 Welcome to The Commentaries, a podcast series from Tan in which you'll learn how to read and understand history's greatest Catholic works from today's greatest Catholic scholars. In every series of The Commentaries, your expert host will be your personal guide to not just read the book, but to live the book, shining the light of its eternal truths into our modern darkness. Tan commentaries.com to get your copy of the book and to subscribe for access to all the great reading plans, new episodes, bonus content, and exclusive deals for listeners of The Commentaries. Welcome back to The Commentaries series on the interior castle by St. Teresa of Avila. I'm Father Timothy Reed, and today is day two, which means we will begin looking into the first mansions of the interior castle and how we actually begin this journey through the interior castle of our souls. At the beginning of the second paragraph of the first chapter, St. Teresa provides her famous analogy of the soul being like a castle. She writes, and I quote, I thought of the soul as resembling a castle formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal and containing many rooms just as in heaven there are many mansions. If we reflect, sisters, we shall see that the soul of the just man is but a paradise in which God tells us he takes his delight to think. Our soul is a paradise where the Lord finds his delight. Have you ever thought of your own soul in that way? And Teresa makes a point of mentioning how beautiful a soul must be stating nothing can be compared to the great beauty and capabilities of a soul. Now let's stop and talk about this just a little bit. Right from the very start, Teresa is challenging us to look at our souls in a way most of us have probably never even considered. And speaking as she does, St. Teresa is teaching us something important. St. Teresa says that our souls are magnificent in beauty, of course, because we are made in God's image and likeness, and therefore it is impossible to comprehend the sublime dignity of the human soul, which through baptism becomes the actual dwelling place of God. So here, at the very beginning of this great work, we find Teresa giving her readers a little indirect primer on Christian anthropology by stressing the absolute beauty of the human soul. And this is important because in doing so, she gives us reason for understanding the interior castle as well as reason for making the inward journey through it. Hopefully, she helps us to understand ourselves and God's plan for us a little better. Truly, man himself is a capacity for God. We are a unity of soul and body, and we have been created for God in a way that no other creature has. And this is because man, unlike the rest of creation, has the ability to choose for or against God. Now, Ruth Barrows, who wrote this great little book called Interior Castle Explained, takes up this topic. Unlike a flower that will always be a flower or a dog who will always be a dog, man can choose to be man fully by living for God or become merely a shadow of what a man is called to be by rejecting God. And Barrows says that the measure of how fully we become man is our particular growth in holiness. Now, unfortunately, many people today focus only on the bodily aspects of humanity. So many of us pay a great deal of attention to our bodies, making healthy choices regarding food and exercise, and this is a good thing. We should take care of ourselves. But we mustn't neglect caring for our souls. I mean, truly, shouldn't we spend as much time taking care of our souls as we do our bodies? St. Teresa complains that we know we have souls by faith, but so many of us fail to reflect upon what gifts our souls may possess. Who dwells within them are how extremely precious they are. She says, Therefore, we do little to preserve their beauty. All our care is concentrated on our bodies, which are about the coarse setting of the diamond or the outer walls of the castle. Now, according to Ruth Barrows, St. Teresa is driving here at this idea that each of us must choose to become a man of full integrity by uniting ourselves to the Lord. In this union with God, we detach from the things of the flesh and the material world, and we grow in holiness and a greater likeness of God. I mean, do you realize, my friends, that God is constantly communicating himself to us? He's constantly reaching out to us, calling to us, but we must respond to God's call. And as we respond to this call through prayer, we begin our journey into the mansions of the interior castle. As Ruth Barrows puts it, The more man penetrates into the depths of the interior castle, the more man's capacity for receiving God's call and responding to it grows. In other words, holiness builds on holiness. And so this is why we must learn to see ourselves as potentiality, as capacity for God. While the fullness of union with God is only found in the seventh mansions, those that are in the most deepest part in the center of the soul, God is nonetheless constantly offering his friendship to us throughout our lives, so that his indwelling within us may be permanent. And indeed, even in eternal. What we must wrestle with is our own human sinfulness, because it is our sinfulness that keeps us from moving through the mansions of the interior castle. It is our sinfulness that keeps us from uniting ourselves with God. Make no mistake about it. Sin is an obstacle to God, and it tarnishes our human dignity. The more we sin, the more we will have to be purified before we can be eternally united with God, whether in this life through our prayer, sufferings, and sacrifices, or through the pains of purgatory in the next life. So this is why St. Teresa speaks very early on of the necessity of knowing oneself, which we come to in prayer. And we must try to understand that God made us to love, serve, and praise Him. Yet even more than that, our Lord's goodness is vast, and He's merciful, which we can see by the fact that He chooses to commune with us, to seek intimacy with us, even though we are like us, St. Teresa puts it, loathsome worms. Furthermore, God is willing and happy to grant great graces to souls. He's not stingy, and we in turn must give praise to God for these favors, even if He doesn't grant them to us, but just to other people, keeping in mind that He doesn't necessarily grant spectacular favors to souls because they are more deserving. He grants those spectacular favors to show forth His glory. With all of that said, know as well that humility and trust in our Lord are our keys from moving through the interior castle, and we must never doubt God's generosity in giving graces. Now, with our little lesson on anthropology out of the way, St. Teresa is ready to begin the tour of the mansions, beginning with the first. She tells us that the castle is entered through prayer and reflection, whether mental or vocal. So whether your prayer life is made up of meditations and silent mental prayer or a series of well-known prayers that you pray out of a prayer book, you can enter the interior castle. What's important about our prayer is that we be attentive to God. According to St. Teresa, souls who do not pray or do not pray attentively are truly crippled souls. So think for a moment of what your prayer life is like. Do you aimlessly and quickly say your daily prayers just to get them out of the way? Or do you pray attentively, actually pondering your words? Do you pray with real love for God? Is daily prayer even a priority? Or do you quickly leave it behind if something else that seems more important arises? Do you have a set time each day that you pray? Or do you ever make visits to a church just in order to pray? I'm asking all of these questions because we must have some type of interior life if we wish to grow in holiness. What I mean by that is that we must have a friendship with God. We must treat Him just as we treat our friends. We have to make it a point to spend time with Him and converse with Him. God dwells within our souls, my friends, and so we must have a real relationship with Him if we wish to enter into the interior castle of our souls and make our way toward God. In describing the outer reaches of the interior castle, Saint Teresa distinguishes between two types of souls found outside the castle. So there are those who are so involved in the things of the world that they can no longer help themselves and they need help from God himself to enter. She says that there are souls in the outer courtyard of the castle who really have no desire to enter, and she's not really concerned with these souls in the treatise. Rather, she's concerned with these other souls who have the capacity and desire to enter. Now in this outer area of the castle, little of the glorious, brilliant light from the King's Royal Chambers can be seen in these places. Souls here who have the capacity and desire to enter are typically new to the spiritual life, and they're still enticed and distracted by the things of the world. Saint Teresa writes of these souls that they are still very worldly, yet have some desire to do right, and at times, though rarely, commend themselves to God's care. They think about their souls every now and then. Although very busy, they pray a few times a month with minds generally filled with a thousand other matters. For where their treasure is, there is their heart also. And she goes on that even though they managed to enter, they are accompanied by numerous reptiles which disturb their peace and prevent their seeing the beauty of the building. Still, it is a great gain that these persons have found their way in at all. Now once inside the castle, Saint Teresa is ready to discuss more details of the first mansion and this we will do next time. But in the meantime, give some thought to your own human dignity and to your own capacity to be an intimate friendship with God. Do you realize how much your soul is worth? Well, let me tell you, it's worth so much that God would become one of us and die in order to save it. So with this in mind, shouldn't we do all that we can to love and honor God by becoming men and women of full integrity, men and women who are in real relationship with God? Truly, there's a magnificent journey ahead of us, an inward journey through our souls to real union with God. And it all begins with making a daily commitment to prayer. And that brings us to the end of day two in our study of the interior castle. Thank you so much for listening and for joining me on your journey to grow deeper in your spiritual life. Next time, we'll be discussing the second chapter of the first dwelling places. And now let's pray Saint Teresa's famous prayer. Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. All things are passing away. God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices. Amen. May God bless you and may Saint Teresa Vavala intercede for you. To get 25% off your next order, including the interior castle and countless more spiritual works to deepen your interior life and guide you to heaven.