An Intimate Good: A Skeptical Christian Mystic in Conversation with Teresa of Avila
Ebook
At age twenty-one, the pain of losing her mother to cancer sent Laurel Mathewson—with a naturally skeptical and questioning outlook—on a years-long existential journey. After an unexpected, overwhelming experience of God’s love, Laurel felt God say to her, “Turn to Teresa. She will guide you.” She understood that “Teresa” was the sixteenth-century saint Teresa of Avila, but she knew very little about her. Even after becoming an Episcopal priest, she had never read more than a few pages of Teresa's writings.
Laurel began to read The Interior Castle, Teresa’s book about the “dwellings" within our souls that we move through to develop an ever-deepening relationship with God through prayer. She truly marveled at discovering a text that illuminated her own spiritual path with such insight, candor, and clarity. And she continued to experience the intimate presence of a God who kept defying and transforming her cynical nature—and offered her the gift of healing.
This beautifully written and moving memoir illustrates an ancient reality still very much alive today: the love and closeness of a good God, as known through Jesus Christ, who seeks to move out into the world, into our very bodies and lives. Not by nature or training inclined to believe such a wild claim, Laurel discovered that God is full of surprises.
In every age, but perhaps particularly in our own, people hunger for personal narratives that help bring to life complex frameworks and ideas. An Intimate Good brings into focus not just Teresa’s Interior Castle but also the living God who is at the heart of it, especially for modern readers who take the life of the mind seriously and yearn for confirmation of meaning and belovedness. Laurel’s journey will lead you to a clearer understanding of the varied avenues God works in our lives over time, through prayer and other people, leading us in ways only possible by One who knows us intimately and loves us deeply.
So many of us are disillusioned, despairing, weary of all the cacophonous, hollow God-talk we hear today. Yet we can’t quell our soul’s ache for an encounter with divine love. St. Teresa knew this despair, this ache—and Laurel Mathewson knows it too. These pages, from the heart of a pastor with the pen of a poet, carry us through deep, mysterious waters and into the Mercy that will never let us go.
—Winn Collier
Director, The Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination, Western Theological Seminary, Holland, MI
Author, Love Big, Be Well and A Burning in My Bones: The Biography of Eugene Peterson
I was deeply moved by An Intimate Good. Laurel Mathewson is a fantastic guide to St. Teresa of Ávila’s masterpiece TheInterior Castle. The writing is engaging, accessible, and deeply sincere. And yet this book is more than a companion to reading Teresa of Ávila—it’s also a powerful personal memoir of Mathewson’s own journey of experiencing the close presence of God through the gift of prayer and contemplation. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand why Teresa of Ávila’s writings on prayer have been celebrated for hundreds of years and the integral connection between a life of contemplation and a life of action.
—Rev. Adam Russell Taylor
Author, A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community
President, Sojourners
Christian mystical experience in the American context includes shimmering testimonies from Ann Lee, Nat Turner, Rufus Jones, Howard Thurmond, Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, and more. Now add the surprising experiences of Laurel Mathewson—a thoroughly postmodern priest, wife, and mother in Southern California—who falls in love with sixteenth-century Spanish saint Teresa of Ávila. Mathewson’s voice is so refreshing one is tempted to guzzle her words—but sip and savor. The voyage of a single soul is more precious than all else. Mathewson invites readers on a candid journey through spiritual wreckage that anyone serious about knowing God will confront. With St. Teresa of Ávila guiding Mathewson, and Mathewson guiding us, we can learn to breathe in the darkness.
—Rose Marie Berger
Author, Bending the Arch: Poems
Senior Editor, Sojourners magazine (sojo.net)
Long recognized as a classic text on the mystical way, The Interior Castle of Teresa of Ávila can seem remote and impenetrable to the contemporary reader. Not so for this author, who engages Teresa as an experienced guide and teacher. By chronicling her own spiritual journey with a disarming candor that reflects Teresa’s own transparency, Laurel Mathewson opens the way for readers to find their own story embedded in those “dwelling places” with God whose contours Teresa knows so well. This is, above all, a helpful book for spiritual seekers no matter their starting point along the inner path.
—The Reverend Julia M. Gatta, PhD
Bishop Frank A. Juhan Professor of Pastoral Theology
The School of Theology, The University of the South, Sewanee, TN
Author, Life in Christ: Practicing Christian Spirituality and The Nearness of God: Parish Ministry as Spiritual Practice
An Intimate Good gracefully merges St. Teresa of Ávila’s timeless wisdom with Laurel Mathewson’s thought-provoking insights, creating a profoundly inspiring guide for skeptical and deconstructing Christians. This beautifully crafted book offers a trustworthy roadmap through the vast terrains of the spiritual journey, encouraging transformative self-discovery and a deeper connection with the Divine. A captivating exploration that leaves an indelible mark on the heart, An Intimate Good is a must-read for those seeking a more meaningful understanding of their faith.
—Rev. Brandan Robertson
Pastor and Author, Dry Bones and Holy Wars: A Call for Social and Spiritual Renewal
Laurel Mathewson offers an intimate and contemporary inquiry into Teresa of Ávila’s life and spiritual journey. Many who seek a deeper knowing have heard of the saint of Ávila, yet relatively few have walked Teresa’s way for years and years, journeying closer and deeper into the heart of God. Those who abide in the journey will, at turns, discover frustration, enlightenment, muteness, surprise, boredom, ecstasy, doubt, confirmation, and more. The author describes her own experience of persistently walking alongside Teresa, supported and accompanied by the divine presence. Readers of this book will meet wonder, joy, the desert, and a deeper and more expansive knowing of God and self. Teresa’s journey is both contemporary and ancient, and her wisdom a bountiful gift for our season.
—Katharine Jefferts Schori
Former Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church of the United States
There seems to be an invitation afoot to unfurl our hand, unclench our fist, release the stormy first draft of how we see God, how we think about religion and spirituality. Through the depth of Laurel’s hike, her wrestle, her honesty, and the intimacy of her conversation with St. Teresa of Ávila, we are invited to re-member, re-story and wonder anew. An Intimate Good is the book I want to read when I’m wrestling with my faith. This is a book I want more of.
—Felicia Murrell
Author, And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World
- Title: An Intimate Good: A Skeptical Christian Mystic in Conversation with Teresa of Avila
- Authors: Jim Wallis, Laurel Mathewson
- Publisher: Whitaker House
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9798887690919, 9798887690902
- Resource ID: LLS:9798887690919
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-01T13:46:24Z
Laurel Mathewson was born and raised in Oregon, where she received a lasting love for the natural world, rural communities, and social justice. She graduated with honors from Stanford University, where she found her intellectual passion in the intersections of literature and landscape, faith and politics, and social transformation—as well as a life partner in her now-husband, Colin. In her existential and vocational quest after losing her mother to cancer at the age of twenty-one, Laurel worked in academia, in media (as an editorial assistant at Sojourners in Washington, D.C., with founder Jim Wallis), and in ministry. Finally landing in a dual vocation as a writer and a Christian minister, Laurel and her husband headed to seminary and were ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church in 2013. Their current church, St. Luke’s, is a multicultural community in San Diego where the Lord’s prayer might be heard in English, Arabic, or Swahili, depending on the Sunday. Laurel is the editor of the forthcoming book The Interior Castle: Exploring a Spiritual Classic as a Modern Reader. She has written award-winning work for Sojourners magazine, Geez magazine, and The Christian Century. As an “elder millennial” mother and pastor, Laurel is passionate about preaching, teaching, pondering the ever-surprising love of God with a diverse and multi-generational audience of serious skeptics and serious believers, parenting her two young children, ocean swimming, and well-made cookies. Her essential vocation, in the end, is as an interpreter: of texts, traditions, and contemporary experience; between Catholic and Protestant strands of Christianity; and between seemingly incongruous or unintelligible perspectives, even across the centuries.