Teresa’s Constant Plea: Self-knowledge and Humility
Teresa opens The Interior Castle with a description of the beauty and wonder of the human person. The basis of this great marvel is the presence of God. The human person is not only made in the image of God. This loving God is present at the deepest center of every human being. The destiny of each and every human being from the moment of conception is union with this God of love revealed in Jesus Christ.
Alongside this marvel of divine presence and human destiny, each person shares the destructive and pervasive consequences of Original Sin. This leads to the human battle of good and evil, sin and grace, the weeds and the wheat that dominates our lives and all of human history.
From time to time, Teresa lays out this dominance of sin that is the ugly condition of all of us. However, she puts more emphasis on the beauty and wonder of our heritage as children of this loving God.
When Teresa repeats her relentless call for self-knowledge and humility, she is deeply conscious of the battle within the human heart. However, she is always leaning to the gracious gift of God’s ever-present call to life, love and new life.
This great Carmelite Saint never tires of proclaiming the absolute importance of self-knowledge. She points out its significance even in the early material of the first Dwelling Places, in fact it is a major theme of this first section of the Interior Castle. Likewise, she is ever singing the beauty and importance of humility that she understood as living out the the truth of our relationships with God: “Once I was pondering why our Lord was so fond of this virtue of humility, and this thought came to me – in my opinion not as a result of reflection but suddenly: it is because God is supreme Truth; and to be humble is to walk in truth for it is a very deep truth that of ourselves we have nothing good but only misery and nothingness. Whoever does not understand this walks in falsehood.” (IC 6.10.7)
Teresa says shortly afterwords: “While we are on this earth nothing is more important to us than humility.” (IC II-9)
She continues proclaiming the wonders and importance of self-knowledge and humility empathizing that we will never truly know ourselves without true knowledge of God.
Our sinful condition creates a relentless pull to center on ourselves as the final measure of reality. Our independence is what truly matters. This self-centeredness is the central consequence of our heritage from Adam and Eve. The Christian life, the call to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, is a movement away from this self-absorption.
The gospels are full of teachings by Jesus that make this truth of self -knowledge very immediate and concrete. In Mark we read: “If anyone wants to be first, he must make himself last of all.” (Mk 9:35) Matthew tells us: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 10:39) Again, John says: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” (Jn 12:24) Finally, Matthew adds: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” (Mt 16:24)
This struggle for self-knowledge and humility is at the heart of the ever-present tension of good and evil that is the heavy burden of the human heart. As a result, all of life both on the personal and social level is caught up in this perpetual battle. The heart is always on the edge of human ambivalence which is in a constant search to water down the gospel of Jesus Christ to make life more comfortable. Teresa’s consistent plea is for us to keep our eyes and heart on Jesus.
Teresa resolved this very harsh reality as a sinner standing before God in this way. She found the answer in a simple gesture. She grew in a deeper awareness of her personal brokenness while at the same time, she had an even stronger embrace of God’s limitless and always available mercy. She saw herself as a world class sinner but a sinner who was loved and forgiven. This led her to declare often, “我生命的故事就是上帝仁慈的故事”。”
By this she means that when she had arrived at the deepest and clearest moment of her life, her “主啊，救救我！” moment, she learned what it meant to be a creature. She embraced the fact of her reality as creature because for her it meant she was cradled in the loving hands of a gracious Creator revealed in her great friend and Savior, Jesus Christ. The ultimate reality is that God is good not that we are good. In the end, God’s limitless mercy is her victory.
Teresa understood self-knowledge as our relationship with God. To truly know ourselves, we must accept our creaturehood in all its limits, most especially our mortality. This is to recognize our total and absolute dependence on God. This should make us share Teresa’s insight that our life may be the story of God’s mercy.
Humility’s role is to help us live out the truth of our awareness of self-knowledge. It directs us on the journey away from the False Self and its message of lies and distortions. It shows the way to the True Self which draws us into the Mystery of Love. It guides us into a gospel-rooted lifestyle of love and service. It goes beyond seeing the goodness and mercy of God to accepting it and letting it direct our lives as children of God.
