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Saint Teresa of Avila AND SAINT PEDRO OF ALCÁNTARA

SAN PEDRO DE ALCÁNTARA: Mother Teresa had many friendships with this great Franciscan saint and she met several times. He recommended that she found rent-free convents and assured her that she was on the right path. He tells us about him in his book of Life.

This holy man of this time was: he was thick (in) the spirit… He told me and another person… it seems to me it was forty years that he told me he had slept only an hour and a half between night and day, and that this was the greatest work of penitence that he had had in the beginning, of conquering sleep, and for this he was always either on his knees or standing; What he slept was sitting up, and his head leaning against a log that he had nailed to the wall; thrown out, even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, because his cell—as is known—was no longer than four and a half feet. In all these years he never wore the chapel, no matter how great the sun and water he experienced, nor anything on his feet or clothing; but a sackcloth habit, without anything else over the meat, and this as narrow as could be tolerated, and a mulch of the same on top. He told me that in the extreme cold he took it off, and left the door and window of the cell open, so that by later putting on the cloak and closing the door, he would satisfy his body, so that it would rest with more shelter. Eating on the third day was very ordinary; and he told me why I was scared, that it was very possible that someone got used to it. One of his companions told me that he happened to go eight days without eating. He must have been in prayer, because he had great raptures and impulses of love for God, of which I once witnessed.

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His poverty was extreme and mortification in his youth, that he told me that it had happened to him to spend three years in a house of his Order and not know a friar, except by speech; because he never raised his eyes, and so he did not know where he needed to go, but he went after the friars. This happened to him on the roads. He never looked at women; this many years; He told me that he was no longer good at seeing than not seeing; but he was very old when I came to know him, and his weakness was so extreme that he seemed nothing more than made of tree roots.

With all this holiness he was very affable, although of few words, except by asking questions. In these he was very tasty, because he had a very nice understanding… It was the end of him like life, preaching and admonishing his friars. As he saw it was already ending, he said the psalm “Laetatus sum in his quae dicta sunt mihi” (I have rejoiced in what I have been told: Ps 121, 1) and, kneeling on his knees, he died…

Hele (I have) seen him many times with great glory. The first one that appeared to me told me what a blessed penance I had deserved so much reward and many other things. A year before he died, he appeared to me while I was absent (in bilocation in the fall of 1561) and I knew he was going to die, and I told him, being a few leagues away from here. When he expired, he appeared to me and told how he was going to rest. I did not believe it, and I told it to some people, and eight days later the news came how he was dead, or began to live forever 63.
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