Interviewed by Michael Kevin McMahon.
Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) was a Catholic nun, philosopher, memoirist, poet, and mystic, who reformed the Carmelite monastic order and founded new convents across Spain. Described in her day by a papal emissary as “restless, pacing, disobedient, and stubborn,” Teresa needed those characteristics to become an author, public intellectual, and administrator in a deeply patriarchal society.
Teresa wrote and published prolifically during her lifetime, across multiple genres, including poetry. Thirty-one of the poems survive, and have been translated for modern readers, with companion essays, by Dana Delibovi in the new book, Sweet Hunter.
I recently sat down with Dana—a friend since our college days—to talk about Teresa and why she matters five centuries since her birth.
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MKM: What motivated you to translate St. Teresa of Ávila’s poetry and put this book together? I gather from the book’s introduction, it wasn’t really planned.
DD: You’re right, I didn’t have a plan. When I retired in 2019, one goal I had was to practice my Spanish, which I had let slide. So I decided to start by translating Spanish texts. In what had to be my first week of retirement, I found a website called Ciudad Seva, which posts Spanish literature. And there were the poems of Teresa of Ávila.
I’d known Teresa and admired her for years, but I didn’t know she wrote poems. I didn’t even realize she wrote that famous poem that’s on so many needlepoints and kitchen magnets: “Let nothing disturb you. Nothing frighten you. All things are passing. God never changes…”
I downloaded all of her poems. In about a year, I had a rough translation of each one. By 2023, I had a complete book of translations and essays.
MKM: It’s curious that you weren’t, at the start, aware that Teresa wrote poems, even though you had a long-standing interest in her. How did that happen?
DD: I learned about Teresa in college. I was philosophy major, and so I learned about her as a philosopher and mystic who wrote prose, in particular her book on the theory of the soul and personal identity, Interior Castle. I honestly didn’t think to look for poems.
But the upshot is, I was unfocused when I started this project. Someone asked me a few years ago why I was “bothering” to translate St. Teresa. I answered that I didn’t know. I just started and kept going. I’m reluctant to say I was “led” to the translations in some mystical way. It’s more that I came on the poems by accident, and they captured my imagination. They hooked me.
MKM: We were in college in the 70s, so your engagement goes way back. Do you think the saint’s work had an influence across the arc of your life?
DD: I do. The influence is different at different times. At first, I was like a lot of women involved in philosophy or intellectual history—we get fascinated by Teresa. There’s a group of contemporary authors like Julia Kristeva, Cathleen Medwick, and Mirabai Starr who have written novels, essays, and biographies focused on Teresa. Women in philosophy are starved for women philosophers, especially early ones.
When we encounter Teresa, we learn she’s not just a philosopher. She’s a force. How did a woman in 16th century Spain—a patriarchal and repressive society where the Inquisition was raging—become one of the country’s foremost intellectuals? Where did she get that writing style of hers, so clear, conversational, and modern? The world didn’t have to wait 500 years to discover Teressa—she was a public intellectual during her life. Plus, she reformed her whole religious order. She made the Carmelites into the Discalced Carmelites—the “shoeless ones” who took vows of poverty and obedience very seriously. As a student, I admired Teresa as a proto-feminist, a writer and reformer in a male-dominated culture.
Early on, I didn’t give a hoot about the spiritual side of her. I was a very religious Catholic as a child, but I abandoned religion as a teenager. Then, in my late 20s, my life took a bad turn. It was suggested to me that I find God, and quick. I was so desperate, I said, “Okay.” I started praying and going to church. After a few years, I picked up Teresa’s Interior Castle again, and I looked at it differently: “Oh, duh, this is a spiritual book!” It’s about how to pray, how care for your soul, and how to grow closer to God. I started looking at her other prose too, her autobiography, called The Life, and her work of monastic education, The Way of Perfection.
Teresa’s poems are the next iteration of this arc. I’m a poet. Meeting Teresa as a poet, when she already meant so much to me, was fantastic. Her poetry also fits neatly with a part of her spiritual instruction that I use—her focus on private, contemplative prayer, which I’ve practiced since I returned to religion.
MKM: I practice Buddhist mediation. Buddhists discuss with great respect the depth of other spiritual practices, including the nearly 2000-year history of Catholicism and silent prayer. They view Teresa as having the kind of spiritual discipline associated with their own forms of meditation.
DD: Teresa believed in the importance of two “sister” virtues: humility and detachment. Of course, non-attachment is totally Buddhist. For Teresa, a person has to be humble and detached from what she called “the world,” to be able to surrender to God in prayer.
Many of Teresa’s poems render in verse her spiritual experience or instructions to nuns about humility, detachment, and surrender. Poems contain ideas from her prose. In her autobiography, Teresa recounts a vision of an angel piercing her with a spear, which drove her to an ecstasy of pleasure and pain, full of erotic overtones. Her poem, “About Those Words, ‘My Beloved Is Mine’,” recasts the experience via a metaphor from the Old Testament’s Song of Solomon, which also has a tinge of eroticism. In the poem, the spear becomes an arrow, and Teresa is the prey of a “sweet Hunter”—my book title. The Hunter is God, to whom she surrenders.
MKM: One of the essays in the book, “Many Mansions,” links a group of Teresa’s poems to the 7-part spiritual development in Interior Castle. The stages she describes start with a withdrawal from the world of sin, and culminate in a final mystical union with God. Can you discuss these stages as they relate to the spiritual and emotional development of a woman in today’s world?
DD: In today’s world, this would be hard to do, for two reasons. First, you can’t adopt Teresa’s approach without believing, or at least entertaining the idea, that you have a soul. In modern analytic philosophy, there are no souls. Most modern philosophers believe that we have perceptions and psychological continuities like memory, but none of these are owned or held by one’s individual soul. Second, you also have to find the time and undisturbed quiet for profound prayer and meditation. Not many have the inclination or even the ability to do this now.
But assuming these two things, here goes: In Interior Castle, Teresa describes the soul as a crystal castle in which there are many “moradas,” a word meaning “dwellings” that is often translated as mansions, into which the soul can travel. Right off the bat, there’s a logical contradiction, which Teresa addresses. On one hand, the soul is the castle. On the other, the soul travels into the castle. Teresa admits this sounds like nonsense: How can you enter into what you already are? But then she says, when you hear about prayer as a way of entering into oneself, that’s the idea. It’s really the philosophical idea of self-consciousness, that strange human quality of being conscious that we are conscious, which enables us to search ourselves. But that search isn’t only to find ourselves, it’s also to find God, who lives within our soul. Teresa says this in Interior Castle, but she also says it in poetry, especially in the poem “Soul, Seek Yourself in Me.”
The soul enters the first mansion of the castle when you begin to pray. When you enter the second mansion, you become a student of prayer. You attend seminars. You go on YouTube for Bishop Barron or Father Martin. In mansions three through five, you’re living a more exemplary life and getting deeper into contemplative, meditative prayer. You are cocooning with God. Teresa introduces the metaphor of a silkworm preparing to become a butterfly to describe this. In the sixth mansion, you are very closely connected with God, almost spiritually complete, but you’re afflicted and anxious, a hatched and flitting butterfly. If you press on to the seventh and final mansion, you achieve full spiritual connection. The butterfly is dead—the old you is dead. You have a new life, detached from “the world” and united with God.
Could anyone do this now? Could they ever? Teresa wrote for the readers of her day, monastic women, clerics, the noble and wealthy classes with leisure. Maybe they had a shot at it. For women now—for most of us now—giving it a try may be the most we can achieve.
MKM: A section of your book, “O Sisters,” has an essay and poems that show Teresa as an entrepreneurial manager, developing people, working within an organization. She reformed an order, founded convents, and trained her nuns. Do these poems speak to women as leaders, mentors, and teachers in today’s world?
DD: In this group of poems, Teresa absolutely gives the woman leader permission to be an unrepentant boss. There is one poem, “New Clothes,” where the nuns are complaining about their cheap robes full of lice. Teresa dismisses them as an “unruly herd,” and reminds them how small their problem is compared to Christ dying on the cross. No niceties and indirectness for her.
There is also a hint in these poems that, for a woman who wants an intellectual or entrepreneurial life, marriage can be tricky. The first lines of the poem, “Big Gala,” about the ceremony where nuns take vows, are “Our husband wants to put us in prison.” On the surface, this refers to God as a husband, and possibly to the iron bars behind which cloistered Carmelite nuns did—and still do—receive visitors. But I think there is also a sarcastic dig at marriage generally, as limiting for women.
Every poem in this set emphasizes the community of women, laboring together. Teresa writes of friendship, of having a place in “the flock,” of the rites of passage they share. There is power in sisterhood. That’s an important idea women can take away from Teresa’s poetry.
MKM: In one of the essays, you mention a phrase from the 4th-century philosopher Augustine, whose work Teresa knew: “My weight is my love.” How do you hope this book weighs in the lives of readers?
DD: This question is hard for me. I have to reveal my self-centeredness. When I first submitted Sweet Hunter for publication, all I wanted was my own copy. I just wanted to hold my book. I didn’t think about the reader at all. I don’t know if other writers are that solipsistic, but I was.
Things started to change once the book was accepted. I had to think about selling the book, about the community-building a writer does to spread the word. Through that process, I started to think about what people might want from a book like this.
The book’s editor, Anne McGrath, told me something that helped. “Before our collaboration,” she said, “I didn’t care at all about Teresa, but your book made me care about her as an important figure.” I hope that others who read the book will start to care about Teresa as the great historical and cultural figure that she is. I’m not sure the book can help anyone spiritually; that seems like a stretch, and not a very humble goal. But maybe the book can pique people’s interest in Teresa, not as some fusty old saint, but as a creative writer, thinker, and leader, who achieved all that at a time when women normally did not.
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Michael Kevin McMahon is an educator and a writer. Professionally, his focus has been on learning in the context of large, highly distributed human/technical systems. He works with issues connected with organizational learning, acculturation, and individual development in complex organizational settings. As a writer, Kevin works with narrative—whether genre’d as travel, journalistic observation or fiction—focused on development and learning. Dana’s Saint Teresa interests him as a visionary leader of large organizations actively engaged in and holding herself accountable both for her own spiritual development and her impact on a larger world.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator who started out as a philosopher. Her new book of translations and essays, Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila, will be published on St. Teresa’s feast day, October 15, 2024, by Monkfish Books. Delibovi’s work has appeared in After the Art, Noon, Presence, Psaltery & Lyre, Salamander, U.S. Catholic, and many other journals. She is a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist and a consulting editor at the e-zine, Cable Street.
ID: Cover of Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila by Dana Delibovi.
Psaltery & Lyre 