The Absolutely Terrifying Visions of St. Teresa of Avila
After receiving a vision of the place the devil had reserved for her in hell, St. Teresa of Avila concludes that what we suffer here on earth is nothing.
One recent afternoon, I took a walk through a neighborhood I hadn't been to in decades and received several glimpses into the carefree, naive days of my childhood. I passed the quaint Lutheran Church where classmates attended Montessori school after their half-day in kindergarten, and the bus stop where we squeezed in a game of tag before the bus arrived in the morning.
As I turned down a small side street, where the sun shone across an enormous big leaf maple still waiting for its spring leaves, I passed a house where a friend from middle school once lived. She had long, thick blond hair, braces, and a penchant for fun. We’d make up our own lyrics to songs from The Sound of Music on field trips, chill at the library after school, and compare math assignments over churros at morning break.
And she threw epic slumber parties. EVERYONE was invited. Into the wee hours of the morning, we'd play Bloody Mary and watch movies like The Sandlot and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, then after an hour or two of sleep, eat strawberries and whip cream over a large farmhouse table.
At one particularly melodramatic party, a circle of us girls got into our pjs and sleeping bags and started to divulge our tales of woe: having parents who were chronically unemployed, being too skinny or too fat, and contending with the fast girls for boys at school. As the weeping escalated, one girl with huge brown doe eyes wept into the shoulder of her BFF:
I just can’t believe God would send anyone into hell. Everyone has some good in them. I don’t think anyone deserves that!
The rest of us girls concurred. How could a God who was all good and all loving sentence anyone to eternal punishment? It made no sense.
Several years later, in the city nearby this bedroom community, while asleep on the top bunk of my cramped college dorm room, with my romance-book-devouring, 'N Sync-adoring roommate snoring below, I awoke with a start and called out to my mom as though I were a little girl.
I’d just seen a menacing, grotesque face with shriveled skin growling at me through a doorway. A knowledge settled within me that pierced deeper than his glare: this was the face of Lucifer, and he wanted nothing less than to completely annihilate me.
A shuddery, disquieting feeling accompanied me the following morning. I felt as though I’d just been threatened with a knife or narrowly averted a fatal car accident. At noon I attended Mass, and after receiving Communion the feeling went away. I received the comfort I’d called out for in the night, and was curled up in a safe space, separated from that evil force that wanted the very worst for me.
However, the vision had been so real, so terrifying, that I could not help but fully acknowledge the out-to-destroy-you evil we’re up against in this vale of tears.
St. Teresa's Descent into Hell
Teresa of Avila, a Saint and Doctor of the church, lived in a Carmelite Monastery in Spain in the 1500s. Around the age of 40, she committed herself to the practice of mental prayer. Many mystical experiences ensued. In one, she physically experiences the place the demons reserved for her in hell, torments she describes in The Book of her Life, a spiritual memoir she wrote around the age of 50.
While I was in prayer one day, I suddenly found that, without knowing how, I had seemingly been put in hell….the entrance it seems to me was similar to a very long and narrow alleyway, like an oven, low and dark and confined; the flow seemed to me to consist of dirty, muddy water emitting a foul stench and swarming with putrid vermin. At the end of the alleyway a hole that looked like a small cupboard was hollowed out in the wall; there I found I was placed in a cramped condition.
All this was delightful to see in comparison with what I felt there….What I felt, it seems to me, cannot even begin to be exaggerated, nor can it be understood. I experienced a fire in the soul that I don’t know how I could describe. The bodily pains were so unbearable that though I had suffered excruciating ones in this life and according to what doctors say, the worst that can be suffered on earth…these were all nothing in comparison with the ones I experienced there. I saw furthermore that they would go on without end and without ever ceasing.
This, however was nothing next to the soul’s agonizing: constriction, a suffocation, an affliction so keenly felt and with such a despairing and tormenting unhappiness that I don’t know how to word it strongly enough. To say the experience is as though the soul were continually being wrested from the body would be insufficient, for it would make you think somebody else is taking away the life, whereas here it is the soul itself tears itself in pieces.…..I felt myself burning and crumbling; and I repeat the worst was that interior fire and despair….
the Lord wanted me to actually feel those spiritual torments and afflictions, as though the body were suffering. 1
A Great Favor
Why does God permit or grant these glimpses into the reality of demons and hell? Avila concludes it’s a great act of mercy. It made her get real about her perspective towards this life, and her role in it.
I was left terrified….thus I recall no time of trial or suffering in which it doesn’t seem to me that everything that can be suffered here on earth is nothing; so I think in a way we complain without reason. Hence I repeat this experience was one of the greatest favors the Lord granted me because it helped me very much to lose fear of the tribulations and contradictions of this life…..from this experience also flow the great impulses to help souls and the extraordinary pain that is caused me by the many that are condemned. It seems certain to me that in order to free one one alone from such appalling torments I would suffer many deaths very willingly. 2
The Middle School Mind
In decades of attending Mass after Mass after Mass, in parish after parish after parish, I have never heard anything more than a stern warning once or twice that we can’t take our salvation for granted. I've never heard anything that even approaches St. Teresa’s account of hell nor the terrifying vision of Lucifer I had in my dream.
And in those instances when hell has been discussed, it's been boiled down to simple conceits such as: “Hell is proximity without intimacy” or “People create their own heaven or hell.” And though I do not at all discount the theological implications of these descriptions, they make hell seem more like a clever argument than an actual place of torment.
The modern approach to evil nearly reflects the attitude of us weepy girls at our middle school slumber party. And I totally get this watering-down, borderline erasing Catholic teachings on the devil and hell. It’s a terrifying reality. I’d prefer that the devil didn’t exist and that our loving God assures everyone an eternity of running through meadows of tall grass and daisies.
This is in fact the destiny God wants for us. Scripture says that God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth." (1 Timothy 2:4) However, as John Paul II points out in Crossing the Threshold of Hope,
There is a destination to eternal damnation, which consists in the ultimate rejection of God, the ultimate break of the communion with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Here it is not so much God who rejects man, but man who rejects God. 3
This is the central paradox of our existence. We have been created through no choice of our own. However, where we spend eternity is entirely our own choice to make.
A Grave Naiveté
As I’ve mentioned, my own take on the devil and hell contrasts sharply with the preaching I’ve heard in the Catholic Church. As I see it, a softening or completely denying the reality of demons and hell is dangerously naive. It’s not unlike telling ourselves that the psychotic serial killer on the loose in our neighborhood is just some hooligan, out to knock over a few garbage cans and spray some graffiti, but nothing more, and then leaving our doors and windows unlocked and making ourselves vulnerable to his wiles.
St. Teresa, too, clearly harbors no delusions regarding the devil’s desire for us to suffer terribly. Instead, she emphasizes the power God has over him:
I don’t understand these fears “the devil!, the devil!” when we can say “God God” and make the devil tremble! 4
This coincides with Scripture. Jesus tells us over and over again not to be afraid, and that He’s won the victory over evil. Here’s just a few Gospel verses that drive this point home:
“Take courage, I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33) “All power on heaven and earth has been given to me.” (Matthew 18:18) “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it." (John 1:5)
This is a most reassuring thought. By remaining in the love of Jesus; being in a state of Grace and living a lifestyle of prayer, fasting and works of mercy; we have nothing to fear.
And You?
What is your take? What sort of encounters with the devil have you experienced in your own life?
Of course, demonic attacks and visions are rarely so explicit as those I’ve recounted. It’s oftentimes unclear when a message, compulsion, or experience comes from God or the devil. It takes skill and experience to tease this out. Fortunately, St. Teresa has passed on her wisdom in this area as well. More on that later.
🍃
Volume 1: The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD & Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, 1976. Pages 213-4.
Volume 1: The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Pages 214-5.
Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul II, 1994. Page 73.
Volume 1: The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Page 170.
When covmania started I immediately saw this as a spiritual war with satan very much in charge. He has orchestrated such complete deception and layering of lies, only he could pull this off. My birth family is divided in half and my mom is the most devout prayerful woman I’ve ever known but she refuses to listen to anything I say about the shots. We used to say together “things are not as they seem”. Now she has no response when I mention this.
Even the sickness and death is being lied away. Oh that’s long covid. Families losing their children may be the one thing that wakes people up.
I believe most people are good though many are misguided. There are dark forces however and the perceptive have noted particularly since Covidcon that this looks like nothing less than a battle between good and evil. What would the Devil want but your soul? All of the genocide and pain unleashed, the dividing of friends and family, the othering and unpersoning ultimately come back on the perpetrators. You lose it when you lose the ability to see humanity in others and make sacrifices in Molochs 's name. Many are naive and refuse to see it as it shakes this world view too much. Few want to confront death, much less what comes afterwards...