A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. While the crowds pressed around him, Jesus began to speak to them in these words. This is an evil age. It seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah was a sign for the Ninevites, so will the son of man be assigned to this present age.
The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment along with the men of this generation, and she will condemn them. She came from the farthest corner of the world to listen to the wisdom of Solomon. But you have a greater than Solomon in your very midst. At the judgment, the present generation, and they will condemn it. For at the preaching of Jonah, they reformed.
But you have a greater than Jonah here. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Today we are celebrating the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila. And it would be very easy to to bring in text, to quote people, and give the impression that she died yesterday.
Actually, she died in 1582. She's very much alive, as all the saints are. Because we don't commemorate them merely as memories, we commemorate them as present realities in our own daily living. And I mean that just not in the sense of mere illustrations of very dramatic examples that we can look up to and say, if they did it, maybe I can do it too. Oh, no.
That's not the way the saints operate in the church of Jesus Christ. They operate as a community with me, actual. Because we believe firmly it's a doctrine of our faith that we talk about the communion of saints, the mystical body of Christ, the Church with a capital c. What do we mean? Well, it used to be you could ask any second grader and they'd tell you what it meant.
You can't ask them now. It means that we have a unity of the church militant, the soldiers in the trenches. We have the church triumphant, and we have the church living in this world. So we have these three, but they're one. They're one.
And as I say, not with the actuality of a memory, which is active actual in my mind, but in the actuality of their presence, their power, their existence. Their existence, that's what we're talking about. Now in 1982, our holy father visited Spain to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of this woman, Saint Teresa of Avila. Maybe if some of you have been there. If you've been there you will know how green her memory is in Avila.
You'd think she would just die the day before, if you go to the right places. Now in the course of our Holy Father's well chosen remarks on that occasion, on 11/01/1982, here's how here is how he introduced this lady who died in 1582. She was born in 1515. Notice, I want you to notice those dates 1515 to 1582, and they're accurate. I just looked them up.
Yesterday. Here's what our holy father said of Saint Teresa of Avoy. He referred to her as the first woman doctor of the church. Now that's a very special title. And up to that time there had been no ladies in that category of being doctors.
Then I am now quoting, I presume he was speaking Spanish. The Holy Father said, referring to Saint Therese of Avila, his first word was, God's vagabond vagabond. The reformer of Carmel, that is the order of Carmelites. Spain's glory, and a light to holy church, an honor to Christian women, a distinguished presence presence in universal culture. So whether you're Catholic or whatever, our Holy Father is saying she belongs to the universal culture of our world, and that's no exaggeration.
Now, the two points I want to make to try to talk about Saint Teresa briefly, it's ridiculous. But there are two things I want to bring out this morning. The first thing is this: You see, when we talk about these saints, we talk about his great heroes and heroines, what they accomplished, and many of them accomplished a great deal, unbelievable. And somehow we think that it was all smooth going. That everybody said, Oh, you're so right, Teresa.
Everybody knows you're right. Let's just all get behind that wheel and shove, shove, shove. Now, the absolute contrary of that is true. Notice I didn't say contradictory. The contrary of that is true.
Instead of shoving in the way she wanted to go, there were plenty on the other side shoving in the way she didn't want to go. She was dying and was cast out of one of her own convents. How do you like that? It wouldn't keep her in her own her own religious order. And she was dying, and she did die a few days later, or soon after that.
So that's the first point I wanna We've got to disabuse ourselves that to be Christian means to have a tranquil, peaceful life. Peaceful in the sense of this world. It ain't so, and never has been so, and never will be so. My dear people, it wasn't true of Jesus Christ. And who are we to think we're going to have it better than he had it?
Look where he landed. Now that's a very that's a scary thought. It is for me. It scares the dickens out of me. And the word dickens isn't the word that came to my lips.
It is scary. But that's what we're called to be. We're called to be the sons and daughters of Jesus Christ. And look where he look where he wound up. Don't forget the empty tomb.
Don't forget the resurrection. Don't he didn't stay on the cross. But his life was no bed of roses. His life was not one of tranquility. Out of his own chosen group that he personally chosen, two of them proved traitors, and one of them hanged himself from a tree.
Two of them, that's two twelfths, one sixth, of his own intimate people that he they were handpicked. Well, there's no use going, you know the life of Christ and you know what it was. And if we're Christians, can we expect to have it any better? And yet we talk about peace, we talk about the peace of Christ, but what are we thinking of getting out of this? We talk about the love of Christ.
What do we think it's going to mean? As C. S. Lewis says, you better be darn sure you know what you're saying when you pray for the love of God. The fact is, he may love you all too well.
The second point I want to make is this, and this is very I but I gotta touch on it. If there's any I'm I'm not a scholar of Saint Teresa. Remember there are people devoted their lives to this woman, studying her works and all that. I'm just on the periphery as I am on most things. The thing that struck now remember her dates are 1515 to '82.
Now notice that Martin Luther is raging up in in in Germany. The Renaissance has reached its peak in Italy. All hell is breaking loose in it in in England. Saint Thomas More is executed. Henry the eighth is having wife after wife.
Queen Elizabeth come the first comes on at the end of the century. The Council of Trent takes place to try to bring or to restore some kind of unity in the church. Henry the eighth, Elizabeth, Thomas More, Martin Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, the the conflagration of the Reformation in Northern Europe, and the similar as it turned out to be in England. She lived through all of this. She's a contemporary of all of this.
But you'd never know it from her writings. See, what I'm what the point I want to make is this. We get a picture of the church being in great turmoil. Turbulence. It was up around Wittenberg.
It was later on in England. The Renaissance was a fact in Southern Europe. But that's not the Church of Jesus Christ. It's part of it. Here down down in Spain and mostly around Avila, you have here a woman who's devoting her life to one thing, holiness.
And trying to help her her sisters in religion to be holy. And that carried over to the to the male order of Carmelites. Because she had a great influence in reforming them too. They all needed reforming. Now, in her life, and she was extremely she was not a well educated women generally, generally, notice that word generally, were not well educated in her day.
The thing is, that appeals to me, she had a lot of what we today would call personal revelations. She distrusted every single one of them. Distrusted them, and sought the advice, sought the recommendations, sought the counsel, sought the instruction, sought the guidance of outside people. Mostly priests who were either Jesuits, or Dominicans, or Franciscans. Very few of them were Carmelites.
Notice the Jesuits are in there. Ignatius Loyola had founded his order. This was the first generation of Jesuits. She distrusted herself. She distrusted these things that you we call revelations or religious experience.
I don't care what part of what you know what I'm talking about. These people who have what seems to be an overwhelming consciousness of God or something. This happens, and I'm not downgrading it. I'm only saying that St. Therese of Avila distrusted it, and I'm in her company.
I'm on her side. She appealed to outside sources. She wanted guidance, and she got it. She got it. Now that brings me to my last point.
See today we have just the opposite point of view. I just received a gift of a book called, let me give you the exact title, Psychological Seduction. It's by William Kilpatrick. Now I went I made a retreat a few years ago down on the Potomac. It was all psychology and bum psych I can read books too, you know.
The man who who was talking all this psychology stuff, I can read the books as well as he can. We never went near the chapel. Now this man, William Kilpatrick, is a young Harvard he's a graduate of Harvard, teaches in the South. For example, I just just before I came over here I looked mentions a man named Maslow. I looked I have one of his books on anger.
The first thing in that book is this: We are exclusively pleasure seeking animals. That's the very first sentence, we are exclusively pleasure seeking animals. As we get older that gets modified. And then he goes on to say that we are purely creatures of our emotions. Not long ago I gave it well it's longer than I like to think a lecture to a group of psychiatrists in Washington.
And I referred several times to the, believe it or not, free will. The chairman of the meeting, who was a Catholic and whom I knew well, came up and said, Father, he said, I, that word has no meaning for me, free will. Kilpatrick gives an tells how he was in church in Scotland, the Catholic church, and the priest was giving a very learned discussion. He was quoting Saint John, Saint Matthew, Saint Augustine, know, people like that. And as he says, one or two men around him were dozing, and a woman next to him was look taking an inventory of her purse.
When all of a sudden this priest in the pulpit mentions Frong, Eric Frong. Everybody paid attention. Now that's very that's the barometer of the day. That's the tenor of the day. I'm nothing against psychology I've taken my share of it.
But the point is, psychology is supposed to be a positive science as it's presented. But many of these people men like Fromm, K. Kohlberg look at the power he exercises in our moral theology today with his moral relativism. They turn it into a religion, and they even use the word religion. That is so You see, the whole idea is I'm okay, you're okay.
That has been preached from Catholic pulpits. Fulfillment, self fulfillment. See, we've many in many instances, we have lost the perspective that there's a God who's running the world, that the world is his creation, and the world has to say to God, you are God, and I'm your creature, and so be it. Help me to be a good one. You see, this is objectivity.
This isn't looking inside of myself, being introspective, and getting hung up with little old me. This is getting hung up with God. And that's where Saint Teresa of Avila was. Hung up with God. In the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.