“When you pray,
do not be like the hypocrites,
who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners
so that others may see them.
Amen, I say to you,
they have received their reward.
But when you pray, go to your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.
And your Father who sees in secret will repay you."
do not be like the hypocrites,
who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners
so that others may see them.
Amen, I say to you,
they have received their reward.
But when you pray, go to your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.
And your Father who sees in secret will repay you."
Father said this does not mean that we should go to our
bedroom and shut the door and have no need for church. This is referring
to our Interior Castle. Go within yourself and don’t let things distract
you when you pray.
The Interior Castle of St.Teresa of Avila
St. Thomas saw the importance of the sequence of petitions:
The Lord’s Prayer is the most perfect of prayers....
In it we ask, not only for all the things we can rightly
desire, but also in the sequence that they should be
desired. This prayer not only teaches us to ask for
things, but also in what order we should desire them.
(CCC 2763)
Concerning the sequence of the seven petitions:
In the prayer given
us by Jesus, we begin with the end. We begin our prayer with the declaration
“Our Father.”
We begin with our
end in Him, “Our Father who art in heaven!” The prayer ends in what is for
fallen humanity the beginning of our journey, “deliver us from evil.”
There is a great
mystery in the sequence of petitions of the Our Father, because of its divine
origin. Yet we can see somewhat into the mystery through the writings of St.
Teresa, Doctor of the Church. Her understanding of the journey of the soul,
from its first responses to the Gospel to its ultimate loving union with Christ
in spiritual marriage, gives us a framework in which to reconsider this
traditional prayer.
History of the Interior Castles
St. Teresa was asked
by her superiors to write a book about the stages of
the spiritual life and had a vision of the soul as a castle. Within the castle she saw seven dwellings the
soul journey’s toward to reach its deepest center where the Holy Trinity
resides. Each mansion, according to St. Teresa has endless rooms and represent
the stages a soul undergoes to reach perfect union with God.
We are going to walk
through the mansions in the order they are encountered by the soul, as the soul
journey’s toward God. We will compare
the seven petitions of the Our Father in reverse order with each mansion.
The First Mansion
“But deliver us from evil”
The souls in the
first mansion are in a deep struggle with temptation, caught in compulsions and
attached to instinctual need for pleasure, affection, and esteem. They are driven by the need to control life,
self, and God.
The soul is in great
need for God to deliver it from these evils.
The Second Mansion
“Lead us not into temptation”
The Third Mansion
“And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those
who trespass against us”
Souls who have entered the third dwellings in the interior journey have
made great progress. They are very sensitive to the offenses against God that
sin inflicts. They are keen to the ugliness of even venial sins, and seek
ascetical practices and works of worship of God. Their prayer, while still
ascetical and not mystical, is more simple and frequent.
Teresa warns, however, against dangers of this dwelling which come from a
lack of right humility. The practice of virtue may lead to an excess of
self-confidence. When dryness in prayer or other trials come, such persons may
become very troubled.
Teresa points out the critical need in these mansions to “look at our own
faults” and “leave aside those of others”, hence “forgive us, as we have
forgiven.”
The Forth Mansion
“Give us this day our daily bread”
The fourth mansions in the journey of the soul mark a radical and
essential change. In the fourth mansions, the soul advances beyond ascetical
prayer — attainable through ordinary grace — and enters mystical prayer through
genuinely supernatural experience. God grants a work in the soul beyond those
consolations sometimes given in ascetical prayer: He grants what Teresa calls
spiritual delight.
“One strong warning I give to whoever finds himself in this state is that
he guard very carefully against placing himself in the occasion of offending
God. In this prayer the soul is not yet grown but is like a suckling child. If
it turns away from its mother’s breasts, what can be expected for it but death?
I am very afraid that this will happen to anyone to whom God has granted this
favor and who withdraws from prayer – unless he does so for a particularly
special reason – or if he doesn’t return quickly to prayer he will go from bad
to worse. I know there is a great deal to fear in this matter.”
The need Teresa writes for those in these mansions, the need for “its
mother’s breasts” to grow and become strengthened in its new relationship with
His Majesty, is reflected in the fourth petition of the Our Father for “our
daily bread.” The soul in these mansions is in urgent need of spiritual
sustenance.
The Fifth Mansion
“Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven”
The relationship to God of the soul in this dwelling is the relationship
of union, specifically with God’s will. Teresa calls the prayer of these
mansions the prayer of union. In speaking of the deep spiritual delights of
this union, Teresa writes, “One cannot arrive at the delightful union if the union
coming from being resigned to God’s will is not very certain. Oh, how desirable
is this union with God’s will! Happy the soul that has reached it.”
“We cannot know whether or not we love God, although there are strong
indications for recognizing that we do love Him; but we can know whether we
love our neighbor. And be certain that the more advanced you see you are in
love for your neighbor the more advanced you will be in the love of God”
In the perfection of love we fully live within His will. As Teresa
describes it we move toward, in this fifth dwelling place, the perfecting of
covenantal love in marriage. In this fifth dwelling is the “meeting”, the “joining
of hands” with the divine Spouse. It is reserved to the sixth dwelling to make
firm the betrothal with our Spouse, and to the seventh, the spiritual marriage
itself.
The Sixth Mansion
"Thy kingdom come"
This dwelling, as Teresa describes it, is an experience of profound
suffering and of joy in Christ, to whom the soul becomes betrothed.
Through both the suffering and the flights of spiritual ecstasy, with
imaginative visions, the soul becomes almost completely detached from any love
for this world. This detachment comes through joy: “The joy makes a person so
forgetful of self and of all things that he doesn’t advert to, nor can he speak
of anything other than the praises of God which proceed from his joy.” The
detachment comes also through the suffering.
The soul now sees that only the Creator can console and satisfy it.
Yet the souls in the sixth mansions, having endured and grown in loving
intimacy and obedience, pray this petition in a simplicity which calls us to
remember the fiat of Mary. These souls are betrothed to the Lord! They are
given to Him through the sufferings and the ecstasies of kenosis: a
self-donation that is a participation in the Passion of Christ.
The Seventh Mansion
“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name”
In this dwelling, the soul is brought into spiritual marriage with the
Lord, sharing, in a special personal sense, in His holy name. Here Teresa
describes the supreme intimacy of the soul with the Beloved, this side of the
Beatific Vision.
In this dwelling the presence of the Trinity within the soul is revealed
and assured, and our Baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Spirit” is perfected. Here the holy name is hallowed in the interior
worship and love of the soul, now wed with her Spouse.
Transforming Union
Transforming union is a state in which the most perfect union of our will
with the Will of God is reached in this life.
“By means of this union, God’s will and the soul’s will are now one….Accordingly,
the intellect of this soul is God’s intellect; its will is God’s will; its
memory is the memory of God; an its delight is God’s delight; and although the
substance of this soul is not the substance of God, since it cannot undergo a
substantial conversion into Him, it has become God through participation in
God, being united to and absorbed in Him, as it is in this state. Such a union is wrought in this perfect state
of the spiritual life, yet not as perfectly as in the next life.”
