ST. TERESA OF PORTUGAL - Feast Day: June 17

Today is the feast day for Saint Teresa of Portugal.  She was married to my 26th Great Grandfather, King Alfonso IX of Leon, and they were FIRST COUSINS! She is also a distant cousin of mine.

After having several children together, the church dissolved the marriage because it was too close in blood relation (consanguinity.)  It was common at one time for relatives to marry one another among nobility because, God forbid, one couldn't marry a commoner.  Their world would fall in. Consequently, since I am descended from a bunch of royal lines, I am a cousin to myself a hundred times over, maybe more!

After the marriage was dissolved, Teresa returned to her estate at Lorvao in Portugal and funded a monastery on her property.  Later, she replaced the monks with 300 nuns following the Cistercian Rule, and she lived with them, though she did not take vows until later.

In 1231, her former husband's second wife, Berengaria of Castile, asked Teresa to return to Leon to arbitrate a dispute between their children about the throne and inheritance of Alfonso IX, who had died in September of the previous year. Imagine the confidence that Berengaria would have had to have in our Saint Teresa in order to call on her for assistance with something as weighty as this. As is the case with so many of the female saints, we have to infer her virtuous qualities from the limited amount of information passed down to us over the years.

After settling this dispute, she returned to Lorvao and lived as a nun for the rest of her life, ruling over hundreds of Cistercians in her convent (pictured below) which HAD been a monastery of Benedictine MEN. She replaced them with her Cistercians, which I find incredible, because it is usually the men that are throwing out the women! She must have been remarkable.

This too tells me something about her attributes, since I cannot imagine the men obeying her edict to get lost and then hundreds of women following her in religious life without that woman having had an unusual character. She would have to inspire devotion and obedience in all those women, overcoming the pettiness and infighting that could easily occur among a community of people who have been told since childhood that they are worthless in comparison to the male sex. I pray to be imbued with some of that inspiration myself!

Many of my Sainted ancestors and cousins have started convents and monasteries. I have also long wanted to start a convent geared toward disabled and retired ladies, but that sort of thing requires a huge amount of funding.  My sainted ancient ancestors were wealthy, most of them, or at least had quite a bit of land, and they had the freedom to dedicate it to the church so as to establish convents and monasteries "for the glory of God." If you had no money, you had little or no chance of a religious vocation - unless, of course you were young, exceedingly healthy, and able to wait on and serve everyone else. 

Abbey of Lorvao

Photograph by Vitor Oliveira

from Torres Vedras, Portugal

This is a view of the old Abbey cloister and of the

lantern tower of the Abbey Church.

It was originally occupied by Benedictine monks, from

about 1070 to 1206, and then housed Saint Teresa's Cistercian

nuns from 1206 to 1887

The great importance of prayer, whether intercessory prayer, glorification, or contemplative prayer in which one simply inclines the mind to God, cannot be underestimated, but I find that, even some very devout people don't see the sense of it and are not likely to support contemplative vocations.  They expect visible production in the form of social programs on the part of the religious, but fail to calculate that Martha AND Mary are necessary.  Some are jealous of the peaceful, protected life of contemplative monastics, despite the lack of mobility and choice about almost anything in a nun's life. When I was a nun in the Vedanta convent, I overheard a few "close devotees" speak with bitterness about the supposed ease of the lives of the nuns, when they knew nothing at all about the tremendous amount of physical labor that was required of them. My body was destroyed by the physical work and I ended up in a wheelchair for a couple of weeks, at least.

Why do I care if I am related to this saint or that saint?  The thing is this:  The saints are not really dead. They have exited the physical world and moved on to another, spiritual realm and if I am related to any of them, I like to direct requests for intercessory prayer to them.  Hey...I need all the help I can get, and I am counting on them to be interested in their descendants and relations.

In addition, the lives of the saints give tremendous inspiration to process along the holy path they trod before me. Their examples prove it can be done. It is possible to conquer the lower urges and approach the Lord, if we observe, imitate and correspond with the glorified ones.

Granted, it is more difficult to be inspired by the saints like Teresa of Portugal who have been ignored by the church and for whom there is so little information, but when we meditate on the events of their life and spend some time considering the implications of their history, we can mine jewels from it.

Teresa had two sisters who were ALSO sainted - Sancha and Malfalda. I have seen this tendency of saints appearing in the same family like this, and it gives me something to think about. Is there some DNA aspect to sisters given to saintliness, or is it entirely a "nurture, rather than nature" situation? Therese of Lisieux immediately comes to mind. Her sisters, you will remember, were also nuns.

Today I commune with Teresa of Portugal and I recommend her to you, as well. 

God bless us all.

Silver "Rose" S. Parnell

Sannyasini Kaliprana

Silver Cottage Hermitage

Albuquerque, New Mexico
(c) 2015