The Attraction of Teresa of Avila

A Model of Living the Simple Life with God

Teresa of Ávila is a woman, a saint, a mystic, and a doctor of the church. She is best known for her reform of the Carmelite community in sixteenth-century Spain and for her many inspiring and profound writings that were saved and circulated in the decades after her death. As a woman of prayer, Teresa is a good model for anyone who wants to live a simple life with God in the midst of a complex world.

Teresa was a favorite of Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement. In The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day tells why she named her daughter Tamar Teresa:

I had read the life of St. Teresa of Ávila and fallen in love with her. She was a mystic and a practical woman, a recluse and a traveler, a cloistered nun and yet most active. She liked to read novels when she was a young girl, and she wore a bright red dress when she entered the convent. Once when she was traveling from one part of Spain to another with some other nuns and a priest to start a convent, and their way took them over a stream, she was thrown from her donkey. The story goes that our Lord said to her, “That is how I…