St Teresa of Jesus,
Virgin and Doctor of the Church

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Saint Teresa of Jesus is the foundress of the Discalced Carmelites.

Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in Avila, Spain, on 28th March 1515 and entered the Carmel of the Incarnation there in 1536. She lived there for about 20 years until she felt that God was asking something more of her.  On  24th August 1562 she founded St. Joseph's, a new monastery in which she planned and hoped that the original Rule of Carmel would be kept faithfully. There was a great deal of opposition to the new Carmel and it was sometime before she was able to live there in peace.

Eventually the hostility died down and Teresa was asked to found more of these houses of prayer in other cities of Spain.   Together with St John of the Cross she also began houses for the friars.  Teresa’s new vision for the Carmelite life combined silence and solitude with community living and giving the life of prayer a specific apostolic role in the Church and the world. Prayer was to be the great outreach to others, the one and only work of her nuns.  She died at Alba de Tormes on 4th October 1582. She was sixty seven years old.

The first reading, Wisdom 7:7-14, speaks of the need for prayer to obtain Wisdom, the second reading, Romans 8:14-17, 26-27, reminds us that “when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself” prays within us so that our pleas “are according to the mind of God.”  There is a choice of two Gospels: John 14-18, 37-39a where Jesus invites “anyone who is thirsty to come and drink” and John 4:5-15a where Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that the water he shall give “will turn into a spring inside...welling up to eternal life.” The account of the Samaritan woman at the well with Jesus was one of particular importance for St Teresa.