I see how yesterday was the feast of St Teresa of Avila, one of only three women to be named a “Doctor” of the Roman Catholic Church, and to my mind one of the greatest of Catholic theologians. I wish I’d noted this significant marker yesterday, but am happy to do so today. Actually, writing as a Unitarian Universalist Buddhist, somehow perhaps this slight lag is appropriate. Teresa is one of my favorite believers in the Christian religion. She and her special friend and sometime confessor St John of the Cross are the great masters of the Christian version of the Via Negativa, the “Negative Way.”
Among my favorite anecdotes about her is how once when she was visiting one of her monastic foundations, riding a cart in the mountains through a terrible rain storm. High on the side of a hill, the cart turned, and she tumbled dangerously down the side of the hill. Covered in mud and filth, she stood up to her full near five foot height, shook her fist into the rainy night, toward the divine itself, and declared at the top of her lungs, “God, if this is how you treat your friends, it’s small wonder you have so few of them!”
the Negative theology is, to my mind and heart, the reach across time and space and culture that connects Christianity and Buddhism. (a google search of “Zen” and “Negative theology” might be fruitful…) Certainly, she provided my first intimation that there is something beyond our differing ideas that unites us as human beings and opens the possibility of joy and peace within our existence.
God rest her soul…
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