For three days I’ve been taken into Our Lord’s agony.
He is represented to me at each instant as dying, with His face on the ground. His hair is red with blood. His eyes are livid. Without a countenance. He is pallid and emaciated. His tunic covers only half of His body.
His back is covered with a multitude of lance wounds, which I understand are sins.
In His shoulder blades He has two wounds that allow us to see His white bones, and nailed to the holes of these wounds are lances that penetrate into His bones.
In His spine, He has lances that hurt Him horribly. On both sides the blood flows down in torrents, inundating the ground.
The Most Holy Virgin was standing at His side, weeping and asking the Father for mercy.
I see this image with such vividness that it produces in me a kind of agony. I can’t cry, but perspiration pours over me and my hands grow cold and my heart pains me so that I feel shortness of breath.
With this vision, everything becomes bitter to me and I find pleasure in nothing else than staying united with Our Lord. But I find it’s more perfect to do everything without exteriorly displaying anything of my pain.
I talked with my Mother Superior, since I feel it’s necessary that souls not as miserable as mine should console Him. Our Lord told me that our dear Mother and Sisters as well as I have greatly consoled Him.
I don’t know how to thank our Lord who is making me a participant in His sufferings and who finds consolation in me, a miserable sinner. The only thing He asks is that I not speak of myself, that I live only for God and to console Him, that I suffer in silence.
But as there are times when I can do no more, I unburden myself with my Mother. How long will I seek creatures? I desire not to die until the end of the world so as to always live at the foot of the tabernacle, comforting the Lord in His agony.
Saint Teresa of the Andes
26 May 1919
From her intimate spiritual diary
Holy Thursday, 1 April 1920
Biographer and scholar of Saint Teresa of the Andes, Father Michael D. Griffin, O.C.D. offers these notes concerning our saintly Carmelite and her passion and death from typhus:
Holy Thursday was a day always dear to Sister Teresa. On this particular Holy Thursday, the young Sister was beginning to experience the first signs of her illness.
She did not complain nor did she ask to be dispensed from the community exercises. That day, she spent long hours on her knees in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. But that night she felt quite exhausted—too weary, in fact, to fall asleep. She did finally get to sleep but was unable to sleep more than four hours.
The next day she assisted at all community exercises and even attended the preaching of the Seven Last Words.
But late on Good Friday, the Novice Mistress first noticed how ill Sister Teresa was and immediately ordered her to bed. Sister Teresa was running an abnormally high fever. The doctor was summoned immediately but was unable to reduce her fever. His prognosis was very unfavorable.
Sister Teresa had to admit to him that she had not been feeling well for several weeks. Mother Angelica had Sara Urbistondo telephone Señora Lucía [Solar Armstrong] to advise her of her daughter’s condition. She, in turn, dispatched her personal physician, Doctor Diaz Lira, to care for Sister Teresa.
Griffin, M D & Teresa of the Andes, S 2021, God, The Joy of My Life: A Biography of Saint Teresa of the Andes With the Saint’s Spiritual Diary, ICS Publications, Washington DC.
Featured image: The colorful interior of the parish of Saint-Eugène Sainte Cécile in Paris is marked by its iron piers and mouldings painted in vivid blues, reds and greens, the mosaic tiled floor, and multiple stained glass windows. This scene of the agony in the garden is from one of the main windows, which are largely the work of Louis-Adrien Lusson and Gaspard Gsell.
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