As a Carmelite friar, I have been privileged to share the experience of many Carmelite communities in Britain and other countries. Those that have enlivened and enriched my own personal pilgrimage of hope, as well as being beacons of hope to the people they have sought to be alongside and serve, have been ones that live unique expressions and creative interpretations of the Way of Life for a community of lay hermits on Mount Carmel approved by Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem in the 13th century. At their centre has been a profound spiritual synergy that has been inspired by a hope-filled vision of encounter with and ultimate fulfilment in God.
I have also been blessed to walk alongside, accompany, and be challenged by a variety of other Christian communities. These have included parishes, communities of other Christian traditions, lay communities, and the countless families who live the values of the Gospel of hope in very concrete and ordinary situations.
I feel blessed to be in the company of good people who inspire hope. The liberated heart, stirred and shaped by faith in God’s promises, is good. That centre of desire, yearning and searching is created in the image and likeness of God. The awareness that God’s goodness resides in our deepest and most authentic centre resonates with the very beauty and glory of God.
As our hearts seek to be expanded, focussed and fulfilled, horizons shaped by our faith in Christ become transformed by the Eternal Horizon that beckons, attracts, lures. Our pilgrimage, like that of our early Carmelite forebears, leads us ultimately into the very heart of God: a heart that is fresh, forever new, open, accepting, inclusive, embracing, sustaining, forgiving, healing, serving, often surprising, and even vulnerable. This heart of God is an intimate communion of dynamic relationships – Father, Son and Spirit – attuned in perfect harmony and self-giving love.
When two or three good people choose to occupy the same space and engage with each other and the world around them with authenticity and hope, there’s a certain indefinable resonance of spirit that enables a greater sense of meaning, purpose and fulfilment to emerge. Encounters between open-hearted people who seek the truth together can be life-affirming and life-giving, transforming them and the people who have contact with them. I believe these encounters to be sacred, because the common ground which they share and that shapes them not only finds its ultimate origin in the Creator and Relating God, but also its ultimate flourishing in the Liberating and Redeeming God.
Growing in awareness of the good reveals as yet unexperienced, unknown depths, new perspectives, greater appreciation and even new invitations. What is not normally possible in isolation becomes possible together, especially as we build communities of hope. Through accepting my own uniqueness and having a profound respect for the matchless individuality of others, I discover that the God in others complete me, and the God in me contributes to the completion of others.
Jesus is the perfect window through which we might know and experience the Sacred, and through whom the Sacred is shared with us. Growing in our personal and community relationship with Christ we can trace the very contours of God’s face. Journeying in hope, perhaps we also become aware that God is tracing the contours of Christ’s own face in us and those around us.
Jesus of Nazareth engaged with others beautifully and authentically. Each was unique, each different, each called. He affirmed their goodness and offered them a vision of God’s Reign, already present among them but also still a hoped-for future when God will be totally experienced, known and loved.
Jesus gathered disciples together who would learn how to celebrate, develop and share a sense of community rooted in the experience of God where despair is transformed into hope; fragmentation and individualism give way to unity and cohesive meaning; where fear, prejudice and hatred yield to courage, acceptance and love. In Jesus, people tasted and saw that God is indeed good. God became immersed in human experience so that human beings might become immersed in the very experience of God.
After his Resurrection and Ascension, the disciples of Jesus gathered in prayer; they shared the story of how the spirit of Jesus seemed to be working in, through and with them. They gave testimony to the real and living presence of Jesus among them – sometimes with words; often simply by the way they lived. With Jesus having withdrawn from their sight and having spent time with him as their most intimate companion, they had internalised his presence, his values, his teaching, and became his ambassadors of hope. The Community of Believers lives to celebrate and share the presence of Christ in the world today, and that is most convincingly done through building up communities that have Christ as their focus, their most intimate friend and their hope.
Brendan Grady, O.Carm. – Reading Community
