The Way of Perfection - Tapa blanda

THE convent of St. Joseph at Avila having been inaugurated on August 24, 1562, and the storms occasioned by its foundation having somewhat subsided, St. Teresa received permission from the Provincial, Fray Angel de Salazar, to leave the monastery of the Incarnation and join her new community; she crossed the threshold of that ‘Paradise’, as our Lord vouchsafed to call it, about Mid-Lent, 1563, never to leave the enclosure again—as she fervently hoped. She did not know then that God had destined her to more arduous work which would compel her to sally forth and establish convent after convent in distant parts of Spain. Her sojourn at St. Joseph’s only lasted four and a half years, but, as she says, it was the happiest time of her life. The convent was small and poor, the observance as strict as human nature, strengthened by grace, can bear, but she enjoyed to the full the peace which, after the many struggles graphically described in the Life, had at length been granted her.