Bernini, “Ecstasy of St. Teresa”
Spiritual Sunday
A few weeks ago I shared a poem about Joan of Arc by a former student, Clare Hogan, who wrote her senior project on “The work they did with sweat and light”: An Analysis of Ecstatic Narrative in the Poetry of Graham, Doty, and Szybist.” The project concludes with Clare’s own poems of spiritual ecstasy, including several about St. Teresa. I share one of those today.
Teresa’s autobiography, The Interior Castle or The Mansions, sets forth the seven stages of faith—seen as seven rooms in a castle—with the final stage being union with God. In Clare’s poem, Teresa begins with “the house of prayer I’ve made with my body” and then proceeds to shed layer after layer until she is a “sheet of sunlight.” The vine that would have been climbing up a house suddenly find itself deprived of the mortar it clung to and becomes a tulip.
But because spiritual ecstasy must operate through the human body, she also gives us the image of sunlight “pressing down into” the leaves of a dark oak and of the trees roots then “digging into the foundation, drinking, drinking.” Earlier in the poem Teresa imagines herself breastfeeding “some urgent hungry thing” but now it is she that is suckling celestial sustenance.
In other words, we seek to transcend the body to touch the divine but we are always within our bodies. The ecstatic union with the divine is both physical and non-physical. Here’s the poem:
Prayer of Teresa
after The Interior Castle or The Mansions
By Clare Hogan
Here’s the house of prayer I’ve made
of my body, where inside a woman cradles
her breasts, sore from feeding some
urgent hungry thing. Take away the house
and she’ll still be there, the skin spilling
from her hands, her skirts passing over
her thighs, her knees, like water. Take her away
and I’m vines crept up, no mortar to spread
open, a tulip. Take it. There I am, a sheet
of sunlight insistently beating—no house:
a house of light. And I am a glory
that cannot unshine itself, pressing down
into the leaves of that dark oak there, roots
digging the foundation, drinking, drinking.