The convent where the dinner bell waited for food

AVILA, Castile, September 1581 AD — The rules of the convent of St Joseph in Ávila do not set a time for dinner. “As for dinner we cannot be regular, because that must be as our Lord gives,” they say. When there is something to eat, the bell rings at eleven in winter and at ten in summer.

This month the nuns of that house elected Saint Teresa of Ávila to run it. She is sixty-six. She told them she was old and wanted rest, and she refused. Then the friar in charge of every house she has founded, Fray Jerónimo Gracián, ordered her to accept. She said yes.

So now St. Teresa has to find food every day for the house. It is not allowed to own anything at all. No more than thirteen nuns may ever live there.

She wrote that rule herself. She lived at St Joseph’s for years, and there she drew up the Constitutions. “They must always live on alms, having no revenues whatever,” she put down. So the bread is paid for by gifts, and by what the nuns earn.

One sister does the buying. She is the treasurer, and she is the same nun who keeps the turn. She is not allowed to bargain: she is told the price twice, and then she takes it or leaves it. No nun goes out to fetch anything, because they are strictly enclosed. Whatever comes to them comes to the turn, where one sister is always on duty.

They are not supposed to go out and ask for food either. There is to be no begging “so long as they can bear it”. Instead they earn it: “They will earn their bread, not by any fine work but by spinning.” Whoever buys their thread pays what he chooses. The nuns take it without arguing. If the spinning does not pay, they are to find other work. Nobody is given a set amount to get through. “No task-work must be laid on the sisters, and each should contrive to work, that all may eat.”

The gifts are counted out loud. Every evening after supper the nuns all gather. The sister at the turn says what came in that day and who sent it. Then the nuns pray for those people by name.

Coins go into a chest with three keys. They are written up in a book the same night. A girl who wants to join cannot be turned away for being poor.

Four coins and some dried figs

St. Teresa stayed prioress for the rest of her life. In April 1582 AD she founded one more convent, at Burgos, and she travelled through the summer. In September the Duchess of Alba sent her own carriage to fetch St. Teresa to Alba de Tormes. The Duchess forgot to send any food with it. They stopped for the night at a poor village. By then St. Teresa was feverish and faint, and she asked for something to eat.

The nun looking after her, Venerable Anne of St Bartholomew, had nothing but some dried figs. She handed someone four reales and told them to buy eggs whatever they cost. Nobody in the village would sell any, and the coins came back. Anne burst into tears. St. Teresa told her not to cry. The figs were very good, St. Teresa said, and plenty of poor people were worse off.

At Alba, on September 29, she took to a bed she never got out of again. She was still prioress of St Joseph’s, and the poverty of that house troubled her as she lay there. She asked out loud, over and over: “How shall we get the nuns bread to eat?”

She died at Alba at nine o’clock at night on October 4, 1582 AD. That was thirteen months after she was given the job she had refused.