Anyone who has visited Bruges and wandered through its streets has ended up coming across a wonderful little park surrounded by white houses. He Belgian city beguinage It is, along with twelve others spread throughout Flanders, a World Heritage Site since 1998 and no wonder.
Although “it is not known how this movement began,” as Silvana Panciera explainedsociologist and author of a book about them; The truth is that since the 12th century and for centuries, “they proposed that women exist without being wives or religious, emancipated from any male domination.”
The curious thing is that the beguinage, like convents and religious writers, are becoming fashionable. Very fashionable.
And no, I’m not talking about the Catholic ‘revival’. In recent weeks, the temporary “coincidence” of ‘Sundays‘by Ruiz de Azúa or ‘Lux‘ from Rosalía, had raised the murmur that “Catholicism was back“But, really, I don’t talk about that.
As books like ‘Mystics’ by Begoña Méndezwe are talking about something deeper: something that, behind the Catholic trappings, speaks directly to an entire generation of young women. Something that, in the words of Jorge Burón“opens common horizons instead of individual ones.”
Saint Teresa was right. Saint Teresa of Jesus may be the most important Spanish thinker in all of history and, very often, readings that are excessively attached to the Christian background prevent us from appreciating the philosophical power that is hidden behind it.
Today, when the tensions between personal life and professional development are especially intense in a generation of women that has abandoned traditional frames of reference without yet embracing new ones, Teresa de Cepeda’s ideas are especially relevant.
“Between the pots.” A well-known example is in the ‘Book of foundations’when he says that “…understand that, if it is in the kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots, helping you internally and externally.” In that passage, Teresa defends that there is no war between inner life and outer work, that the underlying criterion is not what we do, but how we do it.
However, it is not a defense of “everything doesn’t matter.”
On the contrary, what he rejects is the automatic superiority of the “elevated” over the “everyday.” Seeking God (the meaning of life, who we really are) is not something we demand the most absolute solitude: It is something that must be done wherever it is necessary.
Where it touches. It is not a cliché: a few days ago we argued that the feeling of the end of the era, acceleration, saturation, existential anxiety or problems of legitimacy are something inherent to our days. The feeling that the future is a fiction is the order of the day.
Therefore, it can surprise no one that Saint Teresa is more alive than ever encouraging us to take charge of our day.
Image | Teresa, the body of Christ
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