Daily Inspiration Quote by Saint Teresa of Avila

Holiness, here, is not the airbrushed kind. Teresa of Avila smuggles a bracing admission into a pious frame: getting lost is not merely forgivable; it is instrumentally valuable. The line refuses the fantasy of the straight path, the spiritual self-help story where the “good” is reached by purity of method. Instead, she offers a theology of error that sounds startlingly modern: failure as data, detours as training.

The intent is pastoral and tactical. Teresa founded convents, negotiated with wary church authorities, and lived under the long shadow of the Inquisition. In that world, “gone astray” carries real risk: reputational ruin, doctrinal suspicion, even institutional punishment. By reclassifying wandering as “useful,” she gives her readers permission to be fallible without surrendering the goal. It’s a rhetorical move that lowers the barrier to perseverance: you don’t need to be flawless to continue; you need to keep learning.

The subtext is an argument about knowledge. Experience, for Teresa, isn’t a résumé item; it’s a form of discernment. You can’t recognize the good - spiritually, ethically, psychologically - without having felt the counterfeit versions in your own hands. That’s why the sentence pivots on “and thus”: astray-ness becomes a teacher, not a disqualifier.

What makes it work is its quiet reversal of religious moral accounting. Mistakes aren’t just sins to tally; they’re the raw material of wisdom. Teresa’s authority comes not from pretending she never stumbled, but from building a credible map that includes the wrong turns.