HKB
Sixteen Augustinian Exclamations after having Communicated: sixty-nine Advices to Her Daughters, and a small collection of love-enflamed Hymns, complete what remains to us of Teresa's writings.
Teresa died of hard work and worry and shameful neglect, almost to sheer starvation. But she had meat to eat that all Anne Bartholomew's remaining mites could not buy for her dying mother. And, strong in the strength of that spiritual meat, Teresa rose off her deathbed to finish her work. She inspected with all her wonted quickness of eye and love of order the whole of the House into which she had been carried to die. She saw everything put into its proper place, and every one answering to their proper order, after which she attended the divine offices for the day, and then went back to her bed and summoned her daughters around her. 'My children,' she said, 'you must pardon me much; you must pardon me most of all the bad example I have given you. Do not imitate me. Do not live as I have lived. I have been the greatest sinner in all the world. I have not kept the laws I made for others. I beseech you, my daughters, for the love of God, to keep the rules of your Holy Houses as I have never kept them. O my Lord,' she then turned to Him and said, 'the hour I have so much longed for has surely come at last. The time has surely come that we shall see one another. My Lord and Saviour, it is surely time for me to be taken out of this banishment and be for ever with Thee. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise. Cast me not away from Thy presence, and take not Thy Holy Spirit away from me. Create in me a clean heart, O God.' 'A broken and a contrite heart; a broken and a contrite heart,' was her continual cry till she died with these words on her lips, 'A broken and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise.' And, thus, with the most penitential of David's penitential Psalms in her mouth, and with the holy candle of her Church in her hand, Teresa of Jesus went forth from her banishment to meet her Bridegroom.
O sweet incendiary! shew here thy art Upon this carcass of a cold hard heart; Let all thy scatter'd shafts of light that play Among the leaves of thy large books of day, Combined against this breast at once break in And take away from me myself and sin; This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be, And thy best fortune such fair spoils of me. O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By all thy lives and deaths of love; By thy large draughts of intellectual day; And all thy thirsts of love more large than they; By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire; By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire; By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His; By all the Heavens thou hast in Him, (Fair sister of the Seraphim!); By all of Him we have in thee;-- Leave nothing of myself in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may die.
SOME SELECTED PASSAGES
TERESA ON HERSELF