Experience of God

Teresa is aware that this is one of the charisms God gave her for the Church. “What I say is what I’ve seen through experience,” she writes (Life, 22:5)

Experience as a way of knowing God and spiritual realities goes much farther than mere conceptual knowledge: '[it] makes progress in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit ... through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their heart ... [and] from the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience.”

                                                                                                                                                                         Dei Verbum, 8

In fact, the experience of the Living God stands out in all the work of St. Teresa. In her life, God is Someone! 

Her testimony excites our desire to know him, to meet him, and to “see” him. In her company, we sense that friendship with God is a marvel of simplicity and depth, and that it is possible, in her wake, to make the same experience, even without extraordinary graces.