"There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers"
About this Quote
A line like this lands because it refuses the comforting math of faith: pray, receive, rejoice. Teresa flips the expected moral arc and replaces it with a colder, truer one - getting what you begged for can be the moment things fall apart.
The intent is pastoral but unsentimental. As a reformer and mystic who lived inside both ecstatic devotion and institutional suspicion, Teresa knew that desire is not automatically wisdom. People pray for outcomes that flatter fear, ego, or impatience: a door to open, a rival to lose, a pain to stop immediately. When the prayer is answered, the consequences arrive unfiltered. The tears aren’t proof that God is cruel; they’re evidence that the petitioner was mistaken about what “good” looked like, or that the good comes with an unbearable cost.
Subtext: faith is not a vending machine, and piety doesn’t protect you from yourself. Teresa’s Catholic world prized obedience and discernment - the slow, difficult work of separating real spiritual need from craving dressed up as virtue. The line also carries a quiet warning about control. Unanswered prayers can be endured as mystery; answered prayers remove the veil and force accountability. You asked. You got it. Now live with it.
Context matters: Teresa wrote amid plague, political rigidity, and the Counter-Reformation’s anxiety about spiritual authenticity. In that climate, her blunt realism functions as spiritual inoculation against naive triumphalism. It’s a sentence meant to mature the believer: not to pray less, but to desire more honestly, and to fear most the wish that comes true.
The intent is pastoral but unsentimental. As a reformer and mystic who lived inside both ecstatic devotion and institutional suspicion, Teresa knew that desire is not automatically wisdom. People pray for outcomes that flatter fear, ego, or impatience: a door to open, a rival to lose, a pain to stop immediately. When the prayer is answered, the consequences arrive unfiltered. The tears aren’t proof that God is cruel; they’re evidence that the petitioner was mistaken about what “good” looked like, or that the good comes with an unbearable cost.
Subtext: faith is not a vending machine, and piety doesn’t protect you from yourself. Teresa’s Catholic world prized obedience and discernment - the slow, difficult work of separating real spiritual need from craving dressed up as virtue. The line also carries a quiet warning about control. Unanswered prayers can be endured as mystery; answered prayers remove the veil and force accountability. You asked. You got it. Now live with it.
Context matters: Teresa wrote amid plague, political rigidity, and the Counter-Reformation’s anxiety about spiritual authenticity. In that climate, her blunt realism functions as spiritual inoculation against naive triumphalism. It’s a sentence meant to mature the believer: not to pray less, but to desire more honestly, and to fear most the wish that comes true.
Quote Details
| Topic | Prayer |
|---|
More Quotes by Saint
Add to List
