I did not mean to love St. Teresa of Avila. I was in love with her protégé, St. John of the Cross. These two sixteenth century Spanish Carmelites succeeded in putting words around the ineffable, speaking the unspeakable, and pointing the path through the pathless wilderness to union with God. But they had done so in strikingly distinct ways. While John’s mystical passion was grounded in a silence that appealed to my own contemplative nature, I had always been suspicious of Teresa’s flamboyant raptures.

But then my fourteen-year-old daughter Jenny was killed in a car accident and everything changed.

It was late October of 2001 in the mountains of northern New Mexico. The deliveryman had just rumbled down our dirt drive and handed me the first advance copy of my new translation of Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross. Although I had been excited about the impending publication of my first book, I hardly glanced at it. I was distracted. My daughter had been missing since the night before when she had driven away in my truck and disappeared. Jenny had entered an altered state following Durga Puja at our local ashram a couple of days before and her behavior had been erratic ever since.

The Dark Night of the Soul. The quintessential teachings on the mystical crisis of radical unknowing. The stripping away of all we have ever believed and relied upon about God. The terrible beautiful medicine that lies in the emptiness when all else has been stripped away. I thought I knew about this state.

That day, our house was filled with friends and family members. We had search parties scanning our high desert valley in all directions. An extraordinary circle of support had formed around us, intent upon finding my daughter and bringing her home to me. A half an hour after the delivery of my book, two State police officers arrived. My mother answered the door and the police asked for me.

“Come in,” I said.

Scanning the crowd, they said, “Actually, we’d like to speak to you in private.”

Assuming Jenny had gotten into trouble, I stepped onto the porch, prepared to defend my child like a mother bear, and then bring her home and try to come up with some logical consequences. Filled with dread, I said, “I’d like my mom to be with me.”

When we had closed the door behind us, the younger officer said, “We’ve found your daughter.”

The relief flooded me like a drug. The anguish of unknowing was over. Now I could rest in knowing again. “Oh, good!” I said. “Where is she?”

“She’s been in an accident,” he answered.

Okay, I coached myself. I can deal with this. Visions of my beautiful brown girl with her legs in a cast and her head bandaged, blinking at me sheepishly under the glaring lights of Holy Cross Hospital, filled my mind. I kept my voice calm, exuded maternal competence. “Take me to her,” I commanded.

The two policemen glanced at each other, then at my mother. Finally, they looked at me. “She’s passed away,” said the young officer.

In that moment, in that second, everything I had ever been taught about the meaning of life or the spiritual path was consumed in flash of fire. I collapsed into my mother’s arms, but I could not feel her holding me. A woman made of ash, I was transported to the funeral home to identify the body of my beloved child. This is when the inner work for which I had been preparing since I was Jenny’s age began.

I had already signed a contract with my publisher to translate St. Teresa’s Interior Castle. Not because I was especially drawn to the drama queen saint, but because, in the process of translating her devoted disciple, John, I quickly saw that it was on the shoulders of this spiritual giant that he was standing. In the wake of my daughter’s death, I briefly considered canceling the project, but a gentle voice beyond language urged me to stay with it.

Unable even to make a sandwich or sweep the hallway, I sat at my desk every day and translated the dense prose of Teresa’s early Renaissance Spain, seeking to lighten and brighten the language, blow out the cobwebs so that the teachings would be accessible to regular people like me. My husband had converted Jenny’s room into an office for me, so I was surrounded by her memory and more than that: a palpable presence of a being who had recently been my daughter and had suddenly become what the ancient wisdom traditions refer to as my “ancestor.”

And there was another presence in that room with me as I scanned the dictionary for the right language to express the inexpressible. Santa Teresa de Avila. I began to sense her playing around the edges of my grief, like the unexpected aroma of fresh green herbs in a parched desert landscape, or a warm breeze in the winter. Before long, Teresa was looming over my desk, breathing into my breathless body, massaging my paralyzed hand, guiding my word choices and affirming them. Not in any literal way. I am not a medium. I am a writer who loves the mystics, and a grieving mother who needed something meaningful to do or I would die.

By spending hour after hour paging through Saint Teresa’s description of the stages of the spiritual journey, I began to experience her holding me gently in my loss, helping me to bear the unbearable. The path she pointed to led within. She gave no easy prescription for spiritual awakening or release from suffering. Rather, like the Buddha, she continuously urged me to cultivate my own liberation with diligence. Each step was a step deeper into the wilderness of unknowing, the only world I could trust. The only place that felt real.

And yet, unlike her masterful friend, John of the Cross, Teresa’s was not a stark and austere set of teachings. Rather, she introduced light into the dark night of the soul. She added sweet juice to the emptiness of separation from God. She sparked my long-dormant yearning so that I joined her in an unquenchable thirst for union. Because union with the Beloved meant the dissolution of the self. And if the self dissolved, there would be nobody left to be separated from my daughter.

As it turned out, things were not so simple. Just as I had been disappointed to discover that a spiritual path I had begun with deadly earnestness at fourteen had not resulted in enlightenment by sixteen, I was to find that translating the masterwork of one of the greatest mystics of all times was not going to automatically deliver me from myself into the formlessness of the Divine. I still had to show up and do the hard work of grieving.

Which I did. (And which I continue to do.) Every day, a hundred times a day, I leaned into the hot wind of my pain and put one breath in front of the other. It did not always feel possible. It was like breathing under water. But Teresa helped me to soften, to drop all expectations and ideas about what is natural and appropriate in this life. To face the impossible and not only allow it to be true, but to praise God.

To praise God for all of it. The sweet and easy moments when Divine love pours inexplicably into the broken heart like warm honey into a cup of tea. And the far more common moments of unspeakable agony when I realize yet again that my brilliant daughter will not grow up into the healer she had envisioned herself to be, that the girl would never finish blossoming into the woman she was becoming, that the difficult and fascinating personality that was my Jenny had been snuffed out like a flame, plunging my own life into darkness. To give thanks for those moments, too.

Teresa soothed my soul in more than one way. Hers is a deeply affirming spirituality. In the opening of The Interior Castle, Teresa shares her vision of the soul as an exquisite crystal palace at the center of which dwells the Beloved himself. Addressing her nuns, she asks, “What do you think a place might be like that such a king… would find so delightful?” And then she says, “I myself can come up with nothing as magnificent as the beauty and amplitude of a soul.”

Wracked with remorse about not having been able to save my child, convinced that I had I failed my mission as a mother, I collapsed into a self-hatred so dense that a thousand friends and family members could have lined up to offer me a different reason why Jenny’s death was not my fault and I would not have believed them. But Teresa dismantled the punishing walls I tried to build around my heart. You are beautiful and worthy, she said. The Beloved can’t wait to hold you in his arms.

Not only that. Teresa also reminded me that I am not in charge of directing this show. That God knows what we need and “does not require our opinion on the matter.” That our job is to practice perfect surrender. That our only hope is to lose ourselves in God. The instructions were simple: be still and go within. That center place, where the Beloved dwells, is a place of boundless beauty and immeasurable peace.

The more time I spent with Teresa, the more familiar and available she became to me. It got to the point where I felt like I was spending portions of each day visiting with an eccentric Jewish aunt on my mother’s side. I could hear her Brooklyn accent as I typed. Teresa of Avila came from a converso family. Her grandfather was Jew who had converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition to save the lives of his children. Teresa’s Jewishness, like my own, was hidden. But beneath the habit of a Carmelite nun, the colors of her ancestry bled through. We were of the same family and we recognized each other. I found myself approaching Teresa for guidance and support, even as I composed a translation I hoped would be of some help to this world.

Which is the other thing Teresa gave me: the solace of service. By serving one another, says Teresa, we are serving our Beloved. This is not, she points out, an intellectual matter. It requires action. If your sister is sick, Teresa insists, put down your prayer beads and make her a cup of tea! Teresa’s earthy practicality and humor helped me take myself more lightly when self-pity threatened to consume me. And she reminded me that I am not alone. That I am part of a vast web of lovers of God, all of whom suffer tribulations along the path home to him.

Through loving God and loving one another, Teresa promises, all will be well. Contemplative practice, without any expectation of reward, itself yields ineffable rewards. “In this state of prayer, the Beloved teaches the soul so quietly, so peacefully…” says Teresa. “Here in the Temple of God, in his innermost dwelling place, God and the soul rejoice in each other, in the deepest silence. There is no reason for the mind to be stirred. It has nothing to seek, nothing to find. The Lord who created her is now offering her sanctuary…”

I am not always successful in dropping into the silence and finding sanctuary. Sometimes I even doubt the existence of this Beloved of mine who lures me to his chamber and then brings me to my knees before I can get there. Memories of my daughter fill the horizons of my heart and I ache for her with an intolerable longing. But Teresa has given me the courage not to turn away from the wildness of my grief or clamor for an intellectual foothold. Instead, she coaxes me to rest in the stillness of my own soul. To trust that I am being held in the arms of the One who loves me, even if I can’t always feel it.

Translating the Interior Castle saved my life. It kept me busy during a time when I would have gone crazy without something concrete to do. It gave me intimate access to one of the most brilliant spiritual teachers of all times. It demonstrated that the wisdom teachings in which I had spent my life immersed were only as true as they proved to be after the galvanizing fire of grief and loss.