“Carmelite Thought for the Day! Our word for the journey today comes from Saint Teresa Margaret Redi OCD. Anna Maria Redi was born on 15 July, 1747 to a large, loving Catholic family in Arezzo, Italy. She entered Carmel in Florence on September 1, 1764 a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday taking the name Teresa Margaret of the Heart of Jesus. Teresa Margaret had a rich, active interior life, she resolved to remain hidden which earned her the title ‘Saint of the hidden life’, she kept her gifts and graces hidden from all but her Lord while appearing quite ordinary to the world. Theresa Margaret lived only four years after her Profession.
One Sunday in choir, Teresa Margaret was given a particular grace to understand the deep meaning of the love of God. While the community was reciting Terce, the words “Deus caritus est” (God is Love, I John 4:8) were read and it seemed to her she heard them for the first time. She was flooded with an elevated understanding of these words that seemed to be a new revelation. Despite the fact that she tried carefully to hide this sudden grace, all around her were aware something out of the ordinary had happened. These words occasioned a mystical experience which transformed her knowledge of God. Sister Teresa Margaret of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, died on the 7th of March, 1770, in the twenty-third year of her age, and the fourth year of her religious profession.
Thirty-five years later, on June 21, 1805, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, the incorrupt body of St. Teresa Margaret was transferred to the nuns’ choir in the Carmel of Florence where it remains to this day.”
- the above from the Facebook page of the Carmelite nuns of Preston, England
