A Year with the Saints – 3 September

detail of a painting of Saint Teresa of Avila by Peter Paul Rubens, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, AustriaEntry

Souls that have no habit of prayer are like a lame and paralytic body, which, though it has hands and feet, cannot use them. Therefore, to abandon prayer seems to me the same thing as to lose the straight road; for as prayer is the gate through which all the graces of God come to us, when this is closed, I do not know how we can have any. – Saint Teresa of Avila

Saint Teresa proved this by her own experience; for having abandoned prayer for some time, she began to fall into certain faults and defects from which, though they were slight, she could not free herself; rather, she went daily from bad to worse. She was herself obliged to say that she was on the road to perdition, to which the Lord told her she would have come, if she had not resumed prayer.

MLA Citation