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Prayer at Carmel

Sisters at prayer at Firhouse, Co Dublin

Prayer at Carmel is accompanied by a minimum of material conditions. Prayer involves no rigorously prescribed methods. For its development it requires the liberty and fidelity of a soul constantly visited and vivified by the spirit.

Prayer understood in this way is not so much as an exercise but as being present to God. This is altogether objective and interior, silent and sustained, detached and spiritual.

To prayer, as it is understood at Carmel, there are no limits; just as there are no limits to the quality of interior silence that it realizes and the links it fashions between man and his God. According to the measure of the soul's generosity and divine grace, the living God possesses and vivifies this solitude.

The Rule faithfully preserves this conception of life with God. The central obligation there laid down is "to meditate night and day on the Law of the Lord".

"The land that was desolate and impassable shall be glad, and the wilderness shall rejoice, and shall flourish like the lily" Is. 35: 1).

The depth in which the intuitions of the Carmelite soul are rooted may make them seem obscure. They are, nevertheless, astonishingly living and active. Consciously or not, the soul unceasingly returns there, to strive to live them fully and directly.

If no one is more convinced than the Carmelite of the riches and benefits of tradition, it is also true that no one is more faithfully and lovingly attached to it, yet no one else is more fully persuaded that it is necessary to live personally and to experience in direct contact the mystery of God. Tradition may indeed explain and give a love for the divine realities tasted in prayer: it cannot confer that supreme and incommunicable knowledge which is a fruit of divine wisdom. This comes only to him who suffers God in his soul and in his life.

To remain living and active, the revelation of the divine transcendence and mercy ought to be renewed in each one of us.