Told she will not recover, St. Teresa rises at the usual hour

ALBA DE TORMES, this week, September 1582 AD — Saint Teresa of Ávila is sixty-seven. Since the night she reached the Carmelite convent at Alba de Tormes she has got up at the usual hour every morning, heard Mass, received Communion and taken her place in the day’s work of the house. This week the prioress, Juana of the Holy Ghost, called doctors in to her. They told the prioress that St. Teresa will not recover.

She meant to be at Ávila this month. She is prioress of the convent of St Joseph’s there, and she wanted to give the veil to her niece, Sister Teresa of Jesus. The Duchess of Alba wanted her here instead: the duchess’s daughter-in-law was about to give birth, and the duchess wanted St. Teresa in the castle so that her presence would bring a blessing on the birth. The duchess sent her own carriage to Medina del Campo and asked Father Antonio de Jesús to fetch her. He was the first Carmelite friar to take up her reform. He was also vicar of the province, and he could order her where to go. At Medina he ordered her to Alba and not to Ávila, because the duchess wanted her. She did not want to go: her own house and her niece’s veiling were waiting at Ávila, and she was being turned aside for a duchess. But she had obeyed her superiors all her life, and she obeyed this time too.

They left Medina in the duchess’s carriage. The duchess had forgotten to send provisions with it. St. Teresa had been carrying a fever for months, and an open wound in her throat that made swallowing almost impossible. Venerable Anne of St Bartholomew, the lay sister who nurses her, could get her nothing to eat all that day on the road. At a poor village called Peñaranda, Anne gave someone four reales to buy eggs at whatever price they cost; the coins came back, because there were none in the place. All Anne had to give her was dried figs. Anne looked at St. Teresa, who seemed half dead, and began to cry. St. Teresa comforted her: “Don’t cry, daughter; the figs are very good; how many poor people are worse off! God wills that it should be so.”

They reached Alba at six in the evening on September 20. A messenger met them as they came into the town with the news that the young duchess had given birth to a son — the birth St. Teresa had been fetched to Alba to bless. She said: “Thank God! the ‘Saint’ won’t be wanted now!” She was too worn out to be taken on to the castle, so Father Antonio de Jesús sent her straight into the convent. The house is her own. She founded the convent of the Annunciation of Our Lady at Alba on January 25, 1571 AD, one of seventeen houses of nuns she has founded in twenty years.

The nuns took her blessing and kissed her hand, and she had a word for each of them. Then they talked her into going to bed. She was in a burning fever and said she felt as if all her bones were broken. They undressed her and laid her on a hard straw mattress, because the rule she wrote for these houses allows no nun, however ill, to lie on anything else. “God help me, daughters, how tired I feel!” she said. “I have not gone to bed so early for twenty years! How I thank Him for letting me be with you now that I am taken ill!”

In her houses the nuns are up at five in summer and at six in winter, and pray for an hour before the office begins. She was up at that hour the next morning. She heard Mass and received Communion, and then went round the convent and looked the whole house over. When the office was over she went to the duties in the house with the rest of the community. Later the nuns came in to her one at a time, to talk to her in private. She did the same the next morning, and the morning after that, and went on doing it for eight days.

Some days she was worse and some days better. She tried not to let the nuns see how ill she was, but every one of them could see it.

Anne of St Bartholomew had been with her fourteen years by then. Of those days she said: “I constantly saw Jesus Christ in her soul, united to it as though they were already united in heaven. The sight filled me with the deep reverence that we ought to feel in the presence of God. Indeed, it was heaven to serve her, and the keenest pain to witness her sufferings.”