Page 71 - Nada temas, dice ella

appropriate the Castilian language to make it say that the love relation be- tween a cloistered nun and her object of desire, the other being (inside the self and/or outside the self) is a sensi- tive relation? How does one speak in
a contagious way of this otherness that separation in love makes her feel, but which can also fulfil her through love? This alterity is neither an abstract law, nor a spiritual vocation, nor a metaphysical worry, but is inevitably a call-and-answer, reciprocal and asymmetrical, between two living bodies in desirous contact? A bond between two contagious desires?
Would it be an intimate illumina- tion, or a resurgence of the evangelical theme of baptism? Or an act of loyalty to the spiritual alphabet of the alum- brado Francisco de Osuna who guides Teresa’s mental prayers and whose Third Spiritual Alphabet abounds with images of water and oil to evoke the state of abandon (dexamiento), dear to the enlightened (los alumbrados), and which this author readily likens to the newborn nursed by its mother? All these at once no doubt, not to mention the more or less unconscious regres- sion of the lover in love with her ideal Lord in an embryonic state, touched- bathed-nourished by amniotic fluid ... The fact remains that the ‘image’ of water comes straight away to Teresa’s pen: ‘water is my element’, she says.
At the same time she takes refuge in her condition as a woman by using it
as an excuse for her ineptitude with spiritual language and for the rec- reation of resorting to comparisons! Thus justified, she distinguishes be- tween four types of prayer which she describes as ‘four waters’ which water the garden of the person praying: the well, bucket water-wheel, bucket, river, and rain.
B. From her writings, I gather that
for the cloistered nun, water signifies the link between the soul and the divine: an amorous relation that unites the dry earth of the Teresian garden with Jesus. Springing from the outside or the inside, active and passive, neither one nor the other and without confus- ing itself with the gardener’s labour, water transcends the earth that I am and makes it be other: a garden. Myself, earth, I only become a garden through the touch of a vivifying medium: water. I am not water because I am earth; but nor is water God, for he is the Creator. In our encounter, water is the fiction, the sensitive representation: it rep- resents the space and time of body- to-body contact; the co-presence and the co-penetration which makes be- ing: living being. For the fiction of water joins me to God without identifying me; it maintains the tension between us and while filling me with the divine, it spares me the folly of confusing myself with it: water is my living protection, my vital element. Representing the reciprocating contact of God and His
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