In the upper choir there is a statue of St. Teresa, dressed as a Carmelite, in the stall she occupied when prioress of the house. The nuns often go to kiss the hand as a mark of homage to her memory. The actual prioress occupies the next stall below.
It will be remembered that St. Teresa passed twenty-nine years in this convent before she left to found that of San José. She afterwards returned three years as prioress, when, at her request, St. John of the Cross (who was born in a small town near Avila) was appointed spiritual director. Under the direction of these two saints the house became a paradise filled with souls of such fervor that the heavenly spirits themselves came down to join in their holy psalmody, according to
the testimony of St. Teresa herself, who saw the stalls occupied by them.
“The air of Paradise did fan the house,
And angels office all.”
One of St. Teresa’s first acts, on taking charge of the house, was to place a large statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in the upper choir, and present her with the keys of the monastery, to indicate that this womanly type of all that is sweet and heavenly was to be the true ruler of the house. This statue still retains its place in the choir, and in its hand are the keys presented by the saint.
The convent garden is surrounded by high walls. It wears the same smiling aspect as in the saint’s time, but it is larger. The neighboring house occupied by St. John of the Cross, with the land around it, has been bought and added to the enclosure. The house has been converted into an octagon chapel, called the Ermita de San Juan de la Cruz. The unpainted wooden altar was made from a part of St. Teresa’s cell. In this garden are the flowers and shrubbery she loved, the almond-trees she planted, the paths she trod. Here are the oratories where she prayed, the dark cypresses that witnessed her penitential tears, the limpid water she was never weary of contemplating—symbol of divine grace and regeneration. St. Teresa’s love of nature is evident on every page of her writings. She said the sight of the fields and flowers raised her soul towards God, and was like a book in which she read his grandeur and benefits. And she often compared her soul to a garden which she prayed the divine Husbandman to fill with the sweet perfume of the lowly virtues.
In the right wing of the convent is a little oratory, quiet and solitary, beloved of the saint, where an angel, all flame, appeared to the eyes of her soul with a golden arrow in his hand, which he thrust deep into her heart, leaving it for ever inflamed with seraphic love. This mystery is honored in the Carmelite Order by the annual festival of the Transverberation. Art like-wise has immortalized it. We remember the group by Bernini in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria at Rome, in which the divine transport of her soul is so clearly visible through the pale beauty of her rapt form, which trembles beneath the fire-tipped dart of the angel. What significance in this sacred seal set upon her virginal heart, from this time rent in twain by love and penitence! Cor contritum et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies! was the exclamation of St. Teresa when dying.
The sun was descending behind the proud walls of Avila when we regained the steep hillside, lighting up the grim towers and crowning them with splendor. We stopped on the brow, before the lofty portal of San Vicente, to look at its wreaths of stone and mutilated saints, and read the story of the rich man and Lazarus so beautifully told in the arch. Angels are bearing away the soul of the latter on a mantle to Abraham’s bosom. On the south side of the church is a sunny portico with light, clustered pillars, filled with tombs, some in niches covered with emblazonry, others like plain chests of stone set against the wall. We went down the steps into the church, cold, and dim, and gray, all of granite and cave-like. The pavement is composed of granite tombstones covered with inscriptions and coats of
arms. There are granite fonts for the holy water. Old statues, old paintings, and old inscriptions in Gothic text line the narrow aisles. The windows are high up in the arches, which were still light, though shadows were gathering around the tombs below. There was not a soul in the church. We looked through the reja that divides the nave at the beautiful Gothic shrine of San Vicente and his two sisters, Sabina and Chrysteta, standing on pillars under a richly-painted canopy, with curious old lamps burning within, and then went down a long, narrow, stone staircase into the crypt—of the third century—and kept along beneath the low, round arches till we came to a chapel where, by the light of a torch, we saw the bare rock on which the above-mentioned saints were martyred, and the Bujo out of which the legendary serpent came to defend their remains when thrown out for the beasts to devour. This Bujo was long used as a place of solemn adjuration, a kind of Bocca de la Verità, into which the perjurer shrank from thrusting his hand, but the custom has been discontinued.