Happy Feast Day of St. Teresa of Jesus!
The lofty heights of mystical prayer attained by this great Mistress of Prayer, the Carmelite Foundress so venerated by St. Alphonsus, shows us what great rewards awaits us even on this earth if we only cooperate selflessly and generously with the grace of the present moment and practice self-abnegation and penance, all the while abandoning ourselves to prayer and to childlike confidence in Divine Providence, and being faithful always to the duties of our state.
We are all called to the apices of the interior life, as illustrated by St. Teresa of Jesus today, since we are all called to the Beatific Vision, the unending possession of God in clarity of vision and plenitude of charity so long as God is God.
As Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange explains (The Three Ways of the Spiritual Life. London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1938):To understand what our interior life is in itself and in its various phases, we must consider it not merely in its seed, but in its full and complete development. Now, if we ask the Gospel what our interior life is, it tells us that the life of grace, given to us in Baptism and nourished by the Eucharist, is the seed or germ of eternal life.
According to St. Matthew's account of the Sermon on the Mount, preached by Christ at the beginning of His ministry, our Lord says to His hearers (and it is the burden of the whole of His discourse): "Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." He does not say: "Be ye as perfect as the angels,"' but "as your heavenly Father is perfect" (S. Matt. cap. v., 48). It follows, therefore, that Christ brings to men a principle of life which is a participation of the very life of God. Immeasurably above the various kingdoms of nature: the mineral kingdom, the vegetable, the animal kingdom, and even above the kingdom of man and above the natural activity of the angels, is the life of the kingdom of God. And this life in its full development is called, not the future life -- of which even the better among the pre-Christian philosophers spoke-but eternal life; a life measured, like that of God, not by future time, but by the one instant of motionless eternity.
From The Missal According to the Carmelite Rite in Latin and English for Every Day in the Year (Rome: Vatican Polyglot Press, 1953), here is the Mass for the Feast of Saint Teresa of Jesus, proper to the Carmelites.