Rose Baker - St. Teresa and shifting narrative

    I thought that the unintended symbolism behind the differences between St. Teresa of Avila's descriptions of her spiritual encounters and the church artwork based on them was profoundly meaningful. We discussed the addition of the men in the wings, voyeuristically partaking in what Teresa had portrayed as a private, intimate experience. As an inspired work, the artist's own experience of Teresa's ecstasy was inevitably shaped through a form of voyeurism, exchanging the pureness of revelation for something tinged by jealousy, curiosity, and distance. In that light, the addition makes perfect sense. When he read her narrative, he did not encounter it as Teresa lived it — instead, he experienced it through the lens of an outsider, a viewer, someone receiving a distributed account rather than the original moment of divine union.

    The simple act of sharing an experience necessarily redefines it. The story you tell is not the same as the story someone else hears. This is not only because of their biases, assumptions, or different modes of understanding, but because their relationship to the event itself is fundamentally different. They are not participants in the experience but recipients of its retelling. In telling a story, the telling becomes part of the story itself. The shape, tone, and texture of the narrative are influenced by the storyteller’s memory, their emotions at the time of recounting, and the expectations or reactions of their audience. And crucially, once the story is told, it is no longer fully owned by the narrator. It exists in a new form, mediated by the listener’s imagination and their own internal world.

    In the case of Teresa and the artist, the transition from private mystic experience to public artwork captures this shift perfectly. What Teresa lived as something solitary and sacred became, through retelling and reinterpretation, something communal, something witnessed — and thus something altered. The men on the sidelines are not an artistic embellishment; they are the embodiment of the inevitable transformation that occurs whenever an experience is shared. They are proof that once a revelation is spoken or shown, it belongs as much to the world’s interpretations as it does to the original moment itself.