Recogimiento

In sixteenth-century Castile, under the watchful eye of the Inquisition, a quiet movement emerged among Franciscan friars and ordinary laypeople --- a practice of interior prayer called recogimiento, or recollection. It asked something radical: that a person turn away from the noise of a watched and pressured world and go inward, toward a place where God waited in silence. It shaped Teresa of vila and John of the Cross, and its most enduring claim was not mystical but deeply human --- that the soul's interior is not under anyone's jurisdiction but its own.