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March 28
Teresa of Avila and Thomas Clarkson
David Barnhart
March 28, 2025
Armadillo, 2021. Own photo.
The feast days of saints are traditionally marked by their deaths as a reminder to Christians that we are surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1). In this devotional, I’m using both birthdays (when there is a record of them) and death days as markers for remembrance.
So today I celebrate the birthday of Teresa of Avila, one of my favorite mystical saints. She was born on this day in 1515. She renewed monastic interest in asceticism and the non-ownership of property during a time when many monks and nuns had fallen into the snare of maintaining church power. I suspect that Teresa, like many other saints who practiced mortification, suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but found a path through it with the assistance of mystical experiences and non-ordinary states of consciousness. She wrote about contemplative prayer and described the soul as an “interior castle” which we can explore through prayer.
Today is also the birthday of Thomas Clarkson, in 1760, an English abolitionist and pacifist who managed to organize across denominational lines. He was from the Church of England, but allied with Quakers and other Protestants to more effectively move legislation. At one point, hired thugs attempted to kill him and beat him nearly to death, but he did not stop organizing. He is a model for faith-based organizing today.
Reflection:
Teresa wrote of an ecstatic vision in which she encountered an angel:
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.
This famous reflection of Teresa’s highlights the similarities between the mystical and the erotic, which the famous sculpture by Bernini reflects. But I also think it points to deeper reality where the erotic and sexual are not merely synonyms, and it is possible for something to be erotic without being explicitly sexual. Eros is one of love’s many names, and it emphasizes desire. If God is love, as John says, then it is fitting that she would find overwhelming erotic desire for God in mystical experience.
Thomas Clarkson reflected on the victory of abolition legislation this way:
Thus ended one of the most glorious contests, after a continuance for twenty years, of any ever carried on in any age or country. A contest, not of brutal violence, but of reason. A contest between those, who felt deeply for the happiness and the honour of their fellow-creatures, and those, who, through vicious custom and the impulse of avarice, had trampled under-foot the sacred rights of their nature, and had even attempted to efface all title to the divine image from their minds.
I appreciate the way that Clarkson frames this legislative conflict. He recognized that victory would require persistence over decades, something that I think many modern people forget when we assume victory should be easy and fast. He also frames this legislative battle as a conflict of reason, pointing to the fact that the physical violence justified by the enslavers not only harms others, but even their own minds.
Prayer: Divine Lover, fill us with such desire for you that we could never bear to see your image defaced. Amen.