The Importance Of Companionship With God

The many companions Teresa of Avila had over her lifetime is something to be viewed as a double edged sword. In The Life of St. Teresa, she herself reveals the inner workings of these friendships and how external influence threatened to interfere the freedom that her connection with God brought her. She contemplates the path she has traveled, wrought with companionship both toward fellow man and God. As she contemplates she grapples with themes of divine fate, free will, and positive and negative influences experienced over a lifetime. Through this contemplation there arises a clear link between the soul 's relationship with God and the resulting freedom that flourishes. In this paper I will argue that companionship with God is the only friendship

Teresa, 23). This natural sway toward evil and frivolity reveals that indifference toward our relationship with God is directly an indifference toward the free, good will of your soul. Indifference and inaction cannot truly free you. It only corrupts. Soughers supports the idea that “the type of friendship that the culture advocated, based as it was on ideals of kinship and honor, was not only inadequate, it could actually interfere with a person’s relationship with God.” (Soughers, 173). This relies on the assumption that culturally we do not view our free will and our relationship with god as a single entity. This helps us to understand where the unassuming evil is allowed in. It reveals that it is not enough that we simply do not mean to enslave ourselves. We become so distracted by frivolities that we do not recognize the interference that has grown in between what surrounds us and our relationship with our internal divinity. Even relationships involved with external forms of worship could cause an interference if they lack any form of consideration toward a contemplative, personal relationship with God. Soughers claims