Saint Teresa of Ávila

Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda was born in Ávila on March 28, 1515, the granddaughter of a converted Jew whom the Inquisition had publicly humiliated — a detail the family hid for centuries and that explains a great deal about her life. At twenty she entered the Carmel of the Incarnation, running away from home. She spent nearly twenty years in a monastery that was more a drawing room than a convent — with visitors, crowded parlors, nuns coming and going — and in a lukewarmness she later described with no mercy for herself. Her “conversion” came at thirty-nine. From there began the other Teresa: the one who founded seventeen monasteries crossing Spain in a cart, quarreling with bishops, nuncios and superiors, and more than once risking the Inquisition. She wanted small, poor Carmels with true enclosure: the Discalced. With John of the Cross she did the same for the friars. And she wrote. *The Interior Castle*, *The Way of Perfection*, the *Life* and an immense body of letters, in a lively, witty Castilian full of irony — even toward herself and toward God, to whom, at a difficult moment, she is said to have remarked that if this is how he treats his friends, it’s no wonder he has so few. She died at Alba de Tormes on the night between October 4 and October 15, 1582 — both dates are real: that night the Gregorian calendar came into force and ten days were skipped. She was the first woman doctor of the Church. If your name is Teresa, today is your name day.