08/24/2026
The Shoeless Nuns
August 24, 1562 — Teresa of Ávila Tries Something Different
Teresa wanted to pray. This should have been fairly easy. She was a nun. She lived in a convent. Prayer was kind of the whole thing. But Teresa of Ávila had discovered an unfortunate truth about getting away from the distractions of the world: You bring yourself with you.
And Teresa liked people. A lot. She liked talking. She liked laughing. She liked knowing what was going on. People liked being around her, and Teresa liked being around them.
Which was becoming a problem. Because she had become a nun to spend her life seeking God, and somehow she had ended up with a fairly active social calendar.
She was forty-seven years old. She had already been doing this for more than twenty-five years. And she was beginning to wonder: What if we tried something different?
Teresa had always been a little intense. When she was a girl, she loved stories about saints and martyrs so much that she and her brother Rodrigo decided to run away from home and become martyrs themselves. She was about seven.
Most seven-year-olds run away because someone won't give them another cookie. Teresa was headed toward Muslim territory hoping to die for Jesus. An uncle caught them and brought them home. This was probably good parenting.
But the story tells you something about her. Teresa didn't do things halfway.
She loved stories. She liked clothes. She liked being admired. She loved her friends. She had a huge imagination and a restless heart.
Her mother died when Teresa was thirteen.
At twenty, against her father's wishes, Teresa entered the Carmelite Monastery of the Incarnation outside Ávila.
She was looking for God.
It turned out to be a much longer search than she expected.
Teresa became terribly sick. At one point she was unconscious for days and everyone thought she was dying.
She survived, but her health never completely recovered.
Her spiritual life wasn't especially tidy either.
She wanted God. Then she didn't pray.
Then she felt guilty about not praying.
Then she prayed because she felt guilty.
Then she got distracted.
Then she felt guilty about being distracted.
Which, if you've ever tried to have a spiritual life, may sound familiar.
For years she stopped and started. She wanted God and was simultaneously very good at avoiding God.
Slowly, Teresa began learning that prayer wasn't about becoming impressive at prayer. God wasn't waiting for a better version of Teresa to finally show up.
He kept meeting this one.
Sick.
Distracted.
Restless.
Trying again.
Then Teresa began having experiences with God she didn't quite know what to do with.
Deep prayer.
Visions.
Moments when Jesus seemed startlingly close.
And she didn't immediately trust any of it.
Which I like about her.
Teresa didn't have one intense spiritual experience and immediately start a podcast. She questioned herself. She talked to people she trusted. She wondered if she was imagining things. But the experiences continued.
Slowly, Jesus became less like the subject of Teresa's religion and more like someone she actually knew. Someone she loved. A friend.
And once that happened, she began wanting fewer things between them.
That brought her back to the convent.
The Monastery of the Incarnation was enormous. At times, something like 150 women lived there. And 150 people can complicate pretty much anything. There were wealthy nuns and poor nuns. Private rooms.
Visitors.
Servants.
Social expectations.
The outside world had followed them through the monastery doors.
This didn't make them bad nuns.
Teresa loved many of these women. She wasn't standing in the hallway thinking, “Apparently I am the only person here who understands Christianity.”
Her question was more personal.
“What did I come here for?”
She had come looking for Jesus.
And then she began imagining a life with fewer things competing for her attention. A little house. A handful of women. No special treatment because someone's family had money.
Prayer.
Work.
Silence.
Friendship.
Laughter.
Enough food.
Enough sleep.
Enough stuff.
And then get on with the reason you came.
The idea began taking shape in conversations with friends. What if they actually did it? Not reform the entire Carmelite order. Not complain about everything that was wrong. Just find a little house and try living differently.
Teresa couldn't stop thinking about it.
Then mystical spirituality ran directly into real estate.
They needed a house.
And money.
And permission.
And people willing to live there.
And officials willing to let them.
Apparently even a divinely inspired simplification project eventually requires paperwork.
Teresa wanted the community to live without a large permanent income.
Simple.
Dependent.
Poor.
Some people in Ávila thought this sounded less like spiritual renewal and more like four women the city would eventually have to feed.
Her fellow Carmelites weren't thrilled either. If Teresa needed a new convent to live properly, what exactly did that say about everyone staying in the old one? It got awkward.
Still, Teresa kept going.
Her sister Juana and brother-in-law helped acquire a house.
There were objections.
Delays.
Meetings.
More objections.
Teresa kept working.
She wasn't trying to create a harsher Christianity. She had spent enough years trying hard at religion. She wanted a simpler one.
Even the shoes became simpler.
The women would eventually become known as the Discalced Carmelites—basically, the shoeless Carmelites. They weren't actually barefoot all the time. They wore simple sandals. Teresa wasn't declaring war on footwear.
The shoes were saying something.
We don't need much.
No competition over possessions.
No carrying the social ladder of Ávila into the convent and pretending it belonged there.
No special arrangements for the wealthy sisters.
Just enough.
And then get on with the reason you came.
And it was on this day in history, August 24, 1562, that Teresa's little experiment began. Four women entered the new convent of St. Joseph in Ávila.
Antonia de Henao.
María de la Paz.
Úrsula de los Santos.
María de Ávila.
Four women whose names are easy to lose because Teresa is the one history remembers.
But Teresa couldn't create a community by herself. They had to say “yes” too.
The house had little money.
The project had plenty of opposition.
There wasn't even a guarantee they would be allowed to stay.
And still they came.
They were willing to try it together.
Mass was celebrated.
A bell rang.
Four women began a new life.
Teresa was thrilled.
Then everybody found out.
Ávila was not thrilled.
City officials objected.
A convent without guaranteed income seemed irresponsible.
There were demands that it be closed.
Teresa's Carmelite superiors ordered her back to the Monastery of the Incarnation.
Which meant Teresa had finally created the community she had dreamed about...and wasn't allowed to live there.
So she waited.
She answered questions.
Sat through meetings.
Defended the convent.
Probably prayed a lot.
Probably got distracted while praying.
Probably started again.
And the little house survived.
Eventually Teresa was allowed to move in. And something rather wonderful happened. She was happy. Not mystical-vision happy. Ordinary happy. There were five of them now, living in a little house where nobody had much of anything. They prayed together and cooked together. They swept floors, hauled water, shared meals, and learned all the small things you eventually learn about people when there is nowhere else to go.
Who talks in the morning.
Who doesn't.
Who worries.
Who makes everybody laugh.
Who needs someone to sit beside her when the day has gone badly.
Teresa had wanted a simpler life with Jesus. What she found was that she wanted these women too. Not just nuns living beside one another. Friends. Sisters. People who could remind one another why they had come when one of them inevitably forgot.
And they laughed. That mattered to Teresa. She had no interest in creating a house full of gloomy women trying to out-holy one another. Life with God, she was discovering, did not have to make you less alive.
Apparently other women noticed. Because they started wanting in. And this created a new problem for Teresa. The woman who wanted a small, quiet life now had to leave her small, quiet house and start more of them.
So off she went. Across Spain. In wagons. Over roads that were barely roads.
Through heat, cold, mud, illness, arguments, negotiations, and the surprisingly large amount of paperwork required to convince people that you are trying to live simply.
She bought houses.
Opened convents.
Argued with officials.
Wrote letters.
Got sick.
Got better.
Kept going.
With John of the Cross, the reform spread among Carmelite men as well. There was resistance—sometimes fierce resistance. John was even imprisoned by fellow Carmelites.
This was no longer four women in sandals.
Something was growing.
And somewhere between the wagons, convents, illnesses, arguments, and prayer, Teresa did something else. She wrote. She wrote about God the way someone writes after discovering that the spiritual life is considerably messier than advertised. She wrote about distraction because she had been distracted.
About doubt because she had doubted.
About prayer because she had struggled to pray.
About friendship with Jesus because, somewhere along the way, that was what Christianity had become for her.
Her Way of Perfection and Interior Castle would become classics of Christian spirituality. There is a lovely bit of irony in that. The woman who spent years wondering whether she was any good at prayer eventually became one of Christianity's great teachers on prayer. Not bad for the girl whose first religious plan involved running away from home at seven to get herself martyred. She had learned a few things since then.
But go back to August 24, 1562.
Before the books.
Before the convents scattered across Spain.
Before anyone knew where this was going.
There was just a little house in Ávila. And five women.
Teresa had spent more than half her life trying very hard to find God. Now, at forty-seven, she wanted something simpler. Jesus. Enough quiet to notice him. And people she loved beside her.
History remembers Teresa because history usually remembers the name attached to the movement. But Teresa didn't do this alone. Four other women looked at her strange little idea and, in one way or another, said: All right. We'll try it with you.
So they shared a house.
A table.
Their work.
Their prayers.
Their lives.
And some pretty unimpressive shoes.
They didn't have much.
That was kind of the idea.
