JC Disciples
The Heart's True Home
Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5,15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 1:1-1
One of the great things about being in seminary is that, every once in awhile, I am able to do something that I’ve always wanted to do and earn credit for it. These times almost make up for my frustrations over the lack of time to do some of the things I’d rather do than study.
Last quarter, for my paper in Medieval-Reformation Church History, I was able to read the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century Carmelite nun from the town of Avila in Spain. Teresa was one of the great mystics of Christian history. I have had an interest in the mystics for sometime and Teresa is one of my particular favorites. So I was delighted with the chance to read her writings, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and be able to earn some credit for it in a class.
As did many young women in her time, Teresa entered the convent against the wishes of her parents. However, unlike many of the women entering convents in those days, she was in earnest pursuit of a religious vocation. During her first years as a nun, Teresa struggled with serious health problems. Eventually, she was able to conduct a very intensive prayer life, which frequently resulted in mystical visions for her. Perhaps the most famous of her visions is the one in which she saw an angel before her with a flaming lance in its hands. In her vision, the angel plunged this lance into her heart and withdrew it. This left her feeling a full of divine love, a feeling that persisted even when the vision had ended.
In the course of time, Teresa began a reform movement within the Carmelite order. As she was traveling between the houses she founded, she and the nuns traveling with her spent an evening in the company of her beloved former confessor. During their discussion that night, the confessor asked her to write a book on prayer from a woman’s perspective.
Teresa agreed with her usual reluctant obedience, but for some time, she had no idea what she would write. Then she received a vision of the approach she should take. From this vision was born the book Interior Castle, or in Spanish, The Mansions, perhaps the best known of all her writings. The notes do not suggest that she was influenced in any particular way by any gospel text. However, whenever I think of the word mansions I always think of the passage from John’s gospel that we just read. I suspect it was somehow connected to the image given to Teresa from which her book was born.
To understand her book, you have to understand the vision that prompted it. Imagine a castle made of some sort of crystal, something like a diamond. Now imagine the facets of the crystal are actual chambers, rooms, within the castle. These chambers, or mansions as Teresa called them, are arranged under and over as well as beside each other. Think of them as concentric spheres or Russian nesting dolls.
In Teresa’s vision of a castle, there were seven layers of these mansions. The innermost mansion is the place where God resides. The closer a soul comes to this center of the castle, the more the rooms are illuminated by the light of God. Conversely, in the outer levels of mansions, the light comes more from the world than from God.
The door through which the soul enters the castle is prayer. Nothing more is needed to begin the journey than a desire to draw close to God. The way to act on this desire is prayer.
In the outer levels of the castle, Teresa saw more influence from the world than from God. She imagined distractions and temptations to sin as wild beasts, snakes, and insects roaming the mansions in the first few levels. However, as the soul moves from the first mansions to the second, it begins to hear the call of God more clearly. It persists in the practice of prayer and learns to let go of the world, its distractions and temptations. Finally, as it progresses through the third mansions, it develops the virtue of humility.
As the soul develops humitlity, it moves further into the castle, coming into the fourth mansions. Here the soul begins to experience God respondning to its prayers in what Teresa called the Prayer of Quiet. Genuine love begins to grow within a soul at this stage. This love is born out of the soul’s desire to please God in everything.
By this point, the soul hears the voice of God more clearly than ever before and it begins to move into the inner mansions. Teresa compared the fifth mansions to the betrothal of the soul to God. In the sixth mansions, the soul is prepared for the spiritual marriage, which results when God brings the soul into the seventh, and final, mansion. It is here in these inner mansions where Teresa believed mystical experiences occur.
Teresa regarded her mystical experiences as favors given by God, never a reward that she merited by her own faithfulness. To her, it was God who called the soul to journey through the castle and God who gave the blessings of the Prayer of Quiet, the divine love, and the experience of union. Because God would grant such favors to someone as unworthy as she considered herself to be, she was quite certain that God would, in due time, grant similar favors to any soul that was dedicated to a life of prayer.
Furthermore, this experience of spiritual marriage, this union with God in the innermost room of the castle, was never to be simply an end in itself. Teresa was anything but a spiritual thrill seeker. An eminently practical mystic, she believed the purpose of prayer, of this journey through the castle was to be aligned with God in order to do the will of God on earth.
I can never read our gospel text tonight without hearing the word mansions instead of dwelling places. Although dwelling places is more faithful to the Greek, mansions is engraved in my mind from an Easter cantata I sang as part of a choir years ago. And when I think of mansions now, I will always think of Teresa and her castle of prayer.
This text from John is very familiar to many of us. Happening as it did at the Last Supper, it is part of the Passion narrative. It is a popular text for funerals and memorial services because it promises us a home in heaven.
But I think it also speaks to us here and now. In his book on grief, Mourning into Dancing, Lutheran pastor Walter Wangerin, Jr. writes that heaven is the eternal "now." God is outside of the limits of time; heaven, where God resides, is likewise beyond the limits of time. What that means is that everything that will happen has already happened from the perspective of heaven. In that sense, we are already there.
Jesus promised his disciples that where he is they shall also be. We are disciples no less than the twelve men, and the women who accompanied them, who gathered in the table that night. Where Jesus is, we are also. Where we are, Jesus is present. The promise is for now as well as then. Our dwelling place is in Christ. That is the true home for all our hearts.
Jesus promised to prepare a place for us. I think Jesus also prepares us for the place. In her castle journey, Teresa drew a picture with words of how God interacts with the soul in prayer, shaping it, molding it for the will of God, to do the work of God in the world. The most interior room of the castle did not serve to remove the soul from the world but rather to send the soul into the world to function in the body of Christ on earth.
Peter wrote to Christians under his care, "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."
This is the heart of Teresa’s Interior Castle, the Christian called by God from the darkness of world into the marvelous light of God and reflected back into the world as a bearer of the light of God. As beleivers in Christ, our dwelling place, our true home is within the love of God. As we abide in Christ, that love from God, that love with which God loves, moves in us and through us as we touch the world around us.
Jesus explained to his disciples that he was in the Father and his Father was in him, that the works that he did were the works of Father. Likewise, he promised his followers, "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do." If Jesus is to act in our world, Jesus does it through us. We are the body of Christ here on earth. Each of us has a function in this body.
Jesus has prepared a place for us. It is place here and now as we live on earth as well as our dwelling place in heaven. The place for our heart within the heart of God is where we shall live forever. Forever includes today.
Since the heart of God is to be our home forever, we may as well settle in right now. Jesus explained to Thomas that he is the way. So to find our eternal home, we need only to set our eyes on Jesus and follow the path he has blazed for us. As we walk his way, follow his example, we will find our home in the heart of God. May we live there forever. Amen.