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January 30 - February 6, 2024
My years in Carmel have taught me one thing: when God asks us to sacrifice the normal joys of living, it is only that He may give us a higher and holier joy. Living with God alone in the solitude of Carmel has proved sweeter far to me than all the pleasure and fickle applause of the world.
but my years in Carmel’s solitude have taught me that one does not have to be visible and physically present to ease the burdens of an anguished world.
“In oblivion forgotten, My head resting on my Beloved, Lost to all things and myself, There among the lilies All my cares I cast away.”
We can lessen even the feeling of pain, disappointment and many other disagreeable things by cheerful conformity of our will to the will of God.
It must be a joy to Him to find one who loves His will just precisely because it is His.
After all, our perfection is His work, although we can interfere with it and refuse to let Him work in us. Without our consent His hands are tied. As Saint Augustine has put it: “He who made you without your co-operation will not save you without it.”
Saint John of the Cross says that “God exercises more power in sanctifying a single soul than He did in creating the world, for in creating the world He met with no opposition.”
This means that you are to endure with meekness and love, in imitation of Our Lord, something you do not like.
“My God, I love You, and I do this simply for the love of You.” She added, “Never forget, Cecelia, if you but dry a dish and do it for the love of God, it could be worth more than a martyrdom endured through self-love.”
Everyone is bothered at times, with interruptions while in the midst of an absorbing task or interesting book. Here is how Saint Thérèse advised one of her novices about this problem: “When someone knocks at your door, or when you are called, you must practice mortification and refrain from doing even one additional stitch before answering. I have practiced this myself and I assure you that it is a source of much peace.” The Saint advised the novice to imagine the knock came from Our Lord, Himself.
Saint John of the Cross, speaking of souls acting in union with God, says, “A very little pure love is more precious in the sight of God and of greater profit to the Church than are all [exterior] works together.”
One of the chief reasons we are not all saints is that we so often fail to have a pure intention in the good we perform.
If our assignment is agreeable, how can we do otherwise than find pleasure in it?
I had not yet learned that true prayer does not consist in thinking much, but in loving much; that God listens most to the voice of silent love.
true love consists not in feelings or consolations but in the union of our will with the will of God.
To help me to see only God in superiors and in those under whom I was working, she told me to consider a person at the telephone: how he pays no attention to the instrument before him, but only to the voice coming over the wires.
Before I could find God dwelling deep in my soul, I had to discipline it and empty it of all that did not pertain to Him....”O thou soul,” says Saint John of the Cross, “most beautiful of creatures, who longest to know where thy Beloved is, thou art thyself that very tabernacle where He dwells.”
“The aim of our desire must be not rest, but suffering.”
The Saint of Avila had this final word for her Sisters on the subject of illness: “You who are free from the great troubles of the world, learn to suffer a little for the love of God without everyone’s knowing it.”
“Even the greatest Saints at times expressed to God and complained to Him about the feelings in their troubled souls.”
Our Lord treats His friends with suffering because He wants us to be like Himself.
“Life is to live in such a way as not to be afraid of death.”
He really is most at home in a lonely and loving heart.
In explaining the right use of creatures, our Novice Mistress suggested that we imagine the words “for God alone” stamped on everything that had been given us—whether it was our friends, our cell, or just a book.
He is Our Father, and He will not leave us in want. He has promised, and He always keeps His word, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice and all these things will be added unto you.” If we do our best, no more is expected. We are to live prudently and providently; and above all we are not to be careless with what He gives us. God has always sent us what is needful; if we are what we are supposed to be, He will continue to do so.
A good proof that we are truly poor in spirit is this: if, while desiring for ourselves nothing except God’s love and His grace, we can at the same time sincerely rejoice over His gifts to others as if they were our own. Saint Gertrude formed the habit of thanking God for His gifts to others, and one day Our Lord revealed to her that whenever she did this He gave her spiritual gifts equal to the blessings she had praised Him for giving others.
Saint John of the Cross had this in mind when in his Spiritual Maxims he wrote, “Whether it be a strong cable or a slender, delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not, if it really detains it; for until the cord be broken the bird cannot fly. So the soul, held in the bonds of human attachments, however slight they may be, cannot, while they last, fly upwards to God.”
Someone has said that in this Mystical Body of which Christ is the head, “Carmel functions as the heart.”
Carmel is like the hem of Our Lord’s garment, and just to touch the hem in faith seems to help the one who makes the contact.
Saint Teresa of Avila said, “Solicitude for the welfare of souls extends itself to every type of apostolate! Always use all kinds of ingenuity and tact to lead souls back to God and closer to Him. Your whole life of prayer has to be lived for the profit of souls.”
“Neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives growth.” Prayer and penance are the abiding source of this growth.
The more we think of God, the more we yearn for souls to give Him.
My whole longing then was, and it still is, that since He [Christ] has so many enemies and so few friends, the friends should at least be good ones.
I hoped that if all of us spend our time in prayer for those who defend the Church,....we would be able better to help this Lord of mine who is so grievously oppressed by those for whom He has done so much good.
As we grow in the love of God, we realize that this love cannot be idle. It must expand itself and communicate itself to those who do not enjoy it or who do not know about it.
and I think He prizes one soul which of His mercy we have gained for Him by our prayer and labor more than all the service we may render Him.”
The love we have for God and the love we have for our neighbors are inseparable virtues.
“That through solitude, penance and prayer it might increase the Catholic faith and procure conversions of non-Catholics; and in order also that God would deign to give the Church holy, learned and zealous priests.”
“Apostle, Carmelite, it is all one. While you carry Him to souls, I, like Magdalen, will stay close to the Master in silent adoration, asking Him to render your word fruitful in souls.”
Please, then, let those who are very active and who hope to hold the world in their hands because of their preaching and their external activities understand that they would do more service to the Church and would please God more—to say nothing of the good example they would give—if they would spend even half of that time in being with God in prayer, even though they did not experience it in such a high degree as contemplatives.
Much of the high tension and neurosis, all too common in our day, could be eliminated if each person in the world were to spend the first hour of the day in silent prayer.
Every Carmelite finds her delight in isolation; she never tires of being alone. Silence and solitude—these are, I have discovered, necessary elements of the purest spirit of Carmel.
Any one who desires to belong to God will hear His voice; whether you are in your factory or office or in your kitchen, you can, if you will try, rise above the restlessness of created things and enter the silent desert of your heart and there hear the calm, consoling whisper of Our Lord.
Since useless talk leads to dissipation, we admonish the novice never to speak merely for her own sake or for her own gratification; or, as Edward Leen says so forcefully, “never [to] speak to satisfy an impulse, but solely for the glory of God, for the right accomplishment of duty, for the promotion of truth, for the exercise of charity, for the comfort of the sorrowful and for the purpose of brightening the lives of one’s fellows.”
Silence is not an end in itself; it is a means, along with solitude, of being recollected. It is an aid to concentration and to love. To be recollected, ordinarily, means that one is silent, and one must be recollected in order to pray.
“there is another cloister—the enclosure of each Carmelite’s heart.”
Our Blessed Lord advanced in wisdom and in grace in the silent, hidden obscurity of Nazareth.
In this, as in everything else, the Carmelite nun tries to model her life on that of her Beloved, Who was born in the silence of midnight in the quiet of a cave, Who lived in the silence of Nazareth, and Who died while His silent mother looked on.
Saint Gregory says, “A person given to much talk will never make any great progress in virtue.”
As the Imitation of Christ says, “in silence and quiet the devout soul goeth forward and learneth the secrets of the Scriptures.” “In silence...shall your strength be.”
