adapted from the

Interior Castle of St. Teresa of Jesus of Avila

confessions, good books and sermons, for these are the remedies for a soul dead in negligences and sins and frequently plunged into temptation. The soul begins to live and nourishes itself on this food, and on good meditations, until it is full grown. Here, then, you see what we can do, with God's favor. Let us hasten to perform this task and spin this cocoon. Let us renounce our self-love and self-will, and our inordinate attachments to earthly things. Let us practice penance, prayer, mortification, obedience, and all the other good works that you know of. Let the silkworm die -- let it die, as in fact it does when it has completed the work which it was created to do. Then we shall see God and shall ourselves be as completely hidden in His greatness as is this little worm in its cocoon.

You will have heard of the wonderful way in which silk is made -- a way which no one could invent but God -- and how it comes from a kind of seed which looks like tiny peppercorns When the warm weather comes, and the mulberry-trees begin to show leaf, this seed starts to take life; until it has this sustenance, on which it feeds, it is as dead. The silkworm feeds on the mulberry-leaves until it is full-grown, then it starts to spin its silk and to build the house in which it is to die. This house may be understood here to mean Christ. The silkworm is like the soul which takes life when, through the heat which comes from the Holy Spirit, it begins to utilize the general help which God gives to us all, and to make use of the remedies which He left in His Church -- such as frequent

And now let us see what becomes of this silkworm, for all that I have been saying about it is leading up to this. Then, finally, the worm, which was large and ugly*, Click Here