The Beautiful Diamond of the Carmel
by Peter M. J. Stravinskas, appearing in Volume 48
This homily was given at the Mass for the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Carmelite Monastery of the Infant Jesus of Prague in Traverse City, Michigan.
Echoing my holy patron, let me exclaim: “It is good for us to be here” (Mt 17:4). Saying that, Saint Peter then proposed to Our Lord that he pitch three tents there on Mount Tabor—one for Moses, one for Elijah (the proto-Carmelite), and one for Jesus. Saint John informs us in the Prologue to his Gospel—that stunning piece of poetry and theology—that the eternal Logos “pitched his tent” among us (1:14). And seventy-five years ago, Mother Teresa Margaret “pitched her tent” here in Traverse City.
In so doing, she also brought along with her that eternal Logos, the Emmanuel who in his humility became a child—the infant who promised, “The more you honor me, the more will I bless you.” These nuns lay claim to that promise, and the infant has been faithful to his promise. This band of noble women is living through its fourth Ordinary Jubilee Year, this one being focused on the virtue of hope—and they have every reason to be hopeful as their adorable infant has blessed them, so that they now number fourteen. Of course, Emmanuel continues to “pitch his tent,” to “tabernacle,” here in the Most Holy Eucharist, and it is from this tabernacle that he reigns over his devoted daughters.
Dear sisters, thank you so much for bestowing on me the honor of preaching on this auspicious occasion. I wish to bring with me the presence of Father Nicholas Gregoris who, as you know, most unexpectedly passed into eternity this past August.
Now, on to the celebration at hand.Anniversaries are times to remember, to renew, and to recommit. This is a diamond anniversary. A diamond is known for its sturdiness and purity, and thus its multi-faceted beauty. To appreciate that beauty, one must regard it from many angles. Let’s attempt to do just that with the beautiful diamond, which is this Carmel. So, first, I want to rehearse with you, sisters, just who you are, the better to encourage you to recommit to your holy way of life. And then, I want to remind you, lay faithful, how you have benefitted from their fidelity.
So, who are you, dear sisters? You didn’t arrive in Traverse City ex nihilo. You came out of a long and noble tradition. Preaching on the grand feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 2018, Father Nicholas said this to you and about you:
This venerable Carmel is a living testament to the spirit of Elijah in the Diocese of Gaylord. Here, in beautiful Traverse City, our beloved nuns continue to discover anew each day the presence of the one, true, and living God in the still small voice of their conscience amidst their daily routine of work and prayer with special attention paid to the lovely chanting of the Monastic Office and the devout celebration of the Lord’s Eucharistic sacrifice in the official tongue of the Church, Latin.
He went on:
Elijah was hungry and thirsty in a most desperate life-threatening situation, and yet God provided for him by means of a raven. Materially speaking, the nuns do not have much at all. But they have confidence in God’s providence and rely on the generosity of each one of you for their sustenance, for the provisions that keep them going day in and day out from year to year. Likewise, the nuns trust God to raise up vocations for their Carmel in an age dominated by the noise of technology, in a time when young people seem to shun silence and sacrifice in order to have everything in the palm of their hand. Through the peaks and valleys of vocation surpluses and shortages, the nuns trust that God will provide as long as they remain faithful to his still, small voice calling them to ever-increasing fidelity to their divinely inspired charism. Elijah was a prophet mighty in deeds, in miracles that are too many to recall here. Suffice it to say that Elijah was God’s chosen mediator for defeating the pagan priests of Baal. So too the Carmelite nuns are instruments in the hand of his majesty for sending a message to those who espouse the many pagan and secular values that threaten the Judeo-Christian fabric of our society.
And finally:
Our nuns believe that our worship of the one, true God ought not to be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and expediency and so they adhere to the Catholic faith in an unadulterated fashion and not merely as is convenient for them to do so, but as it challenges them to go against the grain, to swim against the currents of the dictatorship of relativism, the culture of death, and the throwaway culture of the ephemeral which surround us on every side. From within these sacred walls, the cloistered nuns through their sanctification of themselves and of all of you who attend Mass and other services here have become a formidable, invisible force for sanctifying the world. This is perhaps the greatest miracle of any good Carmel. It’s the miracle of incessant prayer that redounds to God’s infinite glory and effects the sanctification and salvation of the world that is so often too busy to pray for its own sake. The prayer of Carmelite nuns unleashes a torrent of abundant graces in the life of the Church. Their prayer is like “a sound of rushing rain” when the heavens opened after a long “draught,” such as miraculously happened in the story of Elijah recounted in 1 Kings 18:42-45.
More than a century before the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Religious Life, Perfectae Caritatis, the inestimable Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman, in his 1843 sermon entitled “The Apostolical Christian,” located your foundation all the way back to the New Testament itself. He asks as rhetorical questions the following:
. . . monks and nuns are patterns of Christian perfection; and. . . Scripture itself supplies us with this pattern. Who can deny this? Who is bold enough to say that Saint John Baptist. . . is not a pattern-monk; and that Mary, who “sat at our Lord’s feet,” was not a pattern-nun? and “Anna too, who served God with fastings and prayers night and day?”
Then we read this echo of Newman from the Fathers of Vatican II:
Communities which are entirely dedicated to contemplation, so that their members in solitude and silence, with constant prayer and penance willingly undertaken, occupy themselves with God alone, retain at all times, no matter how pressing the needs of the active apostolate may be, an honorable place in the mystical body of Christ, whose “members do not all have the same function” (Rom 12:4). For these offer to God a sacrifice of praise which is outstanding. Moreover the manifold results of their holiness lends luster to the people of God which is inspired by their example and which gains new members by their apostolate which is as effective as it is hidden. Thus they are revealed to be a glory of the Church and a well-spring of heavenly graces. (PC, 7)
As you well know, sisters, you had no greater promoter than Saint John Paul II who, in his youth, even entertained the thought of becoming a Carmelite. At any rate, so appreciative was he of the contemplative vocation—let’s say it even more bluntly—so dependent on it, that he established a monastery for contemplative nuns within the very walls of the Vatican. And it was he who, in 1997, set the feast of the Presentation as the day on which the whole Church would turn to consecrated religious with grateful hearts. Which puts me in mind of that magnificent poem of Thomas Merton, Lumen ad Revelationem Gentium:
Look kindly, Jesus, where we come,
New Simeons, to kindle,
Each at Your infant sacrifice his own life’s candle.
And when Your flame turns into many tongues,
See how the One is multiplied, among us, hundreds!
And goes among the humble, and consoles our sinful
kindred.
It is for this we come,
And, kneeling, each receive one flame:
Ad revelationem gentium.
Our lives, like candles, spell this simple symbol:
Weep like our bodily life, sweet work of bees,
Sweeten the world, with your slow sacrifice.
And this shall be our praise:
That by our glad expense, our Father’s will
Burned and consumed us for a parable.
Nor burn we now with brown and smoky flames, but
bright
Until our sacrifice is done,
(By which not we, but You are known)
And then, returning to our Father, one by one,
Give back our lives like wise and waxen lights.
No “brown and smoky flames” for you; all of you “wise and waxen lights.” Indeed, isn’t that what Hans Urs von Balthasar meant when he wrote: “Those who withdraw to the heights to fast and pray in silence are the pillars bearing the spiritual weight of what happens in history”?
In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII issued a decretal on contemplative life, which held sway well into the modern era, the first word of which is “Periculoso” (“dangerous”). Yes, the life you have chosen is “dangerous” for, as the Epistle to the Hebrews warns, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (10:31). Saint Paul saw this danger, so that he could express a concern that “after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor 9:27). So, be vigilant and prudent, ensuring that there’s always enough oil for yourselves before giving oil out to others. You came to Carmel, first, to save your own souls; then, you can help save others—but only when first tending to your own salvation. That said, remember that it is also a blessed thing to “fall into the hands of the living God.” After all, aren’t some of our final words of the day, “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum”?
Now, what profit have you lay faithful gained over the past seventy-five years? Robert Hugh Benson, convert and luminary of the nineteenth-century English Catholic Revival, shares an interesting anecdote in his delightful novel, The Light Invisible. It seems that a priest, visiting a convent, arrives very skeptical of the contemplative life, considering it, in his own words, “useless and barren. . . essentially selfish [and] a sin against society.” However, the “immense light or sound or movement” he finds in the chapel changes his mind.
In 1930, the Anglo-Catholic T. S. Eliot penned a truly remarkable poem, “Ash Wednesday.” Interestingly, Eliot takes as his special model of life-long penitence the cloistered nun; for him, she is likewise a sign of hope. Contemplatives, you see, do intensively and in hiddenness what the rest of us must be about in the hum-drum existence of our daily lives in the world. They do not do the job for us; they point the way, albeit in very dramatic fashion. The poet explains:
. . . where will the word Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence . . . .
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.
But every day is Ash Wednesday for what Eliot calls “the veiled sister,” and the prayer of all such holy women is that our once-a-year observance of Ash Wednesday through silence and introspection, through listening to the voice and looking to the face, will put us in good stead for the remaining 364 days, but most especially for that final day when the king and judge appears either to call us to himself personally or to usher in the end-times—whichever comes first.
Who here today doesn’t call this house of prayer for needs, both great and small? Bishop Walsh, would you not agree that this is the powerhouse enlivening this diocese and supporting you, just as Aaron and Hur did for Moses? Not for nothing did Bishop Hebda come to this spot to make his retreat in preparation for his episcopal consecration.
Dear friends, these nuns have done for seventy-five years—and continue to do to this day—what you cannot do for yourselves. Which is why you so cherish them—and rightly so.
These women are spouses of the “lamb once slain” (Rev 5:6), and all their power comes from the blood of that lamb, venerated in today’s feast. Indeed, Saint Augustine insightfully comments on the Gospel passage of today’s sacred liturgy with these words:
Here was opened wide the gate of life, from which have flowed forth the sacraments of the Church, without which there is no entrance to life which is true life. That blood was shed for the remission of sins. . . . This second Adam bowed his head and fell asleep on the cross, that a spouse might be formed for him from what flowed from the sleeper’s side. O death, whereby the dead are raised anew to life! What can be purer than such blood? What more health-giving than such a wound?
John Donne, unfortunately an apostate Catholic but a stellar poet nonetheless, could pen these moving lines in “Resurrection”:
Moist with one drop of Thy blood, my dry soul
Shall—though she now be in extreme degree
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly—be
Freed by that drop, from being starved, hard or foul,
And life by this death abled shall control
Death, whom Thy death slew; nor shall to me
Fear of first or last death bring misery,
If in Thy life-book my name thou enroll.
Flesh in that long sleep is not putrefied,
But made that there, of which, and for which it was;
Nor can by other means be glorified.
May then sin’s sleep and death soon from me pass,
That waked from both, I again risen may
Salute the last and everlasting day.
One of the most evocative artistic representations of Christ’s sacrificial love for us is the mother pelican, which pricks her own breast to feed her young with her blood. That is precisely what Jesus did for us on the cross and what each celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice makes present to us. Rightly, then, does Saint Thomas Aquinas in his tender Adoro te devote have us sing:
O loving Pelican! O Jesus, Lord!
Unclean I am, but cleanse me in Thy Blood,
Of which a single drop for sinners spilt,
Is ransom for a world’s entire guilt.
Dearest sisters and loving faithful, one and all washed in the blood of the lamb and redeemed by his precious blood, today must be a banner day of gratitude. For you sisters, to Almighty God for your holy vocation; for you lay faithful of this local Church, for the gift of this treasure, this diamond of witness and intercession. May not a few of us be here for the centennial celebration!
As we move into the very heart of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the bloody, redeeming death of Mount Calvary will yield to the glory of Mount Tabor. In anticipation of that transformation, we join the Virgin of Mount Carmel at the foot of the cross, which is the altar of this church, as the sacrifice wrought once and for all on Calvary is re-presented, renewed for us. Permit me to suggest that you make your own this lovely prayer of Cardinal Newman:
O Holy Mother, stand by me now at Mass time, when Christ comes to me, as thou didst minister to thy infant Lord—as thou didst hang upon his words when he grew up, as thou wast found under his cross. Stand by me, holy Mother, that I may gain somewhat of thy purity, thy innocence, thy faith, and he may be the one object of my love and my adoration, as he was of thine.
Amen.