MOUNT CARMEL
CLOISTERED CONVENT
OUR VISION
In the sanctuary of Church, be persons of prayer and a friend of God so as to obtain everything from God for the mankind.
OUR MISSION
- To pray for the Church; for those who are defenders of the Church; specially for preachers and learned men.
- To maintain within the Church a high level of payer.
- To teach other souls the ways of prayer.
TERESIAN CHARISM
St. Teresa lived at a time when fidelity to the Church was weak. Many left the Catholic Church. St. Teresa, on the contrary, felt to the depths of her being that she belonged to the Church. Her last words, I die a daughter of the Church was a testimony for her love and loyalty for the Churh.
PRIMITIVE SPIRIT
The charism of the discalced Carmelites are bound up closely with the development of the spiritual life of St. Teresa. The particularity of Teresian charism constitutes to the style of life she proposed for her daughters. “She found a way of life in which she sets prayer as the center of everything else. No other activity in day to day living must be allowed to obstruct prayer. Every other duty was to be at the service of prayer and every prayer was to be ecclesial” ( Fr. Miguel OCD, general). Her intent was that it should be entirely directed towards prayer and contemplation of the things of God and all would observe the evangelical counsels, in a small sisterly community that would be founded in solitude, prayer and strict poverty.
When founding a reformed Carmel she intended to safeguard the continuity of Carmel, for her desire eas to return to the primitive spirit of the Order. The rule of St. Albert given to the hermits of Mount Carmel, contains one precept around which all the others gravitate: “Meditate upon the law of the Lord, day and night.” Such was the life of the hermits of Carmel. They had come to the holy mountain to live according to the spirit of the great prophet Elias, whose entire soul was expressed in his battle cry: Vivit Dominus in cujus conspectus sto! The Lord is living in whose sight I stand.” This battle cry, crystalizes the essential characteristics of the Carmelite ideal. The presence of God is the haven to which the soul must return whenever its several tasks are done. It was to this end she l0nged for;
“All of us who wear this sacred habit of Carmel are called to prayer and contemplation-because that was the first principle of our Order and because we are descended from the line of those holy Fathers of ours from Mount Carmel who sought this treasure, this precious pearl of which we speak, in such great solitude and with such contempt for the world.” (IC V:1:2)
Not being able to go there, she will create a desert in the midst of cities by founding the reformed convent of St. Joseph of Avila. In it, life will be hermitical. Here one sees her genius as an organizer, in which she excels to add multitude of details to achieve a hermetical life in her monasteries by adding a strict enclosure, grills, a small number of religious, and solitude in one’s cell.
ENCLOSURE
In the Teresian way of life, enclosure has a different meaning than in other contemplative orders, for enclosure was one of St. Teresa's motives for starting her reform. She says explicitly that she thought of beginning the Reform because enclosure was not kept in the monastery in which she was living. She felt in her heart, in her spiritual experience, in her way towards God, with a desire that increased daily, the living and inner necessity of finding another way in a solitude that was not possible at the incarnation. That is to say, the lack of enclosure compelled her to think of the Reform, a new religious family. It is not by the Church law, Teresian Carmels are keeping up their enclosure till this day, but from the realization of the fact that they as the daughters of St. Teresa are bound to be faithful to the original inspiration of their Holy Mother.
LIFE OF FRIENDSHIP
FIRST ELEMENT OF TERESIAN CHARISM
Christ is the heart and soul of the spirit of St. Teresa. To give up everything, to live one's whole life in a convent, withdrawn, to sever all relations with outside world and not love Christ is a wasted life. To love Christ and to attain the greatest possible union with Him is the whole purpose of a Discalced Carmelite. From the beginning St. Teresa was inspired to call the little community of St. Joseph's, the "little college of Christ".She wanted to gather in each house a little group of "trusty friends" of Christ.
St. Teresa in her writings more uses human friendship to indicate the friendship with Christ should grow. There are five laws of friendship:
01
MUTUAL ENCOUNTER
In every friendship there needs personal contact with each other. In the life of spirit, no one in a state of habitual mortal sin can call himself a friend of Christ. Friendship can only between alive persons. Christ is alive. We must become alive by habitual grace if we want to be capable of friendship with Christ.
02
MUTUAL KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge of another's life, his interests, work, ambitious, enterprises, creates a bond. This mutual knowledge depends on frequent conversations. One of the purpose of the two daily hours of mental prayer in our Teresian way of life is to increase this knowledge of God. We need to meditate on His teachings to love Him
03
MUTUAL LOVE
Mutual knowledge alone is not suffice to deepen our friendship. We must be moved to love Him. Our Holy Mother pointed out that true meditation "does not consist in thinking much but in loving much".
04
THE PRESENCE OF THE OTHER
In human friendship, there are limitations of time and space. But this is not with our supernatural friendship with Christ. He is in our souls and with us. As we starts to seeks His company, He will fill us with His presence. When this presence of our friend is constantly with us, in our thoughts, in our words and in all our actions, we have attained transforming union. We cannot acquire this grace overnight. It is a long, slow process which must look upon with determined determination.
05
CONFORMITY OF WILLS
There can be no lasting friendship if there is no communication, no harmonising of the personalities, if our wills do not meet the same enterprises and the same purpose. This conformity of wills is one of the most important and difficult features of the spiritual life. It is not a question of willing or tender words. but it is a question of deeds. We have to show by our deeds we are effective instruments of Christ's work, participating in the redemptive grace of Christ and in His mission.
From the time of their entrance into religious life, they are to habituate themselves to live constantly in the company of the good Master who has called them. Without this habitual intimacy with Jesus, the hermitical setting would make no sense and would have lost its soul.
AT THE SERVICE OF OUR FRIEND
SECOND ELEMENT OF TERESIAN CHARISM
APOSTOLATE OF PRAYER AND SACRIFICE
We cannot be sure that we love Christ unless we love His mission and His Church. It is a condition of friendship.
St. Teresa’s mystical experiences led her gradually to fathom and to interiorize the life of the Church. In the monastery of St. Joseph, Avila were she have attained the fullness of union with God, she understood the Christ as ‘whole Christ’- the Church-the souls who are part of it, even those who are outside but nevertheless called to it. There she entered into the sufferings and anguish of the Church militant. The love for the Church is going to dominate thereafter the whole life of St. Teresa. It becomes a powerful passion, absorbing all her personal desires to the end she directed the prayer, retirement, and entire life of the Discalced Carmelites towards the service of the Church. she exhorts her daughters: “If your prayer and desires and disciples and fasts are not performed for the intentions of which I have spoken, reflect that you are not carrying out the work or fulfilling the object for which the Lord has brought you here”. (WP 3: )
When Teresa found to work for the Church is her vocation and the purpose of her reform, the answer of Prophet Elijah “With zeal I have been zealous for the Lord God of Hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant. They have thrown down thy altars, they have slain thy prophets, zelo zelatus sum pro Domino Deo exercituum.” found a special place in the Teresian heritage. Hereafter, the avowal of the prophet became the motto of the Teresian Carmel.
APOSTOLATE AND ACTIVE APOSTOLATE
The vocation of the Discalced Carmelite Nuns is essentially ecclesial and apostolic. The apostolate to which St. Teresa wished to dedicate her daughters is the purely contemplative one. It consist in prayer and immolation with the Church and for the Church, and it excludes every form of active apostolate.
They move toward achieving that pure and solitary love which is more precious in God's sight and of greater profit for the Church than a great many other works taken together (Constitutions No. 126).
Seal
An expression of our passion..
The motto or legend consists of the words of Elijah taken from the First Book of the Kings, 19:10: With zeal have I been zealous for the Lord God of Hosts. In Latin the phrase reads:Zelo zelatus sum pro Domino Deo exercituum. These words express the whole life of the prophet Elijah and the very spirit that moved him.
The sword symbolises the power and zeal of Elijah. In the Scriptures Elijah appears again and again as God’s Prophet, speaking out boldly against abuses and reminding the Israelites of their special calling to live as God’s people
In the center of the shield rises the Holy mountain of Carmel; the cradle of the order.
Three stars In this shield, which represents the three epochs in the history of carmel.The first as if placed in a grotto of the mountain signifies the prophetic era which extends from the time of Elijah who founded the order in a cave to the coming of St. John the Baptist. The second and the third starts rising over the mountain, signify respectively the Greek and the Latin. Eras, when the order spread through out the east and west; that the time of st. john the Baptist to the Birthhold, the first latin general; and to the Birthhold to the end of the world.
The Cross of the Summit of Mountain was added in the 16th century as the distinctive sign of the discalced Carmelites and they also adopted for their crest.
Above the seal and through the banner is an arm and hand which holds a sword.The sword symbolises the power and zeal of Elijah.For Carmelites Elijah is the solitary prophet who nurtured his thirst for the one and only God and lived forever in His presence. Elijah is the biblical inspiration of the Carmelite life and, like him, Carmelites seek both to continually carry, in their minds and hearts, the sword of the spirit, which is the Word of God”(Carmelite Rule)and to live constantly with a loving, contemplative awareness of His presence.
The Crown of Gold represents the Kingdom of God. He is the Sovereign Lord of Carmel. Carmelites indeed endeavor to serve God faithfully with “a pure heart and a steadfast conscience” (Carmelite Rule).They see their vocation as a calling to unswerving allegiance to their Lord and King, Jesus Christ. In their service to this King they take their inspiration from the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose patronage they enjoy, and Sts. Teresa of Jesus and John of the Cross, the great reformers of Carmel.
The halo of twelve stars above the crown represents the prerogative of every Carmelite’s laud, the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom St. John saw in an apocalyptic vision as:“a woman clothed with the sun… on her head a crown of twelve stars”(Revelation 12:1).In the coat of arms of the Discalced Carmelites these stars also signify the twelve points of the rule, which are: obedience, chastity, poverty, reconciliation, mental prayer, divine office, chapter, abstinence from meat, manual labor, silence, humility, and supererogation.