But heaven, as she whispered to her eleven-year-old brother, La vida es sueño - life is a dream - was a phrase familiar to every Castilian, young and old. She knew that the world was only an illusion. To a girl with an eye for a bargain, this seemed a reasonable price to pay.

Had bought passage to heaven with their life's blood. These martyrs, all devout opportunists (just like Teresa herself), The lovely basilica of San Vicente, just outside the city walls, had been built in their honor. Torturers because they had refused to bow to pagan idols. She thought of SaintĬatherine writhing on her wheel, of Saint Lawrence burning slowly on his grill, and, most of all, of Vicente, Cristeta, and Sabina, the child martyrs of Avila, who in Roman times had endured blow after blow from their heathen Being a practical-minded, enterprising child, Teresa thought she might find a way to skip the preliminaries. That was the truth, and no one she knew of had ever questioned it. Her religion had taught her that life on earth was only a test: if she was chaste and virtuous, she would someday ascend to heaven if she was immodest and sinful, The young Teresa had other plans, based on hopes that in those times seemed realistic. To marriage and to a life congruent with the one she knew. By the time she entered her teens, she could look forward To read, a girl might while away the long afternoons with the Flos Sanctorum, a popular retelling of the lives of the saints.

Properly attended, she ventured out to attend Mass and public festivals, but most of the time she stayed home with her mother, who managed a household full of children and servants. She played with her sisters and brothers there and with a select group of relatives whose visits Lived most of her early life in a domestic fortress that looked impregnable from the street but opened interiorly onto patios. She lived in Avila, a city of walls within walls: ancient ramparts, built to guard against Moorish invadersįrom the barren, windswept countryside church and monastery walls, erected as bulwarks of the faith and the facades of houses, designed to keep strangers out and family members (especially women) in. This was not the usual thing for a well-off Castilian girl in 1522. Teresa de Ahumada began the first of her many journeys at the age of seven.

Teresa of Avila by Cathleen Medwick