ABSTRACT
It is very important. … to have a great, a very determined determination, not to stop till they reach (the living water), come what may, whatever should happen, whatever struggles they have to go through, whoever complains about them … even should the world collapse – as often seems to be the case when they say to us: ‘there’s danger here’, ‘so-and-so went astray that way’, ‘that person was deceived’, ‘that one used to pray a lot, and down she went’, ‘it harms virtue’, ‘it’s not for women’, ‘they’d do better to keep to their spinning’, ‘there’s no need for all this fancy stuff’… (CV: 21.2)
When St Teresa insists on her community’s right to devote time to the ‘dangerous’, ‘deceiving’, ‘virtue-harming’, ‘male-only’ and ‘fancy’ business of personal prayer – oración mental (V: 8.5)1 – she means by that her community’s right to spend time in the company of Christ: a relationship, involving two living persons. She was insisting on her right to spend time with a Jesus whom she understood to be living, available, interested.
