The Transverberation of St. Teresa of Ávila: Divine Love's Piercing Wound by Jeff Callaway

The Transverberation of St. Teresa of Ávila: Divine Love's Piercing Wound

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

An Encounter with the Mystical Marriage of the Soul to God

In the late sixteenth century, in the quiet solitude of her cell within the Carmelite convent, a Spanish nun named Teresa of Ávila encountered something so profound, so overwhelming, that it forever altered the trajectory of her spiritual life and left upon Christendom an indelible mark of what it truly means to enter into that mysterious union with the Divine that the Church calls mystical marriage. The event she experienced—what the Church would come to know as the Transverberation, the piercing through of her heart—stands as one of the most documented and theologically significant mystical experiences in Catholic history. It represents not merely a private spiritual encounter, but a public testimony to the reality of God's love and His willingness to draw the human soul into an intimacy that transcends all earthly understanding.

The word transverberation itself carries profound meaning. Derived from Latin roots—trans, meaning through, and verberare, meaning to strike or pierce—it describes a mystical phenomenon wherein the soul experiences a deep, spiritual piercing. For Teresa, this was not abstract theology or pious imagination. It was visceral, real, and eternally transformative. It was an encounter with the very heart of Christ's redemptive love, mediated through the instrument of an angel's fiery dart, administered with purposeful and repeated thrusts deep into the innermost sanctuary of her being.

The Context: A Life Preparing for Transcendence

To understand the significance of the Transverberation, one must first understand the woman who received it and the spiritual landscape from which it emerged. Teresa of Ávila, born in 1515 in the Castilian town of Ávila, Spain, lived during turbulent times. The Catholic Church was under siege from Protestant reformation, from internal corruption, from spiritual mediocrity masquerading as piety. The Counter-Reformation demanded rigorous reform, uncompromising faith, and saints who could articulate—with precision and power—the interior dimensions of Christian experience that the institutional Church often left unexplored.

Teresa entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation in Ávila as a young woman, but her early decades in religious life were marked by struggle, not transcendence. She suffered from numerous physical ailments that wracked her body with pain. She battled temptation and spiritual dryness. She wrestled with doubt and the terrible accusation that her mystical experiences might be demonic rather than divine—a concern the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition took seriously enough to scrutinize her extensively.

But around the year 1556, a profound conversion seized her soul. According to her own account, she encountered a statue of Christ called the "Ecce Homo," the suffering redeemer depicted in His wounds and abandonment. The image pierced her so deeply that she found herself prostrate on the chapel floor, weeping torrents that seemed to wash away decades of spiritual numbness. This encounter, this moment of encountering the reality of Christ's suffering love, became the spiritual furnace in which all her subsequent mystical experiences were forged.

From this point forward, God began to pour upon her an increasing cascade of visions, ecstasies, and interior illuminations. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that contemplative prayer involves a direct, personal encounter with God, a grace wherein the soul comes to experience intimate union with the Divine Presence. This is not imagination or sentiment. This is the Holy Spirit working directly upon the human soul, teaching it, purifying it, elevating it to heights of participation in the divine life itself. This is what began to happen in Teresa's life with increasing intensity and clarity.

In 1559, Teresa recorded a profound conversion experience wherein she became absolutely convinced that Jesus Christ presented Himself to her in bodily form, though invisible to normal sight. These visions persisted with remarkable constancy for more than two years. They were accompanied by what she termed locutions—interior words from the Lord Himself, teaching her, consoling her, preparing her soul for what was to come. This period became a time of deep purification and illumination. Her will became increasingly united with God's will. Her entire being began to reorient itself toward heavenly realities rather than earthly concerns. She was entering, in the terminology of her masterwork The Interior Castle, the sixth mansion—a place of profound betrothal to Christ, marked by intense trials and extraordinary graces.

The Angel of Love: The Vision Itself

Scholars generally locate the actual occurrence of the Transverberation somewhere between 1556 and 1560, during this period of Teresa's most intense mystical activity. The precise date remains uncertain, as does the exact location—whether it occurred in her cell or in the chapel—but the event itself is recorded with remarkable clarity in Teresa's own handwriting in her spiritual autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, completed in the mid-1560s.

Teresa describes what she perceived with a specificity that reveals neither hallucination nor mere fancy, but rather the careful observation of someone determined to report truthfully what God granted her to experience. She saw, beside her, to her left side, an angel appearing in bodily form. This was unusual for her, as she notes. Ordinarily, her visions of angels were intellectual visions—knowing their presence and communication without sensory manifestation. But on this occasion, the Lord willed that she see this particular angel in corporeal form, something that happens to few souls.

The angel was not large in stature, but small. He was extraordinarily beautiful. His face blazed with such radiance that he appeared to be one of the highest angels—those whom Scripture calls the Seraphim, the burning ones who stand before God's throne. In Teresa's own words, recorded for all posterity: "I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire." This golden dart, this instrument of divine love, was about to become the means through which God would pierce the very depths of Teresa's being.

The angel did not hesitate. He began to thrust the spear into her heart. Not once, but repeatedly. The motion was deliberate, purposeful. With each thrust, the point penetrated deep into her inner depths, into the very sanctuary where God dwells. The experience was paradoxical beyond measure. It was agony and ecstasy simultaneously. It was wounding and healing in the same instant.

"He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very inner depths; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also." With each withdrawal of the dart, Teresa experienced what she described as her very entrails being drawn out. The pain was extraordinary—so severe that it made her moan audibly. Yet she writes with a clarity that has echoed through centuries: "and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it, and the soul could not be satisfied with nothing less than God."

The Nature of the Experience: Physical and Spiritual

This is the crucial point where shallow interpretation must give way to profound theological understanding. The Transverberation was not primarily a physical experience, though it had profound physical accompaniments and consequences. It was a spiritual piercing of the deepest kind—an interior wound inflicted upon the very substance of her soul by the love of God.

Teresa herself clarifies this distinction in her spiritual writings. She explains that while the pain was terrible, it was not of the senses. It was not like bodily pain, though her body certainly participated in it. The wound was entirely interior, in the deepest depths of the soul, beyond any resemblance to physical suffering. It was a piercing of her spiritual heart—that innermost sanctuary where the soul meets God, where the will encounters Divine Will, where human love is drawn up into the infinite ocean of God's love.

This is mystical theology of the highest order, grounded in Scripture and the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. When Saint Paul writes "I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me," he describes precisely this reality—a substitution of the human will and affection with Christ's own will and affection. This is what the transverberation accomplishes. It is the soul being pierced by divine love so intensely that all resistance crumbles, all self-concern evaporates, and the soul experiences itself being thoroughly possessed by God's love.

The physical dimensions were real, though secondary. Teresa's entire body participated in this mystical experience. Her heart, that organ which Scripture teaches is the center of human affection and will, seemed to her to be literally pierced. Her breath became difficult. Her exterior composure was shattered by the interior intensity—hence her moaning. For Teresa, this was not theatre or emotional excess. It was the only possible bodily response to what was occurring in the depths of her soul.

The experience also manifested in what we might call a total transformation of her affective capacities. When the angel withdrew the dart, he left her "all aflame with a great love of God." This was not sentiment. This was a fundamental recalibration of her entire being toward the Divine. Her will, her intellect, her affections—all were now ordered entirely toward God. Any residual self-concern, any lingering attachment to earthly things, seemed to burn away in the fire of this divine love.

The Theological Significance: Entrance into Mystical Marriage

The Church's theological tradition, articulated masterfully by Teresa herself in The Interior Castle and by her contemporary, Saint John of the Cross, understands the spiritual life as a progression through stages toward union with God. The ascetical and mystical theology of the Carmelite tradition, grounded in Scripture and developed by the Desert Fathers and the great medieval mystics, describes this progression as moving from the purgative way (where the soul is cleansed from sin and habitual imperfection), through the illuminative way (where the soul is increasingly enlightened by divine truth), to the unitive way (where the soul enters into the most intimate union with God that is possible in this earthly life).

The Transverberation marks a critical threshold in Teresa's spiritual journey. It signified her entrance into what she calls the Sixth Mansion of the Interior Castle—a place of intense betrothal where the soul sees itself drawn into ever-deepening intimacy with Christ, the Divine Bridegroom. But more profoundly, it opened the way for her entrance into the Seventh Mansion—the place of Spiritual Marriage itself, that mystical union wherein the soul becomes so thoroughly united with God that the traditional distinction between lover and beloved, between the human will and the Divine Will, becomes, in a very real sense, dissolved.

In her Spiritual Relations, Teresa describes this state further: "There are not over 100 people in the United States that hate the Catholic Church, there are millions however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church. Another type of prayer quite frequent is a kind of wound in which it seems as though an arrow is thrust into the heart, or into the soul itself. Thus the wound causes a severe pain which makes the soul moan; yet, the pain is so delightful the soul would never want it to go away. This pain is not in the senses, nor is the sore a physical one; but the pain lies in the interior depth of the soul without resemblance to bodily pain."

This is the language of nuptial mysticism—the traditional spiritual language of the Church wherein the soul's relationship with God is understood through the symbolism of marital love. Just as in human marriage two become one flesh, in spiritual marriage the human will and affection become so thoroughly united with Divine Will and Love that a genuine union occurs—not a loss of the human person, but rather the flowering and perfection of that person in their deepest capacity to love and be loved.

Saint John of the Cross, Teresa's spiritual son and collaborator in the reform of the Carmelite Order, wrote extensively about this same mystical experience. He describes the seraph—the burning angel—assailing the soul with a fiery dart of love, piercing it in such a way that the soul, already inflamed with the love of God, becomes "converted into an immense fire of Love." He notes: "Few persons have reached these heights."

The Physical and Mystical Aftermath

The Transverberation was not a momentary, isolated experience. According to Teresa's own account and the traditions of the Carmelite Order, this mystical grace occurred repeatedly over a period of time. Each occurrence brought the same paradoxical combination of acute spiritual pain and indescribable sweetness. Each recurrence deepened her union with God and transformed her soul more thoroughly into a vessel of divine love.

The effects upon her body were significant. After each occurrence, Teresa experienced a physical weakness and exhaustion that required recovery time. Her spiritual directors observed her after these ecstatic experiences and noted the profound peace that emanated from her, coupled with a complete detachment from worldly concerns. She emerged from these encounters not as someone who had lost touch with reality, but as someone newly oriented toward the only reality that truly matters—God Himself.

The Transverberation marked a decisive turning point in Teresa's spiritual progress. From this point forward, she enters more fully into the Seventh Mansion—that innermost chamber of the spiritual castle where the soul dwells in perpetual union with God. This does not mean that external trials ceased. Indeed, Teresa's remaining years were filled with exhausting labors as she traveled throughout Spain founding reformed convents, establishing the Discalced Carmelites as a renewal movement within the Church. It does mean that an interior foundation had been established that no external circumstance could shake. God Himself had become, in the most intimate possible way, her possession and her home.

The Physical Evidence: A Heart Pierced and Preserved

What might seem purely mystical became, remarkably, physically verifiable. When Teresa's body was exhumed nine months after her death in 1582, those who opened her grave discovered something extraordinary. While her clothing had decomposed as one would expect, her body itself remained incorrupt—no decay, no putrefaction. This incorruptibility persists to this day, nearly five centuries later, standing as a physical testimony to the holiness of this woman.

Most remarkably, when her heart was examined, it bore evidence of the mystical wound. A puncture mark—visible to the naked eye—appeared upon her physical heart. This is not metaphorical language, not pious embellishment. It is a physical fact that has been examined and re-examined by generations of the faithful, by scholars, by those devoted to understanding the spiritual legacy of Teresa of Ávila.

Her heart was removed and placed in a reliquary in the Church of the Annunciation in Alba de Tormes, Spain, where it remains to this day preserved in extraordinary condition. In 2024, when the tomb of Saint Teresa was opened for canonical examination—a process requiring ten separate keys held by various ecclesiastical authorities and the Spanish monarchy itself—researchers confirmed the continued preservation of her relics. The heart remains incorrupt, perfectly preserved with its original tissues and structures intact. The puncture wound, that mark of the angel's fiery dart, remains visible, a tangible reminder of the reality of divine love and its capacity to pierce the human heart.

Pope Benedict XIII, recognizing the profound spiritual significance of this mystical experience, established in 1726 the liturgical Feast of the Transverberation of the Heart of Saint Teresa, celebrated by the Carmelite Order on August 26th or 27th each year. The Church's recognition of this feast is not whimsy or pious sentiment. It is the official acknowledgment that in Teresa's experience, God had granted the Church a profound witness to the reality of His transforming love.

The Transformation: Spiritual, Mental, and Physical

The Transverberation transformed Teresa profoundly in every dimension of her being. Spiritually, it accomplished what no amount of human effort could achieve. It established within her soul a union with God so intimate and so stable that it became the foundation of all her remaining years. She had tasted, in an unprecedented way, the reality of God's love. She had been pierced by it, wounded by it, forever changed by it. There could be no return to spiritual mediocrity or complacency after such an encounter.

This transformation manifested in her mental and emotional life in striking ways. Those who knew her after the Transverberation remarked upon the extraordinary peace that characterized her despite her external labors. She was not a woman overwhelmed by the intensity of her mystical experiences. Rather, she was a woman in whom the interior grace had penetrated so thoroughly that it brought forth remarkable stability, clarity of mind, and spiritual wisdom.

Her writings—particularly her masterwork The Interior Castle, composed after the Transverberation—reveal a mind of extraordinary acuity and theological depth. She was not a learned woman in the academic sense. She had no formal theological training. Yet the Holy Spirit, working through her mystical experiences, had taught her the deep wisdom of the spiritual life in a way that exceeds much formal theological education. Her descriptions of the stages of prayer, the nature of union with God, the signs of authentic spiritual experience—these reveal a mind illuminated by mystical experience and capable of articulating that experience with precision and beauty.

Physically, the Transverberation marked a crossing of the threshold into a new mode of existence. From this point forward, Teresa lived in what might be called a state of continuous mystical union with God, though with periods of greater and lesser intensity. The physical manifestations—the raptures, the ecstasies, the temporary loss of sensory faculties—became more frequent and more pronounced. She experienced levitations during prayer, something she found deeply embarrassing, a testimony to the power of the grace working within her.

Yet despite the extraordinary nature of these physical phenomena, Teresa maintained a remarkable down-to-earth practicality. She was known to say, "When praying, pray. When eating partridge, eat partridge." She took joy in simple things—in food, in conversation with her sisters, in the ordinary details of life in the convent. She recognized that authentic mysticism must bear fruit in charity, in service to God and neighbor, in the practical virtues of obedience and humility.

The Legacy and the Testimony

The Transverberation of Saint Teresa stands as one of the most thoroughly documented and theologically significant mystical experiences in the history of the Church. It was not a private event, known only to Teresa herself. It was witnessed by others, examined by ecclesiastical authorities, recorded by Teresa in her own hand, preserved in the incorrupt relics of her body. It stands as a public testimony to the reality of God's transforming love.

In her later years, Teresa summarized her fundamental spiritual conviction in a prayer often attributed to her: "Let me suffer or let me die. Lord, I am now Yours; I have given myself entirely to You. Dispose of me as You will." This prayer encapsulates the spiritual state established by the Transverberation—a total surrender of self to God, a willingness to accept whatever God deems necessary for the perfection of the soul. The Transverberation had accomplished this surrender in its deepest dimensions.

The Church has recognized Teresa as one of the greatest spiritual teachers in her history. In 1970, Pope Paul VI elevated her to the dignity of Doctor of the Church—a title granted to those whose theological insights and spiritual wisdom are deemed essential to the Church's understanding of the faith. She was the first woman so honored. The Transverberation, that intimate encounter with divine love, stands at the very center of the theological wisdom she spent her remaining years articulating.

Conclusion: The Piercing of the Heart

The Transverberation of Saint Teresa of Ávila reveals truths that transcend her individual experience. It testifies to the reality of God's personal, intimate love for each human soul. It demonstrates that the mystical marriage of the soul to God, spoken of in Scripture and the spiritual tradition of the Church, is not mere metaphor or pious fancy. It is a genuine encounter with the Living God, possible for those souls whom God calls to such heights of union.

The angel's fiery dart, piercing Teresa's heart repeatedly, leaving it aflame with divine love, stands as a symbol of what God desires for every Christian—a piercing of the human heart by divine love so complete that all resistance crumbles, all self-concern dissolves, and the soul becomes entirely possessed by the love of God. This is not achieved through human effort alone. It is the gift of God to those whom He chooses, granted according to His mysterious purposes and designs.

In Alba de Tormes, in the quiet museum of the Carmelite convent where Teresa rests, her preserved heart continues to testify. That small puncture mark, visible to the eye of faith, speaks of a love that was willing to pierce through all the defenses of the human heart and establish itself there as the supreme reality. It speaks of a God who is not distant and abstract, but near, intimate, and willing to transform the human soul through the overwhelming reality of His love.

Teresa's life, crowned by the grace of the Transverberation, stands as an invitation to all Christians. Not all are called to such extraordinary mystical experiences. But all are called to that progressive union with God that occurs through prayer, through the sacraments, through the practice of virtue and the mortification of sin. All are invited to allow the divine love to pierce through their defenses and establish its reign in their hearts. All are called to become, in their own way and measure, brides of Christ—united to Him in that spiritual marriage which is the goal and culmination of the Christian life.

The Transverberation of Saint Teresa of Ávila remains, after nearly five centuries, a testament to the transforming power of God's love and an eternal invitation to the human soul to surrender itself completely to the One who created it, redeemed it, and desires nothing more than to dwell within it as its Beloved and its God.

Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us. May we allow the fiery darts of divine love to pierce our hearts and leave us aflame with the love of God, united forever to His heart, transformed entirely by His grace, and possessed wholly by His love. Amen.

~ by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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