In an attempt to make any sense of them, Teresa thus embarked on a literary career. This subsequently precipitated a sequence of intellectual insights and mystical visions. It was from this time onwards, she would later recount, that a deeper spiritual life began to unfold. Then, in 1554, two experiences reconfirmed her allegiance to the cloistered life: the first, an image of a statue of Christ, wounded and bleeding, which compelled her to throw herself on the ground accompanied by wailing and floods of tears the second, shortly after reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine and his hearing God’s voice calling him, she too felt a similar presence beckoning her from within. To add to her difficulties, she inwardly struggled between a life drawn in one direction towards God and contemplation and the other towards the ways of the world. Shortly afterwards, Teresa was struck down by an illness so severe that it rendered her in a coma for almost four days, and leaving her almost completely paralysed for the following three years, with her acute suffering remaining well into her late thirties. Grief-stricken by the death of her mother when she was only fourteen, Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada (28th March 1515–4th October 1582) embraced a deeper devotion to the Virgin Mary as her spiritual guide and mother, prompting her to take the veil at the age of only twenty-one, entering the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation in Ávila in north-western Spain. Indeed, the writings of one of the greatest female mystics, Saint Teresa of Ávila, ever to have lived are a potent and passionate testament to the craft of the written word and its ability to communicate the inner workings of the human heart, inspiring artists, lovers and fellow renunciates to experience the ecstatic bliss of spiritual love. ITALIAN BAROQUE SCULPTOR, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is one of the most powerful expressions of personal epiphany in the entire history of the visual arts, itself evoking “duende”, the Spanish word for “a heightened state of emotion created by a living piece of art”. “It is love alone that gives worth to all things.” Smarthistory, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa How the interior life is the only path to rhapsodic bliss

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