The Story of St. Teresa of Avila, and the Ten Days That Never Happened
She died on one date and was buried eleven days later, and no time passed at all.
Teresa of Avila died on the night of October 4, 1582.
She was buried on October 15.
Nothing went wrong. Nobody delayed the funeral. The days in between simply did not exist, because that week was the week the calendar changed.
The gap in the year
By the sixteenth century the Julian calendar had drifted about ten days out of step with the sun, and the date of Easter was slipping accordingly. Gregory XIII’s reform fixed it by the blunt method of deleting the surplus. In the countries that adopted it immediately, including Spain, Thursday October 4, 1582 was followed directly by Friday October 15.
Teresa died on the last night of the old reckoning. The ten days that would have followed were struck out of the year while her body lay waiting, and the next day on the calendar was the fifteenth.
Which is why her feast is kept on October 15 rather than on the day she actually died. It is a bureaucratic accident, and it is a very good one, because few people have a more fitting exit than a woman who spent her life writing about time and eternity and then left through a hole in the calendar.
Avila
She was born Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada in 1515, into a wealthy family in the walled city of Avila.
The wealth had a history behind it. Her paternal grandfather was a Jewish convert from Toledo who had been reconciled by the Inquisition in 1485 after confessing to secretly keeping the old faith, and who afterward moved his family to Avila and bought them into the minor nobility. This is ordinary documented history rather than gossip, and it matters for reading her, because she grew up in a household that understood exactly how closely a family like hers might be watched.
She entered the Carmelite monastery of the Incarnation at twenty. Then she got seriously ill, nearly died, and spent years afterward partly paralyzed and in constant pain. Her health never really came back.
Twenty years of nothing much
Here is the part of her life that gets skipped, and it is the part most people could actually use.
By her own account, for roughly twenty years after entering religious life, her prayer was mediocre and she knew it. The Incarnation was a large, comfortable, sociable house with a relaxed rule, and she spent a long stretch of her life as an ordinary nun who found prayer tedious, avoided it when she could, and was reasonably good company in the parlor.
She was nearly forty before anything changed. She describes the turn plainly: she came upon an image of the wounded Christ in a corridor and something in her gave way.
A woman now classed among the greatest contemplatives in the history of the Church spent half her adult life bored in chapel. She wrote that down herself, in a book she was ordered to write, and it is the single most encouraging fact about her.
The dart, and what Bernini did with it
Her later experiences in prayer were intense enough that she struggled to describe them and then described them anyway, in prose that is startlingly concrete.
The best known is what the tradition calls the transverberation: an angel with a golden spear who pierced her heart, leaving her, in her words, completely afire with a great love of God, with a pain so sharp she moaned and a sweetness so great she did not want it to stop.
Bernini sculpted that scene in Rome in the seventeenth century, and the result is one of the most famous and most argued-over objects in Western art, because what he carved is unmistakably a woman in the middle of something overwhelming. The argument about it is mostly a modern argument. Teresa herself was never confused about what she was describing and never pretended it was tidy.
Watched
All of this happened in Spain, in the decades when the Inquisition was alert to exactly this kind of thing: unauthorized interior religion, and particularly women claiming direct experience of God without a man’s supervision.
She was denounced. Her autobiography, which she had written under orders from her confessors, was handed to the Inquisition and held for years. She was investigated. People in authority who did not like what she was doing had a straightforward mechanism for stopping her, and they used it.
She kept writing, kept submitting what she wrote to her superiors, and kept founding houses. She did not go underground and she did not pick a public fight. Like Padre Pio four centuries later, she is a saint whose own institution leaned on her hard, and whose response to the leaning is a large part of what the Church eventually recognized.
The part with the carts
She was also, and this is easy to lose behind the mysticism, a formidable administrator.
From 1562 she founded a reformed branch of the Carmelites, the Discalced, starting with one small house in Avila and reaching about seventeen foundations before she died. That meant negotiating with bishops, landlords, town councils, lawyers and her own order, raising money, and traveling Spain in unsprung carts over bad roads in poor health through a Castilian summer.
The line everyone quotes from this period is the one she is supposed to have said after a cart tipped her into a river: Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few. There is no good early source for it and it is almost certainly a later piece of folklore, but it has survived for four hundred years because it sounds exactly like her, which is its own kind of evidence.
What the Church did about her
She was canonized in 1622, in a single famous ceremony alongside Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Philip Neri and Isidore the Farmer, a Spanish laborer who had been dead for five hundred years. Roman wits at the time said the Pope had canonized four Spaniards and a saint, Neri being the only Italian.
Then, in 1970, Paul VI named her a Doctor of the Church: the first woman ever given that title, with Catherine of Siena following a week later. That is a separate thing from being a saint. Canonization says a person is in heaven and may be publicly honored. Doctor of the Church says the whole Church should go and read them.
It took three hundred and forty-eight years from her canonization to the second judgment. The books had been in print the entire time.
Let nothing disturb you
She is the patron of Spain, of Spanish writers, and of people with headaches, which given her medical history is about right.
The thing most worth taking from her is not the dart or the castle or the visions. It is that she was funny, exhausted, frequently unwell, administratively overloaded, suspicious of pious theatrics, and convinced that God was more easily found among the pots and pans than in a dramatic mood. She is supposed to have prayed to be delivered from sour-faced saints.
A few lines in her own hand were found in her breviary after she died. Let nothing disturb you, they say. Nothing frighten you. Everything passes. God does not change. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing.
Everything passes, including, as it turned out, ten days of that October.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.