Daily Inspiration Quote by Saint Teresa of Avila

Teresa’s line reads like a spiritual pep talk, but it’s really a rebuke aimed at a very specific kind of “piety”: the self-anesthetizing variety. In a religious culture that often praised passivity, she insists that God’s gifts are not decorative. “Faculties” here means the full human kit - intellect, imagination, desire, discernment - and she treats them as instruments meant to be played, not wrapped in velvet and stored away. The sting is in “charm them to sleep,” which skewers the temptation to confuse holiness with numbness: to quiet the mind, mute ambition, and call it humility.

The subtext is practical, even managerial. Teresa is founding convents, negotiating with church officials, wrangling money, health, and politics in Counter-Reformation Spain. Her mysticism is not an escape from the world but a disciplined way of engaging it without letting it swallow you. That’s why she promises “proper reward” for each faculty: not the modern hustle ethic, but a theological argument against wasting what you’ve been handed. If your mind can reason, reason. If your will can act, act. Spiritual life doesn’t start by shrinking; it starts by deploying.

The final clause lands as a clever inversion of ambition. She doesn’t deny the possibility of “something higher,” but she refuses the shortcut. You don’t get to skip the work of being fully human and call it transcendence. The “divine call” comes after fidelity to your present capacities, not instead of it.