This morning we departed from Salamanca and drove approximately one hour to the city of Avila. It is an amazing place - a walled city filled with baroque beauty and intrigue. St. Theresa was born here in 1515. She was born into a relatively wealthy family and became a significant figure in the renewal of monastic spiritual life. Her mother died when she was only 12 years old and she turned to Mary to be her spiritual mother. She fled her family home to run off to the convent. There she led an austere life but became very sickly and spent nearly an entire year in bed. At one point they even thought she had died and sealed her eyes with wax. They had even prepared her tomb. But she wasn’t dead. She would go on to live a full life and worked with St. John of the Cross to found 17 Carmelite communities throughout Spain and worked diligently with him to reform the Carmelite rule of life. She was so well respected as a writer and theologian that she became a doctor of the Church. Her fascinating life is forever noted in her autobiographies The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. Avila has now become an important stop on any pilgrimage to Fatima as St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross have played a significant role in the life of religious communities and in the history of the Catholic faith.
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