A handbook on mysticism

It is interesting to note that in a tradition as skyward and vertical -- and hierarchical -- as St. Teresa's Catholicism, her natural figure for this progress of transcendence is not upward but inward, penetrating to the inmost regions of the "palace where the king lives." The soul is "a garden in which the Beloved takes great delight." And the body -- always a vexing limitation to the mystic -- is but "the outer walls of the castle." Selfknowledge is "a room," and the aspirant is instructed always to "visualize your soul as vast, spacious, and plentiful. This amplitude is impossible to exaggerate."

In her ceaseless image-making, St. Teresa bears a certain kinship with Rumi, the glorious Sufi poet. Both delight in invoking lovemaking as the metaphor that best captures the sensation of spiritual ecstasy. "Imagine a palmetto fruit," she says. "Layer upon layer must be peeled away to reach the tasty part in the middle. So it is with the interior castle. Many rooms surround the central chamber."

In the seventh and final Dwelling, the ultimate arrival of spiritual intimacy between God and self, St. Teresa turns, as if inevitably, to the metaphor of marriage. And she does not mean a modest domestic arrangement but the passionate merging of love, the union of beloveds.

In an age -- our own -- in which the treasures of Catholic spirituality often seem to be eclipsed in the popular mind by the brittle restrictions and prohibitions of the institutional church (no gays, no women in the clergy) and the shameful subterfuges of the sex abuse scandal, it is indeed like entering a "vast, spacious, and plentiful" chamber to read St. Teresa's evergreen masterpiece of the searching heart.

Body and soul find perfect register with their God in the metaphor of the spousal embrace within the palace's inmost chamber. Here, St. Teresa assures us, past all the struggles, all the serpents and "beasts" that beset the courtship, we arrive at "a secret place where His Majesty has taken the soul and unveiled himself to her."