This four-year labor of love is now out in the world! Order yours today by clicking here.

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.

A readable Interior Castle! Order today by clicking here.

Teresa of Avila was a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun who was committed to a life of contemplative prayer. Beloved for both her deep spiritual insights and practical approach to life, her writings are considered spiritual classics, and The Interior Castle is widely recognized as her literary masterpiece. To read The Interior Castle is to put yourself in the hands of an extraordinarily qualified faith mentor who well understands our struggles to connect with God.

Teresa’s primary metaphor throughout this work is that the human soul is an “interior castle,” or a series of “dwelling places,” of great grandeur, beauty, and value. Her book is a tour of the different ways we relate to God through prayer, with varying intensity, awareness, and intimacy, culminating with spiritual unity with God.

Many books on prayer are about what we do to pray, or to pray better. But there are relatively few, like The Interior Castle, that focus on what God does in prayer—particularly the sometimes inexplicable ways God gives us experiences of love, healing, strength, insight, companionship, and knowledge of God’s presence in, and will for, our lives.

In this new edition of The Interior Castle, editor Laurel Mathewson, author of An Intimate Good: A Skeptical Christian Mystic in Conversation with Teresa of Avila, brings this renowned spiritual leader into clear focus for contemporary readers while modernizing the text to include shorter paragraphs, simpler sentence structure, and updated vocabulary. It features an introduction to St. Teresa and her work, chapter introductions and summaries, brief footnotes for additional information and clarity, and questions for reflection. Mathewson encourages us to be open to the ways in which Teresa’s “experiences and writings still shed light on things that happen in our world, so different from hers in so many ways but still filled with human beings struggling to be in relationship with one another and God.”