"The tree that is beside the running water is fresher and gives more fruit"
About this Quote
Holiness, for Saint Teresa of Avila, is rarely a mood. It is a hydraulic fact. Put a tree near running water and it stays green; cut it off and it dries out. Under the pastoral simplicity is a bracing spiritual pragmatism: devotion is not a personality trait you grit your teeth into achieving, it is a condition sustained by proximity to a source.
Teresa is writing from inside the engine room of the Counter-Reformation, when interior prayer and disciplined community life weren’t just private comforts but contested practices. Her reforms of the Carmelite order depended on building structures that kept attention turned toward God: silence, regular prayer, spiritual friendship, and a strictness meant to clear the channel rather than win moral points. The “running water” is grace, but it’s also the lived routines that keep grace from becoming an abstraction. A tree doesn’t will itself into fruitfulness; it takes in what it’s near.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to solitary heroics. If you’re spiritually parched, Teresa implies, it may not be because you’re uniquely broken. It may be because you’ve drifted from the stream: prayer reduced to occasional emergency calls, community swapped for self-reliance, contemplation postponed until life calms down. The image also carries a subtle warning about stagnant water: stillness can look like peace while quietly breeding decay. Teresa’s point is kinetic: choose the current. Stay close. Let the flow do its slow, unspectacular work, and fruit follows.
Teresa is writing from inside the engine room of the Counter-Reformation, when interior prayer and disciplined community life weren’t just private comforts but contested practices. Her reforms of the Carmelite order depended on building structures that kept attention turned toward God: silence, regular prayer, spiritual friendship, and a strictness meant to clear the channel rather than win moral points. The “running water” is grace, but it’s also the lived routines that keep grace from becoming an abstraction. A tree doesn’t will itself into fruitfulness; it takes in what it’s near.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to solitary heroics. If you’re spiritually parched, Teresa implies, it may not be because you’re uniquely broken. It may be because you’ve drifted from the stream: prayer reduced to occasional emergency calls, community swapped for self-reliance, contemplation postponed until life calms down. The image also carries a subtle warning about stagnant water: stillness can look like peace while quietly breeding decay. Teresa’s point is kinetic: choose the current. Stay close. Let the flow do its slow, unspectacular work, and fruit follows.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Saint
Add to List
