The Interior Castle

The Preface, Part 1 of The Interior Castle This is a LibriVox recording.

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For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Anne Boulay The Interior Castle or The Mansions by St. Teresa of Avila Translated by the Reverend John Dalton The Preface To the Right Reverend W.B. Eulathorn, D.D., O.S.B., Bishop of Birmingham My Lord, it is with the greatest pleasure I dedicate this translation of St. Teresa's greatest work to your Lordship, and deeply grateful am I, for having received your Lordship's kind permission to do so.

I know well how devoted your Lordship is to St. Teresa, how much you admire her undaunted courage, fortitude, zeal, and confidence in God, amidst all her immense labors and extraordinary interior trials, and above all, how anxious your Lordship is that the same spirit of prayer and the same heavenly virtues with which that glorious Virgin was so wonderfully endowed may be diffused more and more amongst all men, and especially amongst those holy religious who have chosen the Lord as the portion of their inheritance forever.

The illustrious Order of St. Benedict has produced many admirable contemplatives and writers on mystical theology, all of whom speak in the highest terms of the works of St. Teresa.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Anne Boulay.

The Interior Castle, or The Mansions, by St. Teresa of Avila, translated by the Rev.

with the mystic, with the master.

And so often when the original translations of these great mystical masterworks like Dark Night of the Soul and the Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila, Dark Night by John of the Cross, Showings of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, their original literal translations are arcane.

They're very Christian, obviously, and they're very stilted.

And so early on, you know, with the encouragement, not literally, but just by reading Stephen Mitchell and Coleman Barks and others, I realized that I could be faithful as a translator without being literal so that I could sort of break through to a language that was vibrant, alive, beautiful, and would land in the hearts of people of today who may or may not be Christian.

Welcome back to Ye Gods.

Thanks for joining me on my search for magnetic north on my moral compass.

I'm talking with Mirabai Starr, translator of sacred texts such as Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross and The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila.

As we conclude our conversation, Mirabai discusses how she approaches the works of esoteric teachers and how she distinguishes genuine gurus from charlatans, and she's known both.

We think there's chaos, and there is, but there's underlying the chaos, there's order.

You were talking about being broken underneath, and it reminded me of Teresa of Avila and this wonderful thing that she says in The Interior Castle, where she kind of sees that actually her soul is a diamond in which God wants to dwell.

And it's covered up with tar and dirt.

So it's like deepest down, we're the good that God created us as a son or daughter of God in whom God will dwell.

There was a deep peace and a joy that grounded my entire life.

Having read various Carmelite works around that time, The Story of the Soul, Letters of St. Therese, Interior Castle by St. Therese of Avila, I love the Carmelite spirituality, and I was drawn to their charism of prayer and their spirituality of solitude and union with God.

So I immediately assumed that my best option was to become a discussed Carmelite cloistered nun.

I wished to hold nothing back from the Lord and give myself to him in the most total and radical way possible and thought that was just the way to do it.

And so it's, it's, it was intense, but it allowed me to face these things and, and, and to, to see that I wasn't alone in this.

You know, I was reading Teresa of Avila during part of that time and in the, her book, The Interior Castle, and she talks about these sort of dwellings that you move through in spiritual progress.

And the early dwellings have serpents and bugs that bite and just awful things.

And you're just kind of tortured by them.

Maybe things around you happen, but there's a level of peace in your being that even if everything was stripped away, even if you died, that thing would still come with you, that light, that energy, that being.

And I always think about that book that I read, The Interior Castle, and she speaks, St. Teresa speaks a lot about the moment of the white butterfly.

And she talks about how the butterfly goes through this chrysalis, right? And I use this analogy a lot with my clients, which is the butterfly, the caterpillar, you know, eats and eats and eats.

And like, we're just going about our life or in the three day or whatever it is.

God alone suffices, she would write, words that still echo in the hearts of countless Catholics today.

Her mystical writings, including The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection, read not as dry treatises but as intimate roadmaps for the soul.

Teresa invites us, with warmth and daring, to journey inward to that secret place where God dwells and transforms us.

Declared a doctor of the church in 1970, Teresa's legacy endures wherever believers long for a deeper living encounter with God.