# Who Was St Teresa of Ávila? The Nun Who Called Prayer Friendship

Source: https://christianpure.com/learn/st-teresa-avila-impact/
Publisher: Christian Pure (https://christianpure.com/)
Published: 2025-11-13
Updated: 2026-10-27

St Teresa of Ávila was a nun who reformed her order, founded convents across Spain and taught that prayer is friendship with God. She lived from 1515 to 1582, wrote the story of her own life and books on prayer still read today, and in 1970 became the first woman named a Doctor of the Church.

Her most famous book begins with a picture. Teresa, sixty-two and in poor health, was trying to explain the life of prayer to her nuns, and she wrote that she "thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions." She was borrowing the words of Jesus, "In my Father's house are many mansions" (John 14:2), and turning them inward. The King lives at the centre of the castle, and the whole of the Christian life is the journey to his room. Her own journey there was long, and that is why she is easy to trust.

## Who was St Teresa of Ávila?

She was born Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada in Ávila, a walled town in Old Castile, on 28 March 1515. As a small girl she read the lives of the saints with the brother she loved most, and the two of them made a plan. "We settled to go together to the country of the Moors," she remembered, "begging our way for the love of God, that we might be there beheaded." Their greatest difficulty, she adds, "seemed to be our father and mother." An uncle met the two children on the road outside the town and brought them home.

Her mother died while Teresa was still a girl. In her teens she took to the books of chivalry her mother had loved, and later she was sent to board with Augustinian nuns. In November 1535, at twenty, she left her father's house without his consent to enter the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Ávila, a community of about 140 nuns. There she took the name Teresa of Jesus, which is why many people still call her St Teresa of Jesus. Within a few years she was so ill that she lay four days as if dead, and her health never fully recovered.

Then came the hardest part, and she does not hide it. For years she prayed, gave up praying and began again, drawn at once to God and to the talk of worldly visitors at the convent, a long [dry stretch in prayer](https://christianpure.com/learn/closer-to-god-prayers/). "I passed nearly twenty years on this stormy sea," she wrote, "falling and rising, but rising to no good purpose, seeing that I went and fell again." The turn came in Lent of 1554, when she was thirty-nine. Going into the oratory one day, she saw an image brought in for a feast, "a representation of Christ most grievously wounded." "So keenly did I feel the evil return I had made for those wounds, that I thought my heart was breaking," she wrote. "I threw myself on the ground beside it, my tears flowing plenteously, and implored Him to strengthen me once for all, so that I might never offend Him any more." From then on her prayer changed.

## What did St Teresa teach about prayer?

Her answer fits in one sentence, and it is the sentence for which she is best remembered: "mental prayer is nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us." Jesus told his disciples to pray behind a shut door "to thy Father which is in secret" (Matthew 6:6), and he told them, "I have called you friends" (John 15:15). Teresa took both words at face value. Prayer, for her, was time spent alone with a Friend who is glad we came.

In her Life she explains how that friendship grows with the picture of a garden. "It seems to me that the garden may be watered in four ways," she writes: "by water taken out of a well, which is very laborious," then by buckets drawn up by a windlass, then by "a stream or brook," and last "by showers of rain, when our Lord Himself waters it, without labour on our part." The beginner hauls water by hand. As prayer deepens, God does more of the work, until at last he simply sends the rain.

The Interior Castle, written in 1577, takes the same journey through seven sets of rooms, the "mansions," from the outer courts where the soul is still busy with the world to the seventh, where God and the soul are joined. It would be easy to think the goal is rapture. Teresa says plainly where it leads. "This is the end and aim of prayer, my daughters," she writes in the last mansions; "this is the reason of the spiritual marriage whose children are always good works." She brings Martha and Mary, the two sisters of Bethany, back together: "believe me, both Martha and Mary must entertain our Lord and keep Him as their Guest." Jesus praised Mary for sitting at his feet (Luke 10:42), and Teresa never forgot that someone also had to cook the meal.

## What were St Teresa's visions?

Teresa described graces in prayer that she could not explain away: a sudden sense of God's presence, words heard inwardly, and visions. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912 calls them "intellectual visions and locutions," impressed on the mind rather than seen with the eyes. They troubled her as much as anyone. Some of the devout men she first consulted believed the devil was at work, and in time confessors, among them St Francis Borgia and St Peter of Alcantara, judged them to come from God. Her own test was the one Jesus gave of false prophets: "by their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:20). "Works are the unmistakable sign which shows these favours come from God," she told her nuns.

The best known is the one she describes in chapter 29 of her Life. She saw an angel, small and beautiful, his face burning. "I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God." She adds, "The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one." Catholic writers call this grace the transverberation, the piercing of her heart.

## Why did St Teresa reform the Carmelites?

The Incarnation was a large house with many visitors, and Teresa longed for a small community that would keep the Carmelite rule in its first, stricter form. On 24 August 1562 she opened the convent of St Joseph in Ávila, after many troubles and much opposition, and nearly every house she founded afterwards met the same. Four years later the head of the whole Carmelite order, John-Baptist Rossi, visited her, approved what she had done and gave her leave to found more houses, for friars as well as nuns.

She founded seventeen convents in all, from St Joseph's in 1562 to Burgos in 1582, and with the friar later known as St John of the Cross she carried the reform to the friars as well. The travelling cost her. In her Book of the Foundations she mentions, almost in passing, snow that fell the whole day long, roads missed and fevers on the way, and she owns, "I felt a great dislike to journeys, especially long ones; but when I had once started I thought nothing of them, looking to Him in whose service they were undertaken."

## How did St Teresa die, and when was she made a saint?

She died at Alba de Tormes on 4 October 1582, old and broken in health, after founding the convent at Burgos. The reform of the calendar took effect that very night, so the next day was counted as 15 October, and that is her feast day. She was beatified by Pope Paul V in 1614 and canonized by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. On 27 September 1970 Pope Paul VI proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church, a title the Church gives to saints for the eminence of their teaching, and he noted that she was the first woman to receive it.

- 1515: born in Ávila, 28 March
- 1535: enters the Convent of the Incarnation
- 1554: her conversion before the image of the wounded Christ
- 1562: founds St Joseph's, Ávila, the first reformed convent
- 1565: completes her Life
- 1567: second convent, at Medina del Campo
- 1568: first house of reformed friars, at Duruelo, with St John of the Cross
- 1573: begins the Book of the Foundations, finished in 1582
- 1577: writes The Interior Castle
- 1580: her Discalced Carmelites become a separate province, the start of the Discalced Carmelite Order
- 1582: founds her last convent, at Burgos, and dies at Alba de Tormes
- 1622: canonized
- 1970: proclaimed a Doctor of the Church

## Is she the same as Mother Teresa or St Thérèse of Lisieux?

No, though the three are joined. St Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) was a French Discalced Carmelite, a nun of the order Teresa of Ávila reformed, and John Paul II wrote, "Decisive for fulfilling her Carmelite vocation were the spiritual texts of the Mother Foundress, Teresa of Jesus." Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910–1997), born Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu, took her name from Thérèse of Lisieux when she became a Loreto sister in 1928. The little nun of Lisieux learned from the reformer of Ávila, and the sister of Calcutta was named for the little nun.

## What are St Teresa's most famous words?

Her best-known poem is the short verse she kept as a bookmark in her breviary. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation keeps its spare shape:

> Let nothing disturb thee,
>  Nothing affright thee;
>
> All things are passing;
>  God never changeth;
>
> Patient endurance
>  Attaineth to all things;
>
> Who God possesseth
>  In nothing is wanting;
>
> Alone God sufficeth.

Beside it stand her definition of prayer as friendship with God, and the last advice of The Interior Castle: "our Lord does not care so much for the importance of our works as for the love with which they are done." A prayer often credited to her, which begins *Christ has no body now but yours*, does not appear in any of the three books of hers quoted here.

Her words here come from translations that belong to everyone: The Life in David Lewis's English, first published in 1870, The Interior Castle in the version by the Benedictines of Stanbrook, revised in 1921, the Book of the Foundations in Lewis's English as revised in 1913, and the bookmark in Longfellow's. Modern translations word her differently, and they are well worth reading too.

Teresa spent nearly twenty years falling and rising before she learned to stay. She knew the way to the centre of the castle is long, and she knew who waits there. Jesus promised it to anyone who loves him: "my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him" (John 14:23).

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## Related reading

- [Do Protestants Believe in Saints? Yes, Every Believer Is a Saint](https://christianpure.com/learn/protestant-saint-definition/)
- [12 Short Prayers for Getting Closer to God, Including the Dry Stretch](https://christianpure.com/learn/closer-to-god-prayers/)
- [Prayers for Humility: The Prayer of Saint Ephrem, the Litany of Humility and Everyday Prayers](https://christianpure.com/learn/humble-godly-spirit-prayers/)

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