Thanks everybody for the replies. It's a funny thing - when I was reading the book and came across the piece Jerry quoted I rejected it. I didn't realize I had done that but it was painful to read in his quote and then I had this vague memory of thinking 'Oh that's just her opinion, she's wrong, and I can ignore it!' Don't you just love the way the Big Guy works. I bin something that is critical for me and then He gets prophet Jerry to throw it right back at me. Jerry I'm glad you're a slow reader because even though I am only reading the chapters once, I find I need time to digest them, I can't just plough through as if it was a novel. Re. Carmel333 - a friend recently mentioned about hiding a light under a bushel. The recurring image I have at the moment is that the light is Christ's and I'm the bushel or lampstand - depending on the condition of my soul. My sin obscures his light... what a sorrowful waste. Thank God for His mercy. Dear Jesus, help us to spread your fragrance everywhere we go. Flood our souls with your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly, that our lives may only be a radiance of yours. Shine through us, and be so in us, that every person we should come in contact with may feel your presence in our soul. Let them look up and see no longer us, but only Jesus. Stay with us, and then we shall begin to shine as you shine; so to shine as to be a light to others; the light, Jesus, will be all from you. None of it will be ours. It will be you shining on others through us. Let us thus praise you in the way you love best, by shining on those around us. Let us preach you without preaching: not by words, but by our example, by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do, the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear for you. Amen.
Love the prayer, Batimaeus! I looked it up to print out, and they said it was a favorite of Mother Teresa's. Boy,that woman could pray
I saw a funny piece of a film on St Teresa the other night. She went to confession (she should be the Patron Saint of those stuck with bad confessors..she had so many)...anyway this priest in the confessional adivises Teresa to go to communion much less often , to stop doing mental prayer...and on on and on, each word of advise another nail in the coffin..por Teresa's eyes got bigger and bigger like saucers. ..and you know that's the kind of advice they really gave her, she was at her wits end. But the shopping list of stupidity from her confessor ...poor Teresa...
SO.....WHAT DID SHE DO? WAS SHE OBEDIENT or did she dismiss them and go to someone else??? I NEED to know PLEEEZE!
The prayer was actually written by John Henry Newman and allegedly Mother Teresa daily prayed a version where the 'us' is changed to 'me' - this perplexes me but I'm sure she had her reasons.
Time to give my not satisfactory answer. The quote i fear can only support those who see faith and belief as an illusional crutch, and moreover however much the author argues otherwise, i think he really believes this to be the case. There are not very many novels out there that can be considered as having one of its themes a sympathetic treatment for the positive value of religious belief. The author i hope did not set out to purposely craft a novel with this usp ( unique selling point), yet that quote i feel reveals that the author's belief in belief is as at sea as Pi was. So disheartened was i by how the author ended the book that i spent some time on the internet trying to get a little more background on the author. I offer some quotes. Question: What role does religion play in your life? Yann Martel: Broadly speaking on religion, defining the word very largely and what that means to me is I choose to believe that life makes sense. That life is not just chemistry, not just chance. So faith isn’t necessarily a belief in things, it’s just an openness to believing something. And I find a view of life that entertains a transcendental, that engages with the transcendental, makes things wealthy. It also, it makes things wealthier in their significance, and it also, it’s a way that makes suffering more bearable. That’s one of the great limits of secularism. Secularism is incredibly powerful at delivering things in the here and now. Good governance, science, human rights, these are all results of the application of reason and their secular triumphs. But secularism has nothing to say in the face of death and in suffering. Question: How did you come to religion? Yann Martel: No, my background is totally secular, I’m from Quebec, which is the most secular province in Canada, was the most Catholic, then underwent something called the Quiet Revolution, which was in a matter of a year or two, people left the church in droves. And as I said, it jumped from the most religious province to the most secular. My parents are children of that revolution, so I grew up in a completely secular household and I studied philosophy at university, which is a great way of making you an atheist, a rabid atheist, or at the very least, a rabid agnostic. What brought me to religion was, well, writing "Life of Pi," and what brought me to writing "Life of Pi" was a trip to India. India is this continent civilization, where for better or for worse, religion is still a, is part of the mainstream of life. And so it was India that brought me to that, I saw a face of religion, a side to it that I’d never seen before, and decided to sort of investigate, "Well, what would it mean to have to have faith? That crazy, crazy phenomenon where you are obdurately not reasonable, what would that do?" So I posited this character who had lots of faith, Pi, Pi Patel, who practices three religions. Pasted from <http://bigthink.com/videos/the-role-of-religion-in-a-writers-life> In another article (which i can't find at the moment) he states he goes to Mass every Sunday!
Bartimaeus. Progress report #2. Have read the chapters for mansions 3rd and 4th. A couple of times. No passage i found 'hit me in the face' and could serve as a memory marker fora chapter. Perhaps you have found a passage in these two mansions that arrested you. Have you heard of the radio program Desert Island Discs? Suffice to say St Teresa's Interior Castle would not be the book I would chose to take with me. Thinking about how i would compose this post i took to looking at the quotes you offered in your first post. I sadly could not place them from memory ( eg which mansion , let alone which chapter) Though the first: "...souls without prayer are like people whose bodies or limbs are paralysed: they possess feet and hands but they cannot control them." having been found in the 1st mansion did make me say 'but yes, i've read this!' Here is a surprising thing. I wanted to find the quote: "...the important thing is not to think much, but to love much; do, then, whatever most arouses you to love." i like it and i think as a maxim for directing your life you cannot go wrong if you follow this advice. And i'm sure i've read it and its somewhere in the first two mansions. Yet when i did a search on the pdf document on the word "important" i couldn't find it! I am grateful that i'm enrolled in this book club. It means that there's no possibility of quietly putting the book down not to pick it up again. See you in two weeks. Now for those who profess a love of the book , yes i mean you padraig , ms7 & carmel333. I challenge you to provide a quote from mansions 3 or 4 (which obviously resonates with you for thats why you can remember it! ) without looking at the book. Then look at the book and see how close you are.
I offer part of an article i found on the internet which helped me understand what the first few mansions were about. Interior Castle, like many of her other books, was written in a very simplistic way, yet her thoughts were profound and full of theological significance. She described the subject of her writing as such: “I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions” (10). She used the metaphor to explain the soul’s progress from the First Mansions to the Seventh and its transformation from a creature of sin to the Bride of Christ. She then went on to describe how it was by prayer and meditation that the door to the first castle could be entered. A key virtue that was brought up again and again was humility. She also stressed the importance of self-knowledge. The journey was to begin by “entering the room where humility is acquired rather than by flying off to the other rooms. For that is the way to progress” (11). The souls that made it to the First Mansions were in a state of grace, but were still intoxicated with the venomous creatures (symbolic of sin) that dwelt outside of the castle in the outer courtyards. In order for the souls to have made any progress, they would have to stay in the First Mansion, The Mansion of Humility, for a long time. The Second Mansions were where the soul would seek every opportunity for growth, by listening to sermons, partaking in enriching conversations, and so on. These were the Mansions of the Practice of Prayer. In these rooms, the soul would not be free from the attack of the venomous creatures, but its powers of resistance were strengthened. The Third Mansions were those of Exemplary Life. Those in these mansions realized the dangers of trusting in one’s own strength. These souls had attained a high standard of discipline and were charitable towards others. Limitations in this stage were that one lacked vision and the ability to fully experience the force of love; also it had not yet come to the point of total submission and its progress was slow. It had to endure a spirit of aridity and was given only occasional glimpses of the Mansions beyond. It was in the Fourth Mansions that the supernatural and natural met. No longer did the soul depend upon its own efforts. The soul would be totally dependent on God. This was the Mansion of the Prayer of the Quiet. Love came not from an aqueduct, but flowed from the true source of living water. It had broken all bonds which had previously hindered it and would not shrink from trials. It had no attachments to things of the world and could pass between the ordinary life to one of deep prayer, and back again. Pasted from <http://seek-n-find.hubpages.com/hub/Summary-of-St-Teresa-of-Avilas-Interior-Castle>
Hello again Jerry. Let me first say that as part of my lenten sacrifices I am not going on social networks Mon, Weds, Fri - and the other days I seem to have very little time for interacting online - ergo my spartan responses! The 'love' quote you referred to is in Mansion 4, chpt 1 and is closely followed by this: ...love consists, not in the extent of our happiness, but in the firmness of our determination to try to please God in everything, and to endeavor, in all possible ways, not to offend Him, and to pray Him ever to advance the honor and glory of His Son and the growth of the Catholic Church. One think I have found consoling in this chapter is that Teresa does not burden our soul with the activities of our thoughts during prayer: ...so we cannot restrain our thought. And then we send all the faculties of the soul after it, thinking we are lost, and have misused the time that we are spending in the presence of God. Yet the soul may perhaps be wholly united with Him in the Mansions very near His presence, while thought remains in the outskirts of the castle, suffering the assaults of a thousand wild and venomous creatures and from this suffering winning merit. So this must not upset us, and we must not abandon the struggle as the devil tries to make us do. Most of these trials and times of unrest come from the fact that we do not understand ourselves. When I attempt to encourage people to try Eucharistic Adoration, I generally tell them to just sit there and bellyache to God, and let Him do the work - you don't have to achieve a quite, meditative, prayerful state, just be yourself and let God do the work. I think elements of this mansion support my concept of letting God do the spiritual work rather than us trying to go through slick contemplation. But then maybe I am only reading what I want to see, and St. T is actually saying something quite different!
[quote Now for those who profess a love of the book , yes i mean you padraig , ms7 & carmel333. I challenge you to provide a quote from mansions 3 or 4 (which obviously resonates with you for thats why you can remember it! ) without looking at the book. Then look at the book and see how close you are. [/quote] I can't quote the book because I listened to it on tapes and that was years ago. I think I would have to ask a spiritual director where I was in the mansions for fear I was 'progressing myself' more into the higher levels like 3 or 4 , when in reality I am probably in the first mansion...I hate tests like this... I always feel inadequate and then I feel guilty for not being farther along.... God only knows....
Oh dear. Obviously reading the chapters twice is not enough for me. To have 'just' read it and forgotten it came from the Fourth mansion. I now have the explanation why the pdf search couldn't find it. Because it is not possible to do a search on the catholic treasury on-line version over the whole book I found a pdf version on line. Surprisingly the passage is translated a little differently & omitting the word important. "to make great advance in this way, and to be able to ascend to the mansions we desire, we must remember that the business does not consist in thinking, but in loving much; do therefore whatever may excite you most to love. Perhaps we do not know what love is; and I do not wonder at it, for it consists not in having greater delights, but greater resolutions and desires of pleasing God in everything, and in endeavouring, as much as possible, not to offend Him, and in beseeching Him that He would promote the honour and glory of His Son, and extend the bounds of the Catholic Church. These are signs of love. Do not imagine that it consists in not thinking on anything else, and that all is lost if you have a few distractions. " http://thecatholicguy.com/wp-content/uploaded/The-Interior-Castle.pdf Thank you Bartimaeus: So let the quote i shall attempt to memorize be: "the important thing is not to think much, but to love much" - Interior Castle; Mansion 4. (To be able to quote a line from a play of Shakespeare but not one from the Interior Castle is a little shaming.)
