José Antonio de Yturriaga Barberán
Ambassador of Spain
Lately it has become fashionable to name railroad stations after more or less illustrious people. Thus, the one in Valencia remembers Joaquín Sorolla, the one in Málaga is named after María Zambrano and the one in Atocha, Madrid, after Almudena Grandes. The Avila-born Antonio Sierra -former director of the Cultural Institute of Dublin and cultural attaché of the Embassy in Ireland- has proposed to the City Council of Avila to give the station of the city the name of Teresa de Jesus. It seems to me a wise proposal that I support to the extent of my limited strength, as there are precedents If the Seville station is honored with the names of their patron saints Justa and Rufina, Teresa has more than enough merit to give its holy name to the station of his hometown.
Biography of Teresa of Avila
Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in Avila in 1515 and was the paternal granddaughter of a converted Jew. As a child, she devoured books on chivalry and the lives of saints, which fostered her youthful imagination. When she was very young, she ran away from home with her brother Rodrigo to go to the “lands of the Moors” to confess her Christian faith and join the ranks of the martyrs. She was an extraordinary person in every way: as a religious, as a mystic, as a writer, as a founder of convents and prioress and, above all, as a person, as revealed in her autobiography. She entered as a secular maiden in the convent of Gracia, but had to leave due to a serious illness. During her convalescence in her father’s house she decided to enter religion, which she did in 1536, when she entered the convent of the Incarnation, outside the walls of Avila, under the name of Teresa of Jesus. Her first years as a nun were marred by one illness after another that she endured with fortitude, patience and a spirit of sacrifice.
Throughout his troubled life he suffered from numerous ailments, but he had an iron bad health, which he overcame thanks to the power of prayer. As he recounted in “The Dwellings”, praying is like making a garden in unfruitful soil in which weeds grow, but the Lord pulls them up and plants other good weeds. “With God’s help, we must see to it, as gardeners do, that these plants grow and take care to water them through prayer”. She was a master in the game of paradoxes: “I, as I cannot understand, what I understand is not understanding by understanding”, or her famous poem:
“I live without living in me,
and I hope for such a high life,
that I die because I do not die.
I live already outside of me,
after I die of love;
for I live in the Lord,
who willed me for himself:
When I gave him my heart
he put this sign on it,
that I die because I do not die…”.
After overcoming her ailments and enormous difficulties, in 1562 she founded the convent of St. Joseph in Avila, which served as a testing ground for the reform of the Carmelite Order, creating the branch of the Discalced Carmelites. With it she began her hyperactive life as a foundress, which led her to travel half of Spain, from the two Castillas to Andalusia, and from Extremadura to Murcia. She did not succeed in founding convents in Medina del Campo, Malagón, Valladolid, Toledo, Pastrana, Segovia, Salamanca, Alcalá de Henares, Alba de Tormes, Beas del Segura, Seville – with the help of her brother Lorenzo who had made his fortune in Ecuador -, Caravaca, Villanueva de la Jara, Burgos, Valencia, Soria and Madrid. She encountered the firm opposition of the Carmelitas calzados who opposed the reform, was the object of serious accusations and was denounced in 1575 to the Inquisition by Ana de Mendoza, princess of Eboli. Nuncio Sega described her as “a restless, restless, disobedient and contumacious woman, who – by way of devotion – sold bad doctrines”. The Inquisition found nothing wrong in her teachings or her conduct, and Teresa received the support of Philip II to consolidate the reform of Carmel. She had the invaluable support of Juan de Santo -Juan de la Cruz in religion-, whom she called her “little friar”, who was even imprisoned by the hierarchy of the Carmelites. He also obtained the support of outstanding friars such as Pedro de Alcántara, Luis de León or Luis de Granada. Pope Pius IV authorized the Rules of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, allowed the coexistence of the branches of the Booted and Barefoot Carmelites, and granted the latter a prelature independent of the former.
Despite her busy life and between foundations and visions, Teresa had time to write several works that, once printed, circulated rapidly through churches and convents, to the satisfaction of some and scandal of others: “The Life of Teresa of Jesus”, “Way of Perfection”, “The Dwellings of the Interior Castle”, “The Book of Foundations”, “Relations and Merits”, “Spiritual Challenge” and “Meditations on the Songs”. He composed 30 poems, among which are some of the most outstanding of mysticism, in friendly conflict with St. John of the Cross. He also wrote numerous letters of substance, of which 470 have been published. Never have such delightful letters been written about the joyful, vigorous, impatient and holy scamperings of his foundations, which constituted a vibrant and uninterrupted entertainment.
She died in 1572 in the odor of sanctity, was beatified in 1614 and canonized in 1642. She was proposed in 1923 to be declared Doctor of the Church, but Pope Pius XI opposed her on the grounds of sex, following the misogynistic mood of St. Paul, who excluded women from the leadership of the Church. Paul VI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church in 1970, being the first woman to be conferred such a high honor, together with St. Catherine of Siena. The University of Avila has named her doctor “honoris causa”.
Biography of Teresa of Avila by Kate O’Brien
One of the aspects I want to highlight in these lines is the enormous humanity of the saint, her simplicity despite her deep culture, her closeness to the people, her rebelliousness with cause and her great sense of humor, features that have been highlighted in the delightful biography of Teresa written in 1951 by the Irish author Kate O’Brien. The writer came to Spain in 1922 to work in Portugalete as a governess in the house of the Areilza family and was smitten by Spain and, especially, Avila, Teresa of Jesus and John of the Cross. According to her biographer, Eibhear Walshe, she was attracted to the essential soul of Spain, in which she saw a solitary and oaky spirituality derived from its austere landscape and expressed in the life and beliefs of these two great mystics. His favorite city was Avila, where he lived for long periods, where he saw the very essence of the Spanish spirit. There he discovered Teresa of Jesus and wrote a personal portrait of her. According to what he declared, he did not intend to write about a Saint, but to examine Teresa, not by the rules of canonization, but for what she was herself, a brilliant woman and one of the greatest in the history of Christianity. It highlighted that she behaved, acted and wrote as a precocious feminist and described her most contentious aspect. He showed her more human side and her facet as a tireless reformer of the Carmelite Order -despite the tremendous obstacles she had to face- and founder of fifteen convents and two monasteries, which cost her to be closely controlled by her superiors and subjected to the scrutiny of the Inquisition. She highlighted the determination and indomitable character of a woman of action, who knew how to fight against the established religious power-without stepping outside the limits of the Church-and successfully lead a large organization of women in a man’s world. “She was a public figure, a politician, a combatant against the visible forces of her time,” despite which she won support for her reforms from Philip II and even the Pope himself.
Although she did not possess the traditional gifts required for sainthood, Teresa was for Kate “the warmest, wittiest, most insightful and purest of all the saints”. Through the combined and constant experience of self-discipline, modesty, courage and intelligence, she became “the least pretentious, the most accessible and the most serene of all Christian mystics” and, thanks to her clear expressiveness, her tempestuous and tormented life shines today through human history as the “path of perfection” into which she transformed it. She never lost control of her brilliant common sense and her ability to remain detached from herself. She wrote brilliantly and fluently, and her writings are “a great gift she offered to life.” She was unsettling and also somewhat crazy, but it was much that she carried through. “Charm coexisted with sanctity, wit with vision, and human simplicity with ineffable trances.” She often confidently complained to her Lord, who on one occasion, during a vision, said to her, “Teresa, this is how I treat my friends,” to which she spontaneously replied, “That is why you have so few of them.”
In 1961 O’Brien lived for a few months in Avila and made several reports for the BBC about Spain, which he adored and considered the “femme fatale” of Europe, to the point that he hardly wanted to know other countries. In “Farewell Spain” (1937) he wrote that his love for Spain had been “broad and leisurely, lazy and also selfish, but I know that, wherever I go, I shall never be able to love a land as much as I have loved the Spanish”. Avila has honored her admirer by naming one of its streets after her in 2011, which curiously leads to the city’s train station.
My connections with Avila
I visited Avila for the first time as a member of the Tuna of the University of Seville at Christmas 1955 and I still keep the memory of the serene beauty of the walled city and the cold we spent, which barely allowed us to play our instruments because our fingers froze. I had a special bond with the city because my aunt Pilar, my father’s sister and a nun of the Grenadian congregation Siervas del Evangelio -sor Sagrado Corazón in religion- lived and died there, who lent a hand to the cloistered Carmelites of the convent of the Encarnación, where Saint Teresa taught and of which she became prioress. I used to go to see her as often as I could, which were not as many as I would have liked, because – due to my diplomatic profession – I spent long periods of time outside Spain. During my time as ambassador to Ireland, I came into contact with the life and work of Kate O’Brien, who – in addition to her biography of Teresa of Jesus – had written a couple of novels connected with Spain, such as “Mary Lavelle” (1936) – translated as “Broken Passions” and “That Lady” (1946) – “That Lady” – about the Princess of Eboli, precisely the one who betrayed Teresa to the Inquisition. In 1971 he visited Spain for the last time and, when he died three years later, he was writing a third novel set in our country.
Sierra’s proposal seems not only fair, but also justified. Saving the distances, it should be maintained that Santa Teresa was one of the forerunners of multimodal transport, as it traveled hundreds of leagues in wagon, on donkey’s back and in the ‘San Fernando carriage’ —which meant “a while on foot and another walking”—. How many thousands more kilometers would have traveled the “restless and wanderer” Teresa, if in her time the iron roads had already been invented. As she used to say with her proverbial plainness “God is among the pots”, so there is no doubt that it is also among the trains, tracks and platforms, especially on journeys that are not high speed. On the other hand, I have the conviction that, if O’Brien were alive, would be the first to sign the petition to the City Council to give the name of the Saint to the railway station, and thus could be viably united to his admired Teresa. It is not that the City Council honors Teresa de Avila by giving her name to the station, but it would be the station and the city that would be honored by embracing her saintly name. If Justa and Rufina honored with his name the station of my Seville, with much more reason should do the same the station of Avila with the name of his Teresa.
For all these reasons, I enthusiastically join the request made by my former collaborator Sierra and maybe the Saint will work one of her miracles and get the high speed trains to Avila.
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