Teresa had chosen to enter the Carmelite Order because she believed God was calling her. How quickly she forgot! In "St. Teresa of Avila, Passionate Mystic," Mirabai Starr tells us "Teresa was the center of attention. She was attractive, witty, and vivacious. She was also brilliant, and she tempered her frivolous impulses with a genuine insightfulness about human psychology and its connection to the spiritual path. Men of all ages found her irresistible and began to clamor for time with the remarkable young nun. In spite of herself, Teresa responded to their affections by falling in love again and again, living for the days when she got to see her devotees and speak with them."
Yet simultaneously Teresa was judging herself sternly "about her obsession with these relationships and the ease with which she manipulated everyone into liking her." (Starr) The tension between Teresa's desire for flirtatious relationships, her deep desire to make everyone like her, and her perception that such a life was less than honest finally came to a head. She became so ill that she had to temporarily leave the convent. Once home, she began to pray more regularly and develop an intimate friendship with God.
Yet, alongside her prayer life, she continued her obsessions with men. She sought a confessor, but the only priest in the village was a young man already sexually involved with a local woman. Teresa went to him to confess, and in the process, he confessed to her. Teresa helped him break off his sexual relationship; then he transferred his affections to her! And it seems Teresa fell in love with him. Over and over again, Teresa steered their conversations back to God, but later admitted that often she came close to becoming physically involved with him. Her life was still too compartmentalized for her to have spiritual honesty and integrity.
Eventually through, she faced the truth about herself in prayer and began an ever-deepening spiritual life. At first she did not feel worthy of friendship with God - as often we may not. She realized that her lifestyle so far had in many ways been hypocritical. Yet she persisted, and finally found in God's passionate love for her the love relationship that she had been searching for all her young life. Finally, she was able to live a life of spiritual integrity and return to her Carmelite convent, prepared to reform the Carmelites.
Once Teresa of Avila had been a hypocrite in her life, hungering and thirsting for the delicacies of food and drink and flirtation and gossip found in the convent parlor. Since now she hungered and thirsted for holiness and to please God, her Beloved, alone, she had the inner strength and integrity to be a true Carmelite and to speak the truth to human beings and weather their anger and resistance to reforming the laws of Carmelite life. God's love alone filled her to overflowing.
When Jesus tells us "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled," he is teaching us how to have spiritual integrity. We will be blessed if we center our lives in our relationship with God and we seek for God's order, saving power, holiness, forgiving love, and truth in our lives. We need to be continually vigilant about our motives, fundamentally honest with ourselves. Are we living lives of integrity, or are we letting distractions and obsessions and untruths disorder our souls and separate us from God's vision of what our lives should be?
The word St. Matthew uses for "righteousness" in this Beatitude is "dikaiosyne," or "justice." God's vision of order for all human lives is that, in justice, all those who are created in God's image should have access to life's resources. When the Israelites were stranded in the desert after they crossed the Red Sea, they complained to Moses that they were hungry and thirsty. God fed them manna daily and revealed fresh water. But if the Israelites obsessively hoarded the manna overnight, it grew wormy and rotted away. God wanted them to use only enough to satisfy their needs.
In his book, "Spirituality of the Beatitudes," Michael H. Crosby, O.F.M., Cap. observes "the history of Israel in the desert is repeated in the lives of each of us. God does not want us to lack for any resource. The God who responds to our needs asks only that we never store up. God asks us never to live in excess so that others may have enough. If we try to get more than enough, we become less than God's Images."
Crosby adds "Justice fulfills God's whole plan for the world. Justice is essential to spirituality. This spirituality of justice is expressed in fidelity to law; yet all law must serve justice. Unless our justice exceeds pure legalism, we cannot be part of God's reign."
Jesus always interprets law in light of the demands arising from human need. "Jesus is the one who bends laws to serve justice and people rather than the other way around, the way of the Scribes and the Pharisees. He shows Jesus' truth standing in contrast to that of the leaders."(Crosby.) In fact, the main battle between Jesus and the Scribes and Pharisees was over the issue of truth. Jesus called these so-called leaders "hypocrites" because their lifestyles contradicted what they taught. They paraded around as just and holy men, yet they used laws as stumbling blocks for the people. They even grow angry at Jesus for healing on the Sabbath, saying that he was breaking Jewish Law. Jesus believes in mercy, believes that laws exist for human beings.
How easily we can see the connection between truth and justice today! We want truth-in-packaging. We want truthful unbiased News Media. We want truth-in-government. We want politicians who are not hypocrites, who do not put on flashy shows about how wonderful they are and what they'll do for us, when in truth they care nothing for the people and only want power, prestige, and perks.
We also want truth and justice in our churches and church communities. We want to rid our churches of legalism. Seeking, as Jesus did, to make church law more pastoral for the people, Pope Francis has changed church law so that priests throughout the world will no longer, during the Holy Year, have to seek faculties from their Bishops to grant absolution to a person who has procured or helped another procure an abortion. The Pope himself is giving priests these faculties. Women who've had abortions have ALWAYS been able to go to Confession/the Sacrament of Reconciliation if they repent having an abortion. The Pope is simply cutting red tape, streamlining the process, so that priests can be more pastoral - and people can be healed. As Francis says, "I have met so many women who bear in their heart the scar of this agonizing and painful decision."
Francis knows how graced and therapeutic it is to go to Confession, to say out loud what we have done wrong so that we take honest responsibility for what we've done, and then to hear a priest tell us out loud that God forgives us. How much this aids us in forgiving ourselves!
Dorothy Day, one of the great Catholics of the 20th century, had an abortion when she was a young woman. Yet once she regretted her decision, she didn't waste energy thinking she was unworthy of God's love. She reconciled with God and went on to found Hospitality Houses for the homeless, poor, and mentally ill throughout the country. Dorothy Day hungered and thirsted for holiness and then for justice for God's poor and neglected.
How much do we hunger and thirst for holiness and to live out God's justice in our lives? Like St. Teresa, Pope Francis, and Dorothy Day, we can honestly admit to ourselves that we are hypocrites and sinners, obsessed, distracted, not whole. But integrity and holiness begin to shine in our lives once we experience the passionate, all-encompassing love and truth of God. His Truth, Justice, and Mercy should be the Object of our all-consuming hunger and thirst. God will always satisfy us, fill us, give us exactly what we need. Then we can labor to satisfy those who hunger and thirst for food, drink, justice, and mercy - and lead them then to God for spiritual nourishment.