While I am very fond of this bookmark, I wish the depiction of Teresa was a bit more in keeping with my image of her. The bookmark depicts a dour woman - and I have always envisioned Teresa with a bit of a smirk on her lips and a twinkle in her eyes. She was a noblewoman who gave much of her life to reforming and reinvigorating the Carmelite Order she joined when she was twenty years old. My favorite story about her, the one that led me to believe she often had a smile and a sparkle, comes from of her days traveling from convent to convent.
On one such trip her carriage became mired in mud. Frustrated, she wondered aloud why, when she was trying to do what God had asked her to do, she kept encountering obstacle after obstacle. According to the story, God responded, “Teresa, all my friends endure hardships.” Her response was immediate, “Well then it is no wonder you have so few of them.” Teresa had apparently advanced beyond the falling-in-love stage in her relationship with God to the living-in-love stage. The depth of their relationship allowed for the honest expression of a full range of her feelings.
Teresa endured other obstacles, including opposition to her reforms and criticism from members of the hierarchy. One papal legate described her as a “disobedient and stubborn femina …teaching as a master against St. Paul’s orders that women should not teach.” Teresa was canonized forty years after her death and made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970.