: the question is the quality of what we do, not the quantity of what we add. Practise love of neighbour as Christ wants it practised, without clinging to the satisfaction, the return of affection or the self-image that goes with it, because this is the most concrete way of triggering His grace. Remain patient with yourself, since the lesson took Teresa twenty years.
For formators and spiritual directors. Do not diagnose the Dark Night on the basis of aridity or lost consolation. Ask first about the gift: whether the heart is given wholly, or whether part of the affections is being kept, even in the name of Christ and of God. Remember that this is hidden in the internal forum and that it will not be caught by observation of conduct. A formator can be sincere, observant and fervent and still be at the stage that precedes the second conversion, and a formator who has not crossed that threshold cannot lead others across it. Teach the second conversion explicitly, and teach the difference between being spiritual and being perfectly spiritual. Be the kind of director who can “see” what no priest saw in Teresa. And never use Teresa’s lesson as a formula for judging others.
For religious communities and for the reform of religious life. More activities, more commitments and more external demonstrations of zeal will not renew a community. If we imitate only what Teresa did externally, we will reproduce the twenty years in which nothing flowed, and we will go on wondering why religious life does not flourish, especially in the Western world. The living heart of reform is the total gift of oneself, renewed daily by each member, with all that this implies for friendships, conversations, affections and the use of time. What is allowed by the rule and by custom is not thereby a gift to Jesus.
For the teaching of the faith. Put back into the curriculum what the inner world requires: Pneumatology, Spiritual Theology, Spiritual Direction, Mariology, and the spiritual sense of Scripture. Teach Way of Perfection by starting where Teresa starts, with the conditions for receiving grace, and not with the forms of prayer. Prayer follows from the gift. In the practice of confession and the examination of conscience, direct attention to the subtle movements of the heart: what we cling to, what we love, how and why we act, and not only what we have done.
6. Conclusion
Let us return to the water. Twenty years with Jesus, and the water did not flow. The cause was not that Jesus was absent, nor that His grace was absent, nor that Teresa was lukewarm in the ordinary sense. The cause was that her heart was not wholly given, and that Jesus, who holds the universe in His hands and does not possess our heart unless we give it, will not take what is not given. He waits twenty years for a nun. He waited three centuries for a Church. He is waiting now, with His arms full of graces, and no one understands why He cannot manage to give them to us.
The remedy is not complicated, and it is not easy. It is the total, determined, daily gift of oneself to Jesus, with the handle of the door on our side and the grace to turn it always given. The grace comes from Him. Our response, made possible and sustained by that grace, must become truly ours. This is the mystery of human cooperation. This is the lesson Teresa offers us: not that we must earn the water, but that we must learn to receive it; not that we must make Jesus love us, but that we must allow His love to transform us; not that we must achieve holiness by our own efforts, but that we must give ourselves to the One who alone can make us holy.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Teresa of Ávila. The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. 3 vols. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976–1985. (The Book of Her Life; Way of Perfection, Escorial and Valladolid manuscripts; The Interior Castle.)
John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Revised edition. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991. (Spiritual Canticle; Living Flame of Love.)
Thérèse of Lisieux. Story of a Soul. Washington, DC: ICS Publications.
Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant-Jésus. Je suis fille de l’Église. Venasque: Éditions du Carmel, 1951. English edition: I Am a Daughter of the Church.
Osuna, Francisco de. The Third Spiritual Alphabet. Translated by Mary E. Giles. New York: Paulist Press, 1981.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I–II, qq. 109–114 (on grace and on its preparation).
Council of Trent. Session VI, Decree on Justification (1547), ch. 5.
Code of Canon Law, can. 130.
Works by the author (schoolofmary.org)
Khoury, Jean. “Twenty Years with Jesus, Yet the Water Did Not Flow: Teresa of Ávila’s Lesson.” 15 October 2026. https://schoolofmary.org/twenty-years-with-jesus-yet-the-water-did-not-flow-teresa-of-avilas-lesson/
Khoury, Jean. “St. Teresa’s Conversion: The Meaning of Her Life.” https://schoolofmary.org/st-teresa-of-avila-2-16-st-teresas-conversion-the-meaning-of-her-life/
Khoury, Jean. “More on the Particular Help of the Grace of God in St. Teresa of Avila.” https://schoolofmary.org/more-on-the-particular-help-of-the-grace-of-god-in-st-teresa-of-avila/
Khoury, Jean. “St. Thomas Aquinas’ Explanation.” https://schoolofmary.org/3-st-thomas-aquinas-explanation/
Khoury, Jean. “St. Teresa of Avila: Humility.” https://schoolofmary.org/st-teresa-of-avila-humility/
Khoury, Jean. “The Two Systems of Christian Life.” https://schoolofmary.org/the-two-systems-of-christian-life/
Khoury, Jean. “Preparing the Way for the Lord: Why the Second Conversion Does Not Happen by Magic: Isaiah, John the Baptist and the Journey of Abraham as a Theology of Preparation for Meeting Jesus.” https://schoolofmary.org/preparing-the-way-for-the-lord-why-the-second-conversion-does-not-happen-by-magic-isaiah-john-the-baptist-and-the-journey-of-abraham-as-a-theology-of-preparation-for-meeting-jesus/
Notes
[1]Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life, ch. 30, no. 19, where she recalls praying again and again for the water promised to the Samaritan woman (John 4:5–14). The Gospel of the Samaritan woman is the one the Church gives to her feast on 15 October.
[2]Teresa was born in 1515 and entered the Carmel of the Incarnation at Ávila in 1535, aged twenty. Her conversion, which she narrates in the Life, ch. 9 (and whose fruits open the new account of ch. 23), took place in 1554, when she was thirty-nine. She wrote The Interior Castle in 1577, aged sixty-two. The author’s own treatment of the conversion is in “St. Teresa’s Conversion: The Meaning of Her Life”, schoolofmary.org.
[3]Way of Perfection was written for the sisters of the first reformed monastery, St Joseph’s at Ávila, founded in 1562. It survives in two redactions, the Escorial manuscript and the Valladolid manuscript, whose chapter numbering differs; references below follow the manuscript named.
[4]The Lutheran break dates from 1517. For the author, it did not reform the Church but deviated from the faith and diminished it; Teresa, by contrast, stayed and reformed from within.
[5]On the distinction between the two forums, see Code of Canon Law, can. 130, which distinguishes the exercise of the power of governance in the external forum and in the internal forum. The canon is invoked here only as the canonical root of a distinction that the spiritual tradition applies to the whole of interior life.
[6]See Matthew 5:21–48: “You have heard that it was said of old… but I say to you.” The Sermon on the Mount is, in the author’s reading, the Lord’s primary teaching on the heart and its circumcision.
[7]On the Pharisees, see in particular Matthew 23:25–28. On the poor, see Matthew 26:11 (“The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me”).
[8]Francisco de Osuna, Third Spiritual Alphabet (1527), the principal text of the Recogidos (the “recollected”), the Spanish movement of recollection that preceded Teresa’s reform by decades and which she herself read.
[9]Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”
[10]Teresa, Way of Perfection, on the “determined determination” (determinada determinación), Valladolid manuscript, ch. 21, no. 2.
[11]The Samaritan woman is told: “Go, call your husband, and come back” (John 4:16). The promise is in John 4:14: whoever drinks of the water Jesus gives will never thirst.
[12]On the general and the particular help of God’s grace, and the preparatory grace, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 112, aa. 2–3, and the Council of Trent, Session VI, Decree on Justification, ch. 5 (man is not inactive in receiving the inspiration, since he can reject it). See also the author’s articles “St Thomas Aquinas’ Explanation” and “More on the Particular Help of the Grace of God in St Teresa of Avila”, schoolofmary.org.
[13]Teresa, Interior Castle, Fifth Mansions, ch. 3, no. 6. The image of the worm that gnawed the ivy comes from Jonah 4:6–7.
[14]Marie-Eugène de l’Enfant-Jésus, OCD, Je suis fille de l’Église (English: I Am a Daughter of the Church), p. 183.
[15]The author’s article “The Two Systems of Christian Life”, schoolofmary.org, develops the contrast between the two ways of living the Christian life that the two portraits describe.
[16]John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle (version A), 12, 11 (SCA 12,11); Living Flame of Love, I, 6, 34 (LF I,6,34), as quoted by St Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who read John of the Cross from the first years of her Carmelite life.
[17]John 14:21: “He who loves me will be loved by my Father.” The author reads “he who loves me” as including the one who loves the Body of Christ, that is, the neighbour.
[18]Teresa, Way of Perfection, Escorial manuscript, ch. 25, nos. 1–4, the image of the chess game and the checkmate of the King. See the author’s article “St Teresa of Avila: Humility”, schoolofmary.org, for the checkmate move.
[19]The author’s reading of the “second conversion” as the hinge of the Teresian journey is developed in several articles on schoolofmary.org, among them “Preparing the Way for the Lord: Why the Second Conversion Does Not Happen by Magic”.
[20]Teresa, Interior Castle, Fourth Mansions, ch. 1, no. 1: here, she says, the supernatural things begin.
[21]John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, whose opening stanzas present the wound of love that sets the soul seeking the Beloved, before the purifications of sense and of spirit.