CONFERENCE TO THE DISCALCED CARMELITE NUNS OF U.S.A.
Oklahoma City, March 19-20, 2011
This is my first time meeting Carmel in the United States. Everything is new to me: the faces, names, houses, environment… I’m sure the Teresian Carmel has a particular physiognomy in this geographical area, that numbers three Provinces of friars, four Associations of nuns (with 47 monasteries that follow the Constitutions of 1991 [nineteen-ninety one] and eighteen monasteries that follow the ones of 1990 [nineteen-ninety]). There is also the presence of a large and vibrant Carmelite Secular Order.
We know that the first Discalced Carmelites to lay foot in this region were the three friars who had accompanied the Spanish explorer and diplomat Sebastián Vizcaíno, during his expedition to California in 1602-1603 (sixteen hundred and two – sixteen hundred and three). One of them, Fr Antonio of the Ascension, has left a report and maps of their journey. It was during this journey that the bay of Monterey was discovered. The place names of that region still offer us today various traces of the Carmelite presence of that group of first explorers (Carmel Valley, Carmel River, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Carmel Mission, where the Franciscan, blessed Junípero Serra, apostle of California, died). But the true and proper origin of Carmel in the United States dates back to 1790, when the first house was founded. It was the monastery of Hoogstraeten in Holland that founded the Carmel of Port Tobacco (later transferred to Baltimore), that in the nineteenth century gave origin to other foundations: Saint Louis in 1863 (eighteen sixty three), New Orleans in 1877 (eighteen seventy seven) and Boston in 1890 (eighteen ninety). The monastery of San Antonio (Texas) was also founded around this time, in 1853 (eighteen fifty three), by some monasteries of Mexico. Looking at these dates, we notice that the Order in this country expanded a lot mainly in the first half of the twentieth century, more or less till the second Vatican Council. This is common also to the Carmel in Western Europe, with the difference that in Europe the history dates back three centuries. We can say that Carmel in the United States is a twentieth century Carmel, that had its growth in the pre-Conciliar decades, and had a rapid growth in the years that followed immediately after the Second Vatican Council.
As happens quite often, you, Sisters, present me with many questions regarding the carmelite and teresian identity, formation, unity in diversity of interpretation of our charism, new and practical juridical problems that come up due to lack of vocations and ageing of our communities. In fact, of course, it is I who should like to put many questions to the Carmel that speaks “American English”, that lives in the most powerful country of the world at the political and economic level, whose social and cultural changes have preceded and influenced the evolution of all other nations. I would certainly need much more time to come to know this part of our Order well: I should be visiting your houses, listen possibly to each and every one, young or not so young, little or great, and especially I should know your language better, as also your geography, your history, the life of your Church that in recent years has gone through much suffering. For the moment, however, I have to be satisfied only having “a bird’s eye view” of this reality; I must make more space in my mind and heart, filling my memory with words, sounds and images on which to meditate. During these days, therefore, I should be pleased to hold a dialogue with you, a dialogue that will help us in mutual understanding. Together with Fr John Grennan, I will try to answer your queries; but that, not so much to “instruct” you with authority, as to present to you in a fraternal way my experience, thus soliciting an engagement with your experience. In this sense, the answers to your questions should come not only from me or from Fr John, but also from you and from all the work that we shall be doing together during these days.
1. Identity and its requirements
The first group of questions concern your charismatic identity, the way of being authentic followers of our Holy Mother St. Teresa in the world of today, the task of interpreting your vocation and presenting it to the men and women of our times in a meaningful way. These are topics that are continuously touched upon in our meetings and discussions. I remember, for example, that Fr Luis Aróstegui, my predecessor, has dealt with the topic “The Meaning of the contemplative life in the Teresian Carmel” at the meeting of the Federations-Associations of Discalced Carmelite Nuns from Europe and the Holy Land in February 2009 . In this important intervention he outlined the distinction between the contemplative ideal and the forms in which the feminine contemplative vocation has expressed itself historically. In fact, it is not possible to make a reinterpretation which would bring about the “opportune renewal” recommended by the Second Vatican Council, without making a distinction between the perennial contents and the historical form, between the centre and the periphery, between what is essential and what is only accessory. Fr Luis was tracing the contemplative vocation back to its twofold origin, evangelical and charismatic, linking it, therefore, with the Christian life as such and with the rich original experience of Teresa; on the other hand, Fr Luis was stressing the influence of two basic and historical conditionings in forming the contemplative life: the traditional vision of woman and the typical mentality of the Tridentine reform (and of the Spanish monarchy). No doubt today we are called to propose the teresian contemplative vocation in an altogether different cultural context both as regards the condition of woman and the reform of the Church and its relation with the world. However, at the heart of that vocation remains an intense love for Jesus Christ, lived in a community that is small and poor, but capable of embracing – precisely through a profound relation with Jesus Christ – the whole church and the whole human race. It is, therefore, through these positive terms that we need to define the identity of the contemplative vocation rather than in negative terms, like the exclusion of all apostolic or charitable activity and the separation or retirement from the world. Fr Luis says: « In fact, if there isn’t such direct involvement, call it professional, in works of mercy, there should be such a commitment of faith-hope-charity, which not only justifies the absence of active apostolic commitment, but contains in itself the seed of the whole Gospel and shows that it embraces all vocations (St. Therese of Lisieux). A commitment of such spiritual intensity creates its form of contemplative space ».
I wished to quote these words of Fr Luis, because I feel it important to define the form of teresian contemplative life setting out from its “core” or heart, leaving the “body”, that is its external manifestations, to determine itself spontaneously from within. The metaphor of the “contemplative space” means this: the contemplative vocation creates around itself certain material, spatial and temporal conditions, which express it and render it concretely possible in this world. In this sense, there is neither violence nor artificiality, but a kind of “naturalness” and harmony between life and its form, between the end which it aims at and the means which are used, between the meaning that is intended and the signs that communicate it. When your Constitutions speak of the cloister, of “separation from the world” and of “forgoing the most cherished human things” (Const. nº 112), it does not intend to subdue you under the yoke of a norm, but to express the demands of the gift that you have received.
This precise word “gift” is central in defining your identity. At the beginning of your vocation and your way of living there is the precious gift that our Lord Jesus has given to the church and to the world: he wished to express his love towards humanity once again when he called each one of you to an exclusive and spousal love, or to use an adjective dear to the Bible, to a jealous love. The contemplative life is a sign and an existential sacrament of this continually renewed covenant between God and his people. For this reason it is very precious to the church, and consequently we have a great responsibility to receive, guard and strengthen this gift. No human theory can explain and justify such an irrational choice as the one of dedicating one’s whole life to a relationship of love with Jesus Christ. It is a scandal and foolishness to the wisdom of this world, and so it should remain, without mitigation. Its only justification is an action of God, who through his Spirit continues to speak to his creature, saying: «Come then, my love; my lovely one, come with me» (Song of Songs, 2,10). It is precisely this so close and fascinating presence of God that brings him closer to the world: it is eschatology that storms into history and breaks ties with it, or put in a better way, it recreates these ties from above, from the salvific mystery of God. Remember the words of St. Augustine at the beginning of his Confessions (1, 5, 5): «Behold, the ears of my heart are before thee, O Lord; open them and “say to my soul, I am your salvation.” I will hasten after that voice, and I will lay hold upon thee. Hide not thy face from me. Even if I die, let me see thy face lest I die». It is the mystical life of a Christian, the same one that blossomed in the heart of Teresa, from her childhood, when she repeated: «I want to see God», till the end of her life, when she exclaimed: «It is time now, my Spouse, that we see».
2. A modest pedagogical proposal
You have asked me what counsel I can give you so that you remain faithful interpreters of the charism of Teresa in today’s world. My answer is mainly this one: preserve the centrality of the gift that you have received and its demands, or better, the logic of its gratuitousness. Such a gift of particular intimacy with Jesus Christ remains unchanged even with the change of time. As Gaudium et Spes 10 puts it: «beneath all that changes there is much that is unchanging, much that has its ultimate foundation in Christ, who is the same yesterday, and today, and forever». Any project of renewal should find in this stable foundation its criteria of authenticity. It is clear that the logic of the gift of God is not the logic of the world. The prophetic nature of the contemplative vocation is strictly connected to its mystical dimension, as we can see in Teresa herself or in other mystics, from Catherine of Siena to Magdalene de’ Pazzi.
The question that we need to put immediately after is this: how do we keep alive the awareness and appreciation of this gift today? How do we nourish our theologal life of faith, hope and charity? How can we stand, like Elijah, in the presence of the living God and be a prophetic voice for the world? How do we learn to love the world in a just measure, giving oneself to it, but without being captivated by it? I believe that Teresa can teach us a lot on this point, because she carried the incandescent nucleus of the contemplative vocation in a time and in an environment that had a lot of the characteristics of modern culture. Among the fundamental new realities of the modern era is the discovery of the “person”, understood as an autonomous center of awareness or conscience, a “subject”. It is also inevitable that the religious life should transform itself following this new focus on the person. We can affirm that Teresa “invented” a new pattern of Carmel precisely for this: to explain to the modern person the experience of mystical life in an adequate manner. Many affirm that the long period of modernity, begun in the sixteenth century, is coming to an end, so much so they speak of post-modernity. No doubt we are experiencing a series of radical changes in the style of life, of thought, of communication, that we can ask if we are not entering into a great new historical era. Precisely for this reason we need to have clear in our mind the original project, the emerging intuition of Teresa, so that we may remain faithful to it in spite of the changing historical and cultural context of today. We need to have a concrete pedagogy, which will hold us by the hand and guide us to discern continuously, to remain faithful to our vocation, with that “creative fidelity” mentioned by the document Vita Consecrata, n. 37. What can be the pedagogy for us Discalced Carmelite friars and nuns of today, that can strengthen in us the awareness of our vocation and give us new dynamism and creativity in our personal and communitarian life? I propose for your attention a way centered on three points. I think that for its assimilation it is indispensable to found our charismatic identity in a sure way and to give it a new creative thrust and prophetic courage.
The first point is prayer. I know that this can be seen as something taken for granted; but if it is so in theory, perhaps it is not so in practice. When I speak of prayer, I speak about the experience of prayer, of a way of prayer, an untiring search for prayer. I don’t mean a prayer written about in books, the prayer of another person, be it of our holy mother or holy father. I speak of my prayer, prayer in my life. Are we capable of looking it in the face? Of looking at it in its external reality and especially in its internal reality? We are tempted to pass quickly beyond, not to recognize it for what it really is. In fact, what is prayer to me? What place does it hold in my life? We said that Teresa has re-proposed mystical life to the men and women of the modern era. A fundamental part of this proposal is prayer; prayer not simply as a pious practice, or as a meditation on the mysteries of faith, or as a sentimental effusion. Teresa lived the distressing situation of modern men and women, their precariousness and lack of certainty. Everything is unstable and in state of flux for them, from the skepticism of Descartes to the relativism of our days. No one has described this situation better than Pascal:
We navigate in a vast space, always uncertain and fluctuating, drifting from one extreme to the other. Whatever hold we think of seizing to be secure vanishes and abandons us, and if we follow in order to catch it, it drifts away from our grip, glides and escapes eternally. We find nothing solid. It is our natural situation and yet so contrary to our inclinations. We burn with the desire of finding a secure foundation and a firm base to construct a tower over it that would reach up to the infinite, but every foundation gets broken and the earth opens to the abyss .
It is in this situation that Teresa discovers prayer as the basis of her existence. Prayer – says Teresa – is the door through which to enter the interior castle. To say that in a more anthropological language, it means that the whole reality of man, which cannot be reduced to reason alone nor to passion or affectivity alone, but results in a togetherness of both, his personal I, his subjectivity, emerges in a very precise place, which is a relationship with God lived in prayer. I don’t intend to entertain you with philosophical considerations (I can refer you, eventually, to the reflections of Edith Stein, who, having studied the human person from the phenomenological point of view, understood fully the anthropological value of experience and of the teresian doctrine of prayer). What I am interested in is to recall the meaning of our life of prayer not simply as a moral obligation to which we are bound by our Constitutions, or as a virtuous or spiritual exercise. In prayer we define ourselves, we find ourselves as persons. As St Teresa says in the Second Mansions, we enter into ourselves and thus we are able to enter into God. The simple but decisive gesture of beginning a day with a prolonged time of prayer and concluding it in the same way expresses this truth: through prayer we enter into ourselves, into our truth, into our fullness of being. This founds us humanly, even before elevating us spiritually.
We need to admit that quite often we do not remain with this fundamental discovery of Teresa. We do repeat more or less faithfully the gesture of entering into prayer, but we are not rooted there, we are not nourished, we don’t drink at this fountain and search for more. We distract ourselves by turning in other directions, while we should be remaining firm in our relationship with Jesus and always fathom more deeply. The figure of Jesus fades, disappears, slips into second plan and with that the whole dimension of our prayer as well. Other partial, sectorial dimensions prevail, which fragment us, distract us, and make us lose the concentration that is required to walk the road of human and spiritual growth. They are secondary paths, tortuous deviations from the straight road to be trodden along with Jesus, who – as St Teresa write in her Life 35, 13 – “is not a path (senda), but a highway (camino real) on which one who takes up the journey walks with greater security».
The second point of the journey that I wish to propose is already known to you, as it has been decided by the General Chapter in Fatima: namely, reading St Teresa’s Works. This task also might seem to be obvious: it is natural that the Carmelites – friars and nuns – read St Teresa. What is not so obvious is why a General Chapter should select a re-reading of Teresa as a program for the sexennium. The preparation for the fifth centenary of her birth is only an external occasion. The true profound reason is expressed by the Conclusion of the Chapter document “I was born for you”:
We wish to renew the awareness of our charism for the service of the Church and humanity in our day […] We desire to re-live and share the teresian values: her sense of God and person, her spirit of prayer and openness to the events of our world, her ecclesial responsibility and apostolic spirit.
Our Order has decided to return to Saint Teresa to find in her the thrust and criteria needed for its renewal. We do not mean to read Teresa in order to study her in the academic sense of the word, to prepare spiritual classes or conferences. We feel the need of talking to her, listening to her and of putting to her questions that emerge from the experience of our communities. The answers will not always be direct nor immediate, because they need to surpass a certain temporal, cultural and linguistic distance (at least for those whose mother tongue is not Spanish). Rather, we can say that it is we ourselves who should give answers to our problems, for we don’t find them already written down in Teresa’s books. But we will be able to give correct answers only if our mind is formed with a profound understanding of her spirit, her fundamental options, her original intuitions. So often I wonder what Teresa would do in this situation. What would she decide? Teresa had, of course, her own personality, her own character, her own affectivity, her own manner of meeting persons and loving them. All this pertains to the individual personality of each one and cannot be repeated. It is difficult to think of any person so humanly different from Teresa than John of the Cross. Yet they shared so profoundly the same road, the same charism and have guided our family in the same direction. They met each other and understood each other so profoundly. Beyond the differences of age, character and social backgrounds, they shared one thing that was most important for them: how to live in relationship with Jesus Christ and how to teach others to do so as well.
Teresa and John shared the solution to the basic problem of their lives. Both of them experienced a situation of crisis, which put their vocation, their very emotional stability and physical health to a hard test; they fought almost under the shadow of death, and finally they found the light and a new way of being religious. A new form of religious life, where a convent and a monastery are thought of as a space of living relationship between persons. The monasteries of the Incarnation and of St Joseph’s in Avila express even in their physical set up this change that came with Teresa. The monastery of the Incarnation is a place of “symmetry”, where a group of nuns live aligned as for a great liturgy; while St Joseph’s is a collection of three houses, lacking in symmetry, with a variety of levels, corridors and cells that intersect. In St Joseph’s one notes a family atmosphere, where persons meet and encounter at every moment; they do not proceed “in a compact line”, but emerge in their individuality. This is teresian Carmel: a place where a person grows in relationship. We need to remember, to find again this original spirit and let it grow again today, to redesign the face of our communities and of our religious life. The re-reading of the works of Teresa aims at this.
Now I come to the third and last point of this pedagogical proposal. This last point has been suggested to me particularly by my experience of these first two years as Superior General. In the face of so many problems in religious life I could understand the importance of having a firm and sure point of reference in the Constitutions. Reading them and applying them to the concrete situations where I was invited to intervene, I began to understand more in depth, to find out what was behind each word and to see the possibilities that they were opening up. I understood that they are not a mere list of norms, but a code of life, where the experience of generations has been deposited. Quite often, after evaluating all the possibilities of action, I noticed that the best solution was precisely the one coming from applying the legislative text. There is prudence, wisdom of life which is precious and it would be imprudent to deprive oneself of it. By inviting you to an attentive and renewed study of your Constitutions I certainly do not think of recommending that you do so with a legalistic attitude. Instead, it is a path towards maturity; and the transformation of our charism into structures of ecclesial life is a necessary part of it. This process, on the one hand, is a very delicate and complex one, as it is the question of passing from one language to another, from the experience connected with the person of the Founder and his or her concrete history to the abstractness of a universal norm. On the other hand, however, it is indispensable that this process should be gone through, if we do not want the charism be at the mercy of subjective discretion and get changed from a gift to the church into a private reality which each one may modify according to one’s own taste.
The Second Vatican Council has certainly given a new understanding in relation to Law. We have gone from a rigid application of the norm – which therefore had to be very clear and detailed – to a vague and generic relationship, playing hardly any role in our lives (or sometimes limited only to regulate some strictly canonical aspects). I think the intention of the Council was to give the Law its basic meaning of guide, of teaching (this is the original meaning of the Hebrew word Torah). In this sense, we can legitimately affirm that the Constitutions are one of the most important texts for the initial and on-going formation in the religious life. Quite often it remains a book that is forgotten, towards which we show disinterest or even diffidence, as though it would threaten our freedom, the liberty of charism. In fact, however, it is not so, and any thought of putting opposition between the Law and the Spirit is not healthy.
Twenty years have passed since the approval of your Constitutions and we know how long and tiresome a path was tread to reach this goal. If we confront the legislative text and the everyday life of the Discalced Carmelite Nuns, we can question the rapport that exists between these two poles: what kind of interaction is there between the life and the text that describes and guides it? Do the Constitutions effectively guide the choices of life in our communities? Have they changed their way of living? In what sense? Is the result a renewal as desired by the Council or is it something else? And still more: does the experience lived by the nuns today require, at the distance of twenty years, any revision of the legislative text, corrections, integrations or updating? As you can see, even in this aspect, there is a lot to reflect on, to research, and to discern as communities.
Dear Sisters, it is time to conclude. I wonder if I have answered all your questions and expectations. Several particular questions have certainly not been touched upon. We can do it in our dialogue. I was more interested in going to the core of the question: the gift of the contemplative vocation. I have tried to base it on the theologal truth and to help you to find concrete ways to make it grow and produce fruits in your daily life. I said “in your life”, but I should correct myself and say: “in our life”. In fact, there is no difference between friars and nuns as regards the fundamental vocation. So, what I said to you, I could say, without any change, also to friars. This profound communion, which is a sign of the great originality of the teresian Carmel, will always remain one of the elements of strength and fascination of our family.
Together with you, once again, I thank the Lord.
Cf Acta Ordinis Carmelitarum Discalceatorum, 54 (2009), pp. 209-220.
