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CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY
The Our Father, and the Interior Castle of St. Teresa
by Tom Richard
T
he seven petitions of the Our Father are related in a surprising but beautiful way to the interior journey of the soul as seen by St. Teresa of Jesus (of Avila). There is a special appropriateness of each of the seven petitions of the Our Father to its corresponding dwelling within the soul: the seven petitions to the seven interior mansions. Through this correspondence, we come to understand more deeply the completeness and perfection of the divine prayer, and we come to appreciate more fully the supernatural insights granted St. Teresa. This is of great benefit, if then we come to pray and to live more worthy and faithful Christian lives.The Our Father is a prayer of infinite worth and scope. In this article one aspect of this prayer is stressed: that it is a priestly prayer, a prayer of intercession for the whole Church. It is an expression of the priesthood of Christ, and reaches therefore to all for whom He came and died. In commanding us into this prayer, He commanded us into His priesthood and His kenosis. In the sequence of the petitions of the prayer, we enter into His divine perspective as eternal high priest.
Introduction
Pray then like this:
Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
And forgive us our debts,
As we also have forgiven our debtors;
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
(Mt 6: 9 -13)
The Our Father is much more than a prayer; it is more than a model prayer and more even than the model prayer. The Our Father is the very essence of prayer, including within itself all prayer and omitting nothing that is prayer. All prayer that is true prayer is a participation in this prayer. All true prayer is a sharing in this, the full and essential prayer.
The Our Father can be called the perfect prayer. Its perfection comes from the perfection of its historical source, Jesus Christ: we can be sure that His prayer is perfect. When we pray this prayer, we not only imitate Him, but we enter a communion with Him. This prayer forms us into communion with Him. Our Lord did not say for us to pray “your Father,” but “our Father.” That is, we pray this prayer not only in obedience to Christ the Son of God, which is reason enough, but with Him in His sacred humanity. In this prayer we are invited to a participation in His prayer, and so in His priesthood, interceding with Him for ourselves and for all the Church. In union with the Church and in Him we pray to our Father.
The perfection of this prayer comes also from its source within us as we pray. The prayer itself calls us to this source. At first glance a great tension appears between “Our Father,” which evokes a profound nearness, and “who art in heaven”, which points beyond all created reality. This tension between most near and most distant, between immediate and completely other, is resolved only in the great mystery of the dignity of the human person: we are created beings, created out of nothing, yet created in the image of God!
The source of this prayer, as we pray it, is not merely our lips or mind or memory, but the Word Himself, professing. It is His word, His prayer given to become our confession with Him. The Catechism assures us, “When we pray to the Father, we are in communion with Him and with His Son, Jesus Christ” (CCC 2781). Christ prays this prayer within us, and we with Him, in the most interior center of our souls. The Catechism quotes St. Peter Chrysologus, “When would a mortal dare call God ‘Father,’ if man’s innermost being were not animated by power from on high?” (CCC 2777).
Our communion with the Son enables our sonship: we have a participation in the filial relationship of Christ to His Father. It is because and only because by grace we are in Him, that we can say with Him “our Father.” Again, the Catechism explains this: “... the Spirit of the Son grants a participation in that very relationship to us who believe that Jesus is the Christ and that we are born of God” (CCC 2780).
He, in the Blessed Trinity, indwells us and prays in unceasing intercession for us the Church. We read in Scripture, “but He, because He abides forever, holds His priesthood permanently. Hence, also, He is able to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:24-25). Because the source of this prayer is Christ, we can see the correspondence of this prayer with the essential expression of the priesthood of Christ: His kenosis in love, His Passion. Because the source of this prayer is Christ most interior within our souls, we can see the correspondence of this prayer with the needs, the journey, the history, the formation, the transformation of the soul. We may see this latter correspondence perhaps most easily through the seven mansions, the transformation-journey of the soul described by St. Teresa of Avila in the Interior Castle.
When we pray this prayer, then, we give echo to His petition on our behalf for our sanctification; and we join with Him in His loving praise of His eternal Father, now by grace our Father also. Our Christ, His Son, prays this prayer now, within us, in the most interior interior of the human soul. He chooses to remain there, indwelling a created spirit made in His image,: three divine Persons in eternal communion, in divine loving relationship, within the human soul. There in us is this prayer forever offered to the Father; in our confession with Him we enter His priestly love-communion.
The Prayer
The preeminent place of the Lord’s Prayer in our life of prayer is taught by the Church. Following Ter tullian, she proclaims it is “truly the summit of the whole Gospel” (CCC 2761). The beautiful exposition of the prayer given in the Catechism will not be repeated here, but anyone could benefit greatly by meditation and reflection on that presentation. In this paper we will develop the mystery of the sequence of petitions given in this prayer, and relate this sequence to the Interior Castle seen by St. Teresa.
St. Thomas saw the importance of the sequence of petitions:
The Lord’s Prayer is the most perfect of prayers.... In it we ask, not only for all the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence that they should be desired. This prayer not only teaches us to ask for things, but also in what order we should desire them.1 (CCC 2763)
In the sequence of petitions in the Our Father we find mystery of the Absolute speaking from within His fallen creation. In the Our Father, we see the divine movement from the center and ground of our being in His Being, out to the distant fringes of our estrangement from Him. It is like the net thrown into the sea: beginning in His mouth and near His heart, He casts to the outermost reaches of our need, and then gathers back to Himself. The net begins with the closest, and proceeds to the most separated, and gathers again. It is also like the radiation of light from within the supernatural crystal of the soul: beginning at its source in the innermost center of the Castle (as Teresa saw the soul), the light radiates out, through the interior dwelling places, until all is illuminated.
The divine character of the Our Father is demonstrated in this sequence! A prayer of human origin would probably not proceed in this way, but rather, in all likelihood, in the opposite sequence. We would probably begin our prayer with our struggle against evil, and with temptation, praying for His strength. We would place our needs before Him, only gradually hoping for our hope against all hope, that we might be with Him and in Him and for Him with all our lives. We would begin with “Lord, deliver us from evil!”, and develop our way in prayer to eventually cry out at the end that God might be “our Father” also. The prayer taught us by Jesus is not this way.
In the prayer given us by Jesus, we begin with the end. We begin our prayer with the declaration “Our Father,” an assertion so awesome that we continue to pray only by supernatural grace itself, unless we are so deaf to our own words that we recite as in a stupor. We begin with this word of divine relationship and communion — our end and God’s intention — and from there proceed outwardly, so to speak, outwardly through the path that we must travel if we are to reach that end, until we come to the end of the prayer and the beginning of our journey: “deliver us from evil.”
From the human perspective our salvation begins after Baptism with our struggle against evil. After He was baptized, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilder ness to be tempted by the devil. In the traditional Catholic spiritual understanding of the journey of the soul, from beginner in the purgative stage to proficient in the illuminative stage to the perfect in the unitive stage,2 we begin with a struggle against sin, even mortal sin. In this traditional view if we advance in the Christian life it is toward our final end in Christ, communion and divine fellowship in Him, perfection in charity which is divine life. It is in this end that the profession “Our Father” is consummated, made fully meaningful, and finally understood.
What, then, does this divinely given sequence mean for us? What does it tell us? Why has our Lord told us, “Pray then like this”? Since this prayer has its source in divine mystery itself, in the mission of the Son and in His priestly offering to the Father, this mystery will not be exhausted here! The mystery of the sequence is, I believe, at least this: it is an invitation into the mission of the Son, it is a participation in His journey from the Father, so to speak, into separation and death, and back again.
The Interior Castle
This journey is more clearly seen, perhaps, through the vision of the soul given to St. Teresa, the Interior Castle.3 In the seven mansions Teresa saw seven dwellings of the soul, within the soul, in the journey of the soul toward its end the Holy Trinity. While cautioning against a simplistic reading or thoughts of a linear progression as though step 1 leads next to step 2, and so on—for Teresa insisted that “You mustn’t think of these dwelling places in such a way that each one would follow in file after the other; but turn your eyes toward the center, which is the room or royal chamber where the King stays...”4 Rather, surrounding the center are many rooms above, below, to the right and to the left, so to speak. Yet by seven concentric layers of rooms, as a sphere divided into seven concentric layers of shells, Teresa’s insight into the soul may be pictured. Hence the “first mansions” are all those rooms most distant from the center and from the King who dwells in that center. Those first rooms share certain common temptations and certain graces, certain prayers and certain dangers, which Teresa describes. The next “layer” of rooms, so to speak, the “second mansions” also share certain common features which she describes, and so on. This she continues, describing the soul and increasingly the prayer of the soul, as the soul journeys toward the innermost (seventh) mansions where God dwells.
The Seven Petitions and the Seven Mansions
The mansions are here described in the order they are encountered by the soul, as the soul journeys toward God. For comparison, the seven petitions of the Our Father are given in reverse order.
The 1st Mansions — “But deliver us from evil”
Souls in the first mansions of its journey are in special and grave danger, having just escaped from the clutches of the evil one. Teresa writes,
since in the first rooms souls are still absorbed in the world and engulfed in their pleasures and vanities, with their honors and pretenses, their vassals (which are these senses and faculties) don’t have the strength God gave hu man nature in the beginning. And these souls are easily conquered, even though they may go about with desires not to offend God and though they do perform good works. Those who see themselves in this state must approach His majesty as often as possible. They must take His Blessed Mother and His saints as intercessors so that these intercessors may fight for them, for the soul’s vassals have little strength to defend themselves.5
The last petition of the Our Father is uniquely needed in these dwellings, then, since the soul is especially vulnerable and weak. Teresa stresses the need to grow in self-knowledge, of the horror and ugliness of all sin, and to grow also in the realization of the sublime beauty of the soul. These needs are addressed in the full prayer of the Our Father, yet in the last petition of the prayer is the unique and urgent need of the soul: deliver us! The whole Church, then, in praying this prayer, asks not only for their own needs for deliverance, which may be more or less urgent, but also joins in the saving priesthood of Christ in petitioning for the “very least” of His brethren. In this communion of priests, we live our vocation and pray “our Father”.
The 2nd Mansions — “And lead us not into temptation”
These are souls who have grown somewhat in sensitivity to spiritual matters, and who are now somewhat more receptive to the graces and promptings of God. They are those “who have understood how important is it not to stay in the first dwelling places. But they still don’t have the determination to remain in this second stage without turning back, for they don’t avoid the occasion of sin. This failure to avoid these occasions is quite dangerous”6
This is a time when “perseverance is most necessary”, Teresa writes. “The attacks made by devils in a thousand ways afflict the soul more in these rooms than in the previous ones.” The devils “bring to mind the esteem one has in the world, one’s friends and relatives, one’s health (when there’s thought of penitential practices, for the soul that enters this dwelling place always begins wanting to practice some pen ance) and a thousand other obstacles.”7
Souls in these second mansions are in grave danger in the near occasions of sin, and so have special and urgent need for protection against the subtleties of temptation. Teresa writes, “Ah, my Lord! Your help is necessary here; without it one can do nothing. In Your mercy do not consent to allow this soul to suffer deception and give up what was begun.”8 Hence we see the special need, for souls in these rooms, for the petition for deliverance from temptation! The whole Church prays this, however: “lead us not into temptation.” In priestly intercession for others, and in special priestly intercession for those most in need, the whole Church with one voice offers this petition to our Lord. None would be presumptuous enough to think he is in no danger in temptation! All pray this in sincerity of heart! Yet in priestly intercession all join in support of all, as we pray “our Father.”
The 3rd Mansions — “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors”
Souls who have entered the third dwellings in the interior journey have made great progress. They are very sensitive to the offenses against God that sin inflicts. They are keen to the ugliness of even venial sins, and seek ascetical practices and works of worship of God. Their prayer, while still ascetical and not mystical, is more simple and frequent. Teresa writes,
They long not to offend His Majesty, even guarding themselves against venial sins; they are fond of doing penance and setting aside periods of recollection; they spend their time well, practicing works of charity toward their neighbors; and are very balanced in their use of speech and dress and in the governing of their households – those who have them.9
Teresa warns, however, against dangers of this dwelling which come from a lack of right humility. The practice of virtue may lead to an excess of self-confidence. When dryness in prayer or other trials come, such persons may become very troubled. “When humility is present, this stage is a most excellent one. If humility is lacking, we will remain here all our life – and with a thousand afflictions and miseries.”10 She counsels,
Let us look at our own faults and leave aside those of others, for it is very characteristic of persons with such well-ordered lives to be shocked by everything. Perhaps we could truly learn from the one who shocks us what is most important even though we may surpass him in external composure and our way of dealing with others.11
This third petition of the Our Father, which links a plea for mercy with the need for justice, links also the special need for souls in these mansions for generous forgiveness of others, and humble admission of personal fault. Teresa points out the critical need in these mansions to “look at our own faults” and “leave aside those of others”, hence “forgive us, as we have forgiven.” Here again, it is not that this petition of the Our Father is only for some and not for all of the Church! We all have need to pray this petition: it is truth. Even those not having urgent or immediate personal need of this plea, however, if there could be any, have need by virtue of communion to pray it for the whole Church. Because He is our Father, we must pray for the whole Church, having been gathered ourselves into the priesthood and the cross of Christ.
The 4th Mansions — “Give us this day our daily bread”
The fourth mansions in the journey of the soul mark a radical and essential change. In the fourth mansions, the soul advances beyond ascetical prayer — attainable through ordinary grace — and enters mystical prayer through genuinely supernatural experience. God grants a work in the soul beyond those consolations sometimes given in ascetical prayer: He grants what Teresa calls spiritual delight.12 The effect of this supernatural work of delight is to “expand the heart”, enabling the love which is our vocation. Yet Teresa must say,
One strong warning I give to whoever finds himself in this state is that he guard very carefully against placing himself in the occasion of offending God. In this prayer the soul is not yet grown but is like a suckling child. If it turns away from its mother’s breasts, what can be expected for it but death? I am very afraid that this will happen to anyone to whom God has granted this favor and who withdraws from prayer – unless he does so for a particularly special reason – or if he doesn’t return quickly to prayer he will go from bad to worse. I know there is a great deal to fear in this matter.13
The need Teresa writes for those in these mansions, the need for “its mother’s breasts” to grow and become strengthened in its new relationship with His Majesty, is reflected in the fourth petition of the Our Father for “our daily bread.” The soul in these mansions is in urgent need of spiritual sustenance. While this petition of the prayer can rightly be applied to our material needs in this life, it carries the deeper petition for that heavenly bread which is the Eucharist. The soul in these mansions needs the food of eternal life! It has just been awakened in him, so to speak, in the experiences of infused contemplation. He has come into a second conversion; he has awakened to the presence of the Lord in a most real, personal, and authentic way. But he is now in unique danger, which Teresa alerts us to. This soul must become nourished at the breast of his mother. Mother Church must provide, as she does, in her most precious meal. Our bread includes material needs, and material food, but most importantly our bread is that of the spirit: all that is for the Church is for us, and most urgently for those at the threshold of the mystical life. In this petition the whole Church sends up her epiclesis, awaiting the response of the Spirit. We live our priesthood uniquely in this petition, interceding for all and especially for those most in need, for the bread to feed us.
The 5th Mansions — “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
The relationship to God of the soul in this dwelling is the relationship of union, specifically with God’s will. Teresa calls the prayer of these mansions the prayer of union. In speaking of the deep spiritual delights of this union, Teresa writes, “One cannot arrive at the delightful union if the union coming from being resigned to God’s will is not very certain. Oh, how desirable is this union with God’s will! Happy the soul that has reached it.”14
Teresa writes that there is no great difficulty in discerning the will of God! His will is simple: our perfection in charity, “love of His Majesty and love of our neighbor.”15 Our love for God, Teresa writes, is less certain to ourselves than our love for neighbor: love for neighbor is demonstrable. “We cannot know whether or not we love God, although there are strong indications for recognizing that we do love Him; but we can know whether we love our neighbor. And be certain that the more advanced you see you are in love for your neighbor the more advanced you will be in the love of God”16
In the perfection of love we fully live within His will. As Te resa describes it we move toward, in this fifth dwelling place, the perfecting of covenantal love in marriage. In this fifth dwelling is the “meeting”, the “joining of hands” with the divine Spouse.17 It is reserved to the sixth dwelling to make firm the betrothal with our Spouse, and to the seventh, the spiritual marriage itself.
The fifth petition is meaningful to all in His Church, from the youngest novice to the most advanced elder. Yet to those in the fifth mansions, this petition is newly and urgently meaningful. The personal will of the souls in these mansions is newly one, in mystical prayer, with the will of God. His will is now known in a most personal and intimate way, although even now not completely, because the journey is not even now complete. But the soul embraces in a way it has never before known, the holy will of God. The will of God has become the will of the soul, and the soul most generously proclaims “thy will be done!”
Teresa describes this profound union with His will:
It sees within itself a desire to praise the Lord; it would want to dissolve and die a thousand deaths for Him. It soon begins to experience a desire to suffer great trials without its being able to do otherwise. There are the strongest desires for penance, for solitude, and that all might know God; and great pain comes to it when it sees that He is offended.18
In this deep union with God the soul in these mansions prays “thy will be done.”
The 6th Mansions — “Thy kingdom come.”
This dwelling, as Teresa describes it, is an experience of profound suffering and of joy in Christ, to whom the soul becomes betrothed. After elaborating on both of these favors, the suffering and the joy, she writes “Our Lord grants these favors to the soul because, as to one to whom He is truly betrothed, one who is already determined to do His will in everything, He desires to give it some knowledge of how to do His will and of His grandeurs.”19 Through both the suffering and the flights of spiritual ecstasy, with imaginative visions, the soul becomes almost completely detached from any love for this world. This detachment comes through the joy: “The joy makes a person so forgetful of self and of all things that he doesn’t advert to, nor can he speak of anything other than the praises of God which proceed from his joy.”20 The detachment comes also through the suffering: “The soul is left with greater contempt for the world than before because it sees that nothing in the world was any help to it in that torment, and it is much more detached from creatures because it now sees that only the Crea tor can console and satisfy it.”21
The soul in these sixth mansions prays in a uniquely meaningful way, then, “Thy kingdom come.” The whole Church prays this petition in the midst of the Our Father, and calls upon Him to send and establish His reign. Yet the souls in the sixth mansions, having endured and grown in loving intimacy and obedience, pray this petition in a simplicity which calls us to remember the fiat of Mary. These souls are betrothed to the Lord! They are given to Him through the sufferings and the ecstasies of kenosis: a self-donation that is a participation in the Passion of Christ. We all pray this prayer, and all of this prayer; we pray for ourselves, and we pray for the whole Church. With Christ, we become priests and shepherds, gathering His people into His kingdom.
The 7th Mansions — “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”
When our Lord is pleased to have pity on this soul that He has already taken spiritually as His Spouse because of what it suffers and has suffered through its desires, He brings it, before the spiritual marriage is consummated, into His dwelling place which is this seventh. For just as in heaven so in the soul His Majesty must have a room where He dwells alone. Let us call it another heaven.22
In this dwelling, the soul is brought into spiritual marriage with the Lord, sharing, in a special personal sense, in His holy name. Here Teresa describes the supreme intimacy of the soul with the Beloved, this side of the Beatific Vision. In this dwelling,
the Most Blessed Trinity, through an intellectual vision, is revealed to it through a certain representation of the truth. ÷ Here all three Persons communicate themselves to it, speak to it, and explain those words of the Lord in the Gospel: that He and the Father and the Holy Spirit will come to dwell with the soul that loves Him and keeps His commandments.23
In this dwelling the presence of the Trinity within the soul is revealed and assured, and our Baptism “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is perfected. Here the holy name is hallowed in the interior worship and love of the soul, now wed with her Spouse. The holy name is hallowed here in a most human and personal way, and in a most complete way. Here the prayer of the soul is most fully united with the love-communion of Father and Son, in the Spirit. All souls can and should pray this prayer and this petition of the prayer, “asking the Father that His name be made holy” (CCC 2807). The soul brought by His grace to this dwelling is enabled to pray this petition with Him, in His name, in a union so close that Teresa describes it as sacramental and covenantal: that is, in the bond of marriage. Yet the whole Church, praying through grace and in faith “beyond ourselves” so to speak, prays toward this union in the holiness of His name.
How can we ever, as we pray, move beyond the sublime meanings contained in these opening words of the prayer? How can we continue to speak, having confessed with the Son this divine communion? St. Teresa wondered this perhaps in the year 1566, writing in The Way of Perfection of these beautiful opening words,24
This favor would not be so great, Lord, if it came at the end of the prayer. But at the beginning, You fill our hands and give a reward so large that it would easily fill the intellect and thus occupy the will in such a way one would be unable to speak a word. Oh daughters! how readily should perfect contemplation come at this point!25
Conclusion
There is of necessity great mystery in the sequence of petitions of the Our Father, because of its divine origin. Yet we can see somewhat into the mystery through the writings of St. Teresa, Doctor of the Church. Her understanding of the journey of the soul, from its first responses to the Gospel to its ultimate loving union with Christ in spiritual marriage, gives us a framework in which to reconsider this traditional prayer. With a correspondence that is difficult to deny, we come to see in a fresh way the divine wisdom that it holds.
The Our Father is a prayer that we can pray only in Him and with Him, because it is His priestly prayer of intercession and ingathering for all His people. His prayer begins in Himself, in His love-communion with the Father, yet we are under obedience to offer His words with Him. His words, active and living with the Spirit, begin with our end in Him, “Our Father who art in heaven!” The prayer ends in what is for fallen humanity the beginning of our journey, “deliver us from evil.” Our prayer with Him is our participation with Him as priest and shepherd, building His Church.
In the prayer Our Father, we reach toward the blessed communion of love in the Holy Trinity. We pray with the Son who most intimately shares that life; we confess with Him and mysteriously share His fellowship: “our Father.” In that confession, gathered into His priestly intercession, in union with the whole Church, we recite the perfect petitions of the perfect prayer.
Our vocation requires a journey, for we are not where we are called to be. We are on a path, well described by Teresa’s Interior Castle. To the extent that we reach toward the beatitude of our end, we reach not for ourselves alone but in priestly intercession with Christ for all. This is indeed the perfect prayer, the whole Gos pel summed. With Him in prayer we strengthen ourselves and one another, calling down graces for our journey as Church into His perfect communion. Each recitation of the Our Father carries us through the journey, from end to beginning. Each time we pray “in this way” we enter the movement of the Spirit sent out from communion in the Trinity, so to speak to the very least of His brethren. The Our Father recounts the mission of Christ and calls us into it. The Our Father forms us into His Body, His apostolate, His Cross, His life.
The Catechism passes on to us the end of our journey, a journey so well described by St. Teresa. The Catechism paragraph closes with a prayer that expresses much that was attempted in this article.
The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity. But even now we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity: “If a man loves me”, says the Lord, “he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him” (Jn 14:23):
O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action (Prayer of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity) (CCC 260).
Dr. Tom Richard is Director of Ministry Formation for the Diocese of Norwich.
End Notes
1. St. Thomas Aquinas, STh II-II, 83, 9
2. For example, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP The Three Ages of the Interior Life. Rockford, IL, Tan Books: 1989
3. All references to Interior Castle or The Way of Perfection are from The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, tr. K. Kavanaugh, OCD, and O. Rodriguez, OCD (Washington DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1980) vol. II.
4. Interior Castle I:2, 8.
5. Interior Castle I:2, 12.
6. Interior Castle II:1, 2.
7. Interior Castle II:1, 3.
8. Interior Castle II:1, 6.
9. Interior Castle III:1, 5.
10. Interior Castle III:2, 9.
11. Interior Castle III:2, 13.
12. Interior Castle IV:1, 4.
13. Interior Castle IV:3, 10.
14. Interior Castle V:3, 3.
15. Interior Castle V:3, 7.
16. Interior Castle V:3, 8.
17. Interior Castle V:4, 4.
18. Interior Castle V:2, 7.
19. Interior Castle VI:10, 8.
20. Interior Castle VI:7, 13.
21. Interior Castle VI:11, 10.
22. Interior Castle VII:1, 3.
23. Interior Castle VII:1, 6.
24. In The Way of Perfection Teresa explained the petitions of the Our Father in relation to the grades of prayer as she then understood them. In that work she related the petitions in the order they are prayed, to the increasing grades of prayer as they are encountered in the soul. The strange reality that our spiritual end is prayed in the beginning was noted by Teresa, as quoted, but she continued to apply the prayer as she had begun. Eleven years later, in 1577, she had finished Interior Castle, and her description of the seven mansions. We can only wonder what she would have written concerning the Our Father, had she continued writing.
25. The Way of Perfection 27:1.
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