Second Mansion

By SUSAN BRINKMANN
CS&T Correspondent

This week we journey into the second mansion of our soul. More than 500 years ago, St. Teresa of Avila, a Carmelite Saint and doctor of the church, received a vision of a soul from God. It was a magnificent crystal castle containing seven rooms, with a brilliant light radiating from the innermost room where God dwelled in radiant splendor. This series is based on the book she wrote about this vision, “The Interior Castle,” which documents the soul’s journey toward that brilliant central room where we can achieve complete union with God.

Before we venture further into the mansions of the soul, it’s important to note that a person does not stay in one mansion at a time, but can move between mansions immediately ahead or behind. Also, a person does not stay in a mansion for any particular length of time. The speed of their travel is completely dependent upon how generously they are willing to surrender themselves to the will of God.
Now we are ready to enter the second mansion of the soul, which is known as the “great battleground.” Those who enter here have stepped into the arena where they will engage, for the first time, in genuine spiritual combat.
As Father Thomas Dubay describes so well in his book, “Fire Within,” the soul in this mansion is engaged in a full-scale war with themselves and the world around them. “They are still engaged in worldly pastimes, half giving them up and half clinging to them. … There is a tug-of-war going on. … The world’s tug is experienced in several ways: earthly pleasures remain attractive, and they appear as though almost eternal. The soul finds it hard to give up esteem in the world and a selfish clinging to family and friends.
“In the opposite direction, God’s tug is likewise felt in diverse manners: reason itself shows the person how mistaken the world’s message is and why it is mistaken.”
Souls who are moving into the second mansion have grown spiritually, enough to realize that their old way of looking at life is just that — old.
A new wisdom has opened their eyes to the false wisdom of worldly pundits. All the familiar arguments in favor of abortion, contraception, and various forms of social injustice suddenly ring hollow.
The Truth has changed them somewhere deep inside and they almost feel like a stranger unto themselves. A great conflict is taking place between the spirit of the world and the spirit of God and the soul in this mansion will spend most of their time falling into sin and climbing back out.
The good news is that these conflicts are already producing hidden benefits to the soul who will persevere. “If, then, you sometimes fall, do not lose heart,” St. Teresa writes, “or cease striving to make progress, for even out of your fall God will bring good. …”
Every fall that the soul manages to overcome deepens humility and teaches one to be more reliant upon God. As painful as these falls may be, they are slowly building those two great pillars of the spiritual life — confidence in God and distrust of self.
However, the soul in this mansion is still an infant in the practice of the Gospel virtues such as humility, obedience, love and patience. For this reason, their prayer life is still in the first stage. “If prayer is to grow in depth,” writes Father Dubay, “Gospel living must be perfected — the first cannot happen without the second.”
St. Teresa warns the soul not to look for lofty favors from God in prayer, such as locutions or apparitions. The soul is still an infant in the spiritual life.
“You may think that you will be full of determination to resist outward trials if God will only grant you inward favors. His Majesty knows best what is suitable for us; it is not for us to advise Him what to give us, for He can rightly reply that we know not what we ask.”
Her advice about prayer in this mansion is simple: “All that the beginner in prayer has to do — and you must not forget this, for it is very important — is to labor and be resolute and prepare himself with all possible diligence to bring his will into conformity with the will of God.”
For now, our job is to exercise ourselves in the virtues, to persevere in daily prayer, and to remind ourselves that no one enters the Kingdom “but those who do the Father’s will” (Matt.7:21).
However, God is a good and wise Father. He woos the soul with just enough supernatural delight to offset the anxiety caused by the person’s interior conflicts. “The Lord is so anxious that we should desire Him and strive after His companionship that He calls us ceaselessly, time after time, to approach Him. … He will speak to us very boldly at times, mostly through the conversations of good people, from homilies or the reading of spiritual books.
Prayer, although still in the first stages, can be sweet to the point of tears in this mansion because God is already at work healing the damaging affects of our prior sin-life. Abortion, broken marriages, resentments and grudges are all wounds to the spirit much like cuts and abrasions wound the body. These injuries must be lanced, drained, and healed.
But once they are, the person can experience an almost unearthly bliss and lightness of spirit. The person feels better than ever before, rejuvenated and once again alive in places where they once knew only shame or despair. They fall head over heels in love with God. Not only is He real, He has become their hero, their healer, their helper. The soul is suddenly able to see Him everywhere —in everything and everyone. It’s a whole new reality — like waking up on another planet.
In spite of the conflicts, the internal wars, the frequent relapses, the most frequent song of the soul in this mansion is: “God is alive! Alleluia!”
But there are pitfalls everywhere. In addition to battling the greatest of the three evils — the self — the devil is also very active here. It will try to lure the soul back into the world by “pretending that earthly pleasures are almost eternal,” St. Teresa writes.
“They remind the soul of the esteem in which it is held in the world, of its friends and relatives, of the way in which its health will be endangered by penances (which the soul always wants to do when it enters this mansion) and of impediments of a thousand other kinds.”
Her advice to the soul in this mansion is to be resolute. “If the devil sees that he has firmly resolved to lose his life and his peace and everything that he can offer him rather than to return to the first mansion, he will very soon cease troubling him.”
To those who wish to enter the third mansion, St. Teresa advises. “It is a very great thing for a person to associate with others who are walking in the right way: to mix, not only with those whom he sees in the rooms where he himself is, but with those whom he knows to have entered the rooms near the center.”

Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615