St. Teresa: a fever, a straw bed and eight early mornings

ALBA DE TORMES, this week, September 1582 AD — Saint Teresa of Ávila was on the road to Alba de Tormes in the Duchess of Alba’s own carriage. There was nothing in it to eat, because the duchess had forgotten to send any food with it.

St. Teresa was sixty-seven. She had been carrying a fever for months, and she had an open wound in her throat that meant she could hardly swallow at all. Venerable Anne of St Bartholomew, the lay sister who looked after 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, whatever 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.”

St. Teresa had meant to go to Ávila that month. She was prioress of the convent there, and she wanted to give the veil to her niece, Sister Teresa of Jesus. The Duchess of Alba wanted her at Alba instead. The duchess’s son’s wife was about to have a baby, 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 vicar of the province, and he could order St. Teresa where to go. At Medina he ordered her to Alba and not to Ávila. St. Teresa did not want to go, because her own house and her niece’s veiling were waiting at Ávila. But she had obeyed her superiors all her life, and she obeyed this time too.

They reached Alba at six in the evening on September 20. A messenger met them as they came into the town. The young duchess had given birth to a son — the birth St. Teresa had been fetched to Alba to bless. St. Teresa 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.

St. Teresa had founded that convent, the convent of the Annunciation of Our Lady at Alba, on January 25, 1571 AD. It was one of seventeen houses of nuns she 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. Her fever was very high, and she said she felt as if all her bones were broken. They laid her on a hard straw mattress, because the rule she had written for these houses let no nun, however ill, 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!”

Eight mornings in a row

In St. Teresa’s houses the nuns got up at five in summer and at six in winter. They prayed for an hour before the rest of the day’s prayers began. St. Teresa was up at that hour the next morning. She heard Mass, and then she went round the convent and looked the whole house over. When the prayers were over she joined the other nuns in the jobs of the house. Later they came in to her one at a time, to talk to her in private.

That same week the prioress, Juana of the Holy Ghost, sent for doctors. They told the prioress that St. Teresa would not get better. She kept getting up at that hour, morning after morning, 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.