Seasons of the Heart

I. SEASONS OF THE HEART: THE SPIRITUAL DYNAMIC OF THE CARMELITE LIFE

1. Introduction
-Song of Songs, The Spiritual Canticle

2. A Longing Heart – Our desire for God

a. We choose all
St. Therese: we chose all. And we will never rest until we get it
Carmel tradition attempts to name the hunger
Flame found deep in their humanity and were burned and purified by it in their encounter.

b. Desires of the Carmelites
Teresa A: water Jesus offered to the Samaritan woman, more fire than water
Sp.C: Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning?
Longed-for day with a loved one
Therese of Lisieux: deepest desires: never-ending Sunday, eternal retreat, eternal shore
Assist people in hearing and voicing their deepest longing.

c. Summary
-Hunger for God deep in the human heart, God having first desired us

d. Questions for reflection
(i) How do I experience this longing, this hunger, which is ultimately for God? Am I aware of a fundamental dis-ease, restlessness? Can I find places in my life where this yearning is expressing itself?
(ii) What gives me deepest joy and delight in my life? When do I feel the most creative and alive? Do I push away, ignore , or suppress it, or do I find ways of honoring this fire within me?
(iii) How do I give expression to my deepest longings? What activity embodies them and keeps me hungering for their ultimate fulfillment?
(iv) How do the people, among whom I minister, express their deepest yearning, their hearts’ desires?
(v) How do I, with them, find the language for this yearning, and celebrate it as gift which points to God?

3. An Enslaved Heart – The worship of false gods

a. Settling down with idols
- Which God to follow, Elijah: clear choice for one true God, Yahweh
- Nicholas the Frenchman, Fiery Arrow: members losing their way, following disordered desires under the guise of necessary ministry.
- Attachments

b. Disordered relationship
-How we are relating to the world
-idols, non negotiable, false gods led to false self.
-Carmelite tradition is not withdrawal from the world, but advocate right relationship with God’s world.
-to possess nothing in order to possess all

c. A prophetic role
-Carmelite vocation: suspended between heaven and earth, finding no support in either place
-a sharp critique regarding the human heart and its idol-making propensity
-not to cling to anything, to cooperate with God’s love, often dark, which is enlivening and healing us.
-continual listening for the approach of God, who transforms, heals, liberates, enlivens

d. Summary
-hungers of our heart send us to the world, enamoured by the messengers of God, the soul mistakes them for God. It pours deepest desires into relationships, possessions, plans, activities, goals and asks that they bring fulfillment to our deepest hungers.

e. Questions for reflection
(i) What are the idols, the non-negotiables, that have become part of my life? What are those things without which I cannot go on? Am I hurting them by clinging so tightly to them?
(ii) Where and how have I become unfree in life? Am I unfree to follow my deepest desires? Am I unfree to hear God’s call into God’s future, which is dark to me? Am I unfree to hear my community’s needs?
(iii) Have I, unconsciously, been building my kingdom rather than watching for the reign of God? Have I, without being aware of it, removed God from the center of my life and placed in that center my noble goals, my prophetic work, my understanding of the demands of the kingdom? Have I slowly over the years forgotten to ask, “What does God want?”
(iv) Have the passions which brought me to Carmel been domesticated and left to wither? Have I become compulsively active, perhaps becoming more a functionary of an institution rather than a disciple of the Lord?

4. A Listening Heart – The contemplative life

a. God, always already there
- God loves us first; thinking life was a pursuit of God, realized that God had been pursuing them all along.
- Teresa A: heard these words while in prayer, “Seek yourself in me!”, God meets us and accepts us where we are in our lives

b. Lured by love
- Therese of Lisieux: Everything is grace
- John of the C: Only when God enters a life and kindles a love deep in the person and lures the person past lesser loves, to awake to a reality of a God who is “always already there.”
- Uncreated grace, loving, healing presence of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit

c. Contemplation re-focused
- Contemplation is being open to the transforming love of God
- Carmelite charism: prayer, community & ministry; contemplation is an activity which grounds and links prayer, community & ministry.
- Contemplation, the deepest source of compassion for our world, our openness to God’s love coming towards us in good times and bad

d. Summary
- Beloved coming toward the lover to lure her heart into a deep union, God kindles a deeper love in the soul. God’s love, always present and offered, lures the heart into God’s wilderness, “deeper into the thicket” (Jn of C, Sp. C, 36)

e. Questions for reflection
(i) Like “a watch in the night”, do I keep alert to the approach of God’s love? Where in my life am I called to a deeper listening? Where are the continual challenges to my mind and heart? Are these challenges invitations to surrender more deeply to God’s transforming love?
(ii) Among the signs of God’s love at work are a growing trust in the mercy of God, and a growing freedom from what enslaves the heart. Do I experience that greater trust? Am I aware of a greater freedom? Have I really surrendered myself to the Mystery at the core of my life, or do I continue to struggle to secure my own existence?
(iii) Have I seen the face of Christ in the face of the people I serve? Can I recognize the invitation of God’s transforming love as it approaches cloak in a culure?
(iv) In my community and in my ministry, how can I help create conditions for a “listening heart”?

5. A Troubled Heart – The tragic in life

a. The sorrows of humanity
- Carmel does not avoid the tragic in life but deals with it directly.
- Jn of the C: coming to terms with the dark side of life
- People are drawn to a spirituality which finds words for their deepest sorrows, yet offers hope in the heart of these dark times.

b. The dark love of God
- Teresa A: battles within our fragile psyches are much more difficult than the wars outside us.
- Compulsions, addictions, inauthentic ways of living, false selves and false gods become apparent as the person become grounded in truth, the door to the interior castle is prayer and reflection.
- Without true center, God, we are fragmented with many centers
- Are the immense desires of our hearts, the hungers of our soul meant to be ultimately frustrated.
- The disciple of Christ would carry the cross, through it, life would emerge

c. Dark nights
- The experience of God’s love is not always a peak experience
- Because of who we are and the purification we need the love is experienced as dark
- Frustration of desire and the lure of something more or beyond is the unease caused by God’s continual invitation into deeper union.
- Carl Jung observed that he could not distinguish god-symbols from self-symbols. When an individual loses her God-symbol the personality begins to disintegrate.
- An intense experience which John calls the night of the spirit is simultaneously a powerful experience of our sinfulness, the finiteness of our human condition, and God’s ever-emerging transcendence.

d. A new spirituality
- Contemporary Carmelite martyrs, stripped of all security and support, witnessed to the possibility of faith, hope and love lived in the bleakest of conditions.
- All forms of discipleship eventually embrace the cross.
- New spirituality that grows out of Carmel’s ever-increasing awareness of the realities people are experiencing around the world.
- John Paul II: Our age has known times of anguish which have made us understand this expression better and which have furthermore given it a kind of collective character. Our age speaks of the silence or the absence of God. ..The term dark night is now used of all of life and not just of a phase of the spiritual journey. The saint’s doctrine is now invoked in response to this unfathomable mystery of human suffering.

e. Summary
-Deep sorrow and experiences of the tragic are part of everyone’s life. The limitations of our human condition and the destructive forces loose in the world often assault our faith. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Carmel testifies that God’s love is always present in the debris of our lives.
- the pilgrim is challenged to let go of all supports and walk trustingly into God’s future.
- The suffering of Jesus on the cross was born because of love, not because of a love of suffering.

f. Questions for reflection
(i) What has been my experience of walking a dark way? Have I been able to let go of known paths to be led by a way not of my choosing? What, particularly, was most helpful?
(ii) How do I proceed when the way is not clear?
(iii) What solace or guidance does Carmel offer to people living in distressing situations?
(iv) How should the Order respond to the “dark night” suffered by many peoples in the world? Could this be part of the “new spirituality” urged by the Carmelite and Discalced Carmelite generals?

6. A Pure Heart – Transformation of desire

a. Union with God
-Carmelite spirituality has frequently been presented as a “high” spirituality, a rarefied spirituality for the chosen few. It is often presented as soaring ecstatic unions, or dramatic sufferings more intense than the usual troubles in life.
- The paths of material and spiritual possessions do not reach the top; only the middle path of the nadas open to the top where God is nada and todo. Carmel seems to represent an heroic, even epic journey to God. And it is only for experienced mountaineers who dare scale its heights.

b. An awakening
-our lives are permeated with the loving, enlivening, healing presence of God, uncreated grace. Instead of searching for a hidden center, the center has come to us. John says that even with one degree of love we are in the center.
-the journey is to go deeper into God. But we are in union with God all the way; divinization is a continual process.

c. To want what God wants
-Teresa A: The purpose of prayer is conformity with God’s will.
-God’s love lures us into a transformation of our desire so that we desire what God desires; we want what God wants.
-Divinization is the gradual participation in God’s knowing and loving.
Meister Eckhart: someone living from their center very naturally lives in accord with God’s will.
-Our spirituality is not about heroic asceticism; it is about God’s all-conquering love, a love that has touched every heart and made it ache.

d. Summary
-Entering Carmel is entering a drama playing out deep within every human life: the inexpressible drama of the human spirit encountered by God’s Spirit.
-Carmelites are explorers of an inner place of intimacy with God
-more and more the life of a Christian is expressing desires which are in accord with God’s desire.

e. Questions for reflection
(i) Who are the truly holy people in my experience? What do they look like?
(ii) Do I understand the spiritual life as an heroic ascent, or an awakening to a love always offered from the core of my being?
(iii) Am I able to trust, in practical ways, that God’s love is freely given, unable to be earned? Are there subtle ways I try to guarantee my worth?
(iv) “Relax, it has been done!” said one theologian of grace. What might that expression mean?