When Skippy was a KinderKatholic and living in Detroit, he was baptized and made his 1st Communion at a parish named St. Teresa's which was Klick Zero, right downtown. Today the parish has been renamed and reconsecrated and is now called Blessed Martyrs of Uganda. Neither Geschichte nor Heilgeschichte is ever truly finished. Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in 1515 in Ávila - 2 to 3 days walk Northwest from Madrid. Juan de Toledo, her father's father, was a Converso who had been condemned by the Inquisition for going Cryptokike and turning chickens into fish. So Teresa's old man, Alanso, ponied up some silver and bought himself a Spanish Title and went Grandee over night. Nobility has always been for sale or simply stolen. Goin' Grandee in Espagne was great cover for Marranos and young Teresa was raised as a very pious Catholic. Little Terry loved the Golden Legend - the lives of the Saints - so she decided early that she too would be a saint. At 7 she talked her brother into running away with her and the 2 of them set out to win martyrdom at the hands of the Moors. Other kids play with dolls - Teresa schemed how to bust into heaven. Her uncle found the kinder and carried them home. When she was 19 & ripe for Jesus she ran away again and joined the Convent of Carmelite nuns.
It was in the convent that Teresa discovered Christian Kabbalah, Zen Meditation, and a whole raft of Spiritual Mental Exercises designed to clear the mind of all the busy shit and Empty it for a Vessel/Womb wherein god might flow into her. When Bernini made the scene Sexual he was not pushing the envelope. Teresa was subject to more than just visions - she claimed that at times Christ was present to her both inside and outside of her. In her most famous vision she described a handsome Seraph who drove an Arrow - a flèche - with a flaming point, repeatedly thru her heart. Over and over. She said the pain was Ecstasy and it is the Ecstasy which Bernini captured and that history now associates with St. Teresa. When jealous nuns said her visions were of the Devil Teresa did a Mel and tortured herself, mortifying her flesh. Her motto was: "Lord, either let me suffer or let me die." Opus Dei has her as a calendar girl. Not even the Blessed Martyrs of Uganda loved their misery more. For years the Inquisition watched her every move and studied her every vision. But she died before they could pounce and by 1620 she was a Catholic Saint and had been exalted by the Cortes to be the Patroness of all the Spains. The Church calls her: the Seraphic Virgin.
Teresa's mysticism was ornamented with the old shadows of Kabbalistic barbs, skeuomorphs of her family's ancient Judaism. Terry was rumored to be an Alumbrado - an 'Illuminated One' - a banned sect of Spanish Christian Mystics who were said to be of Gnostic origin if not - in fact - out and out Cathars. Teresa had an earlier avatar as the peasant girl now known as 'La Beata de Piedrahita.' She too was a young virgin girl who joined the Dominicans and took the name: Mariá de Santo Domingo. Maria, also like Teresa, suffered from intense visions of intimate Union with god. She went around screaming that god was inside her and that she was god and that she was god's bride. Alumbrados held "that the human soul can reach such a degree of perfection" that it can directly contemplate and join with god's essence. They claimed that all "external worship is superfluous, the reception of the sacraments useless, and sin impossible in this state of complete union with" god. So all Carnal desires and lusts were allowed and sanctioned - even, and especially, having Contemplative Sex with Jesus. For the Alumbrados, like the Cathars, Perfection consisted in "the elimination of all activity, the loss of individuality, and complete absorption in God." It was Quietism. Silence. The Mind stopped at Nothing and Nothing was god, and god was a thing you could join.
So Teresa of Avila wrote a book: Interior Castle - where the Castle was the Soul. The Castle/Soul has 7 Rooms and Alchemically Translates itself from room to room as it Progresses on its Pilgrimage to Ein Sof. The ascent up thru the 7 takes place in 4 stages - thus Squaring the Circle - the 1st is called: Heart's Devotion; contemplation/concentration begins and you must withdraw with your soul from the exterior world. The 2nd Stage is Devotion of Peace: your puny Will diffuses into God's - other mystics brand this stage: Pissing in the Sea. Memory, Reason, and Imagination are still caught in the shards of the hardened world - but it's becoming quiet. At Stage 3 - Devotion of Union - Reason deserts the shards and is absorbed into god. Just Memory and Imagination rattle around in the auswelt. Bliss, sweet slumber, conscious rapture "in the love of god." At the last Stage - Devotion of ecstasy or Rapture - you become powerlessly passive and all memory of life in your body is gone. Reason is extinguished. There is a long, slow, moist, happy pain which toggles between "a fearful fiery glow," and a rushing sensation of flight. The afterglow lasts a few hours and is described as a "swoon like weakness, attended by a negation of all the faculties in the union with God." Then you wake up in tears.

All the Marranos knew the story of St. Teresa - the nice Jewish girl who had grown up to couple with god - and by the time of Spinoza there were Conversos still hiding from the Inquisition in the Iberian countries under the guise of New Christians. St. Teresa was a favorite Icon under which they could chuckle and still be Jewish. In their time the Jews of Spain had to stop washing themselves so closely as Halakha commands and stink a little more like the Christians. If you were too clean, and smelled too fresh, the Old Christians would know you must be a Jew. If you wore clean clothes on the Sabbath your neighbors would send for the Dominicans and you would be explaining why to the Inquisition. If you cut the gristle from your meat or drained it of blood you might just as well show them your dick. But then Spanish Jews had quit circumcising as soon as they went Crypto. The Marranos saw in Teresa of Avila a kindred spirit - a hidden Soul - so they put her icons on their walls, their posts, their gates and lovingly kissed them as they passed thru. It pleased them no end that the Jew Teresa had had sex with the Jew Christ and that none of the Christians seemed to understand what this Gaudium Inexprimabile meant.
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