St. Teresa of Ávila

Who they were

Teresa entered the Carmel at Ávila at twenty and spent nearly two decades finding prayer so difficult that she later admitted she sometimes shook the hourglass to make the time pass. Chronic illness ran through her whole life, a mysterious paralysis in her twenties, and headaches so constant that the noise in her head, she wrote, was like rushing water. The change came in her forties, in front of an image of the wounded Christ, and what followed made her one of the great teachers of prayer in the Church's history: the reform of the Carmelite order, seventeen new monasteries founded on foot across Spain, and books, *The Interior Castle*, her *Life*, written under obedience in stolen hours. In 1970 she became the first woman declared a Doctor of the Church.

Why people turn to St. Teresa of Ávila

The headaches are documented in her own hand, so migraine sufferers claimed her. But her larger constituency is anyone who prays and feels nothing, she did, for twenty years, and kept showing up.

How to ask their intercession

For headaches, plainly. For dryness: tell her prayer feels like nothing lately, and ask her to pray you through the showing-up part, which she insisted was the whole battle. ---