Faith & Spirit Quote by Saint Teresa of Avila

Ecstasy, in Teresa of Avila's hands, is less a haloed calm than a kind of holy malfunction: language overheating under the pressure of contact with God. The opening cry, "O my God", isn’t decorative piety; it’s the sound of the self being interrupted. She frames the soul in this "state" as both emptied and overfull, an interior physics where desire becomes bodily: to be "all one tongue" is grotesque on purpose, a surreal image that turns devotion into anatomy. Praise isn’t a polite act here; it’s a compulsion, a hunger for a single organ big enough to match the magnitude of the divine.

The phrase "a thousand pious follies" is the sly hinge. Teresa refuses to romanticize mystical speech as pure wisdom. She anticipates suspicion - from confessors, inquisitors, and the practical-minded clergy of Counter-Reformation Spain - that rapture looks like nonsense. So she names it first, disarming critics while insisting that the "folly" is evidence of authenticity: when the soul is "possessed", it can’t manage respectable sentences. That word "possesses" is doing dangerous work, borrowing the vocabulary of demonic seizure to describe sanctity. The subtext is a daring claim that true devotion can resemble madness, and that institutional religion should make room for experiences it can’t fully police.

Teresa’s intent is instructional as much as confessional: she’s mapping the humiliations of prayer to legitimize them. If your love of God makes you babble, she suggests, it may be because you’ve brushed against something too large for syntax.