I entered Carmel at the age of thirty two armed with a habit of optimism of the Mr Micawber variety: “Something will turn up”. This had been my coping strategy throughout my late teens and early twenties, when life had often been difficult.
Entering Carmel enthusiastic but ignorant, tested this strategy profoundly. Everything about the lifestyle and in particular my fellow novices caught me off balance. Ascent of Mt Carmel? Forget it. Here was I clinging by my fingernails to a vertical black cliff, just to ensure I kept “hanging in there”. I certainly would not have done so without the expert and very experienced guidance of my novice mistress, Sr Rachel – known to the Catholic world as Ruth Burrows. I remember vividly explaining to her, with some pride, my habit of optimism and how the thought that something would always turn up, kept me going – only to have it instantly dashed to the ground; or so it seemed to me at the time. It took me a long time to realize that what Rachel was trying to do was to lead me deeper than shallow optimism. She wanted to lead me to hope. In our time, perhaps in all times, we tend to confuse optimism with hope. This is a mistake. Optimism though good in itself, is a habit of mind, largely governed by temperament and relatively superficial: It is firmly based in the self, whereas Hope is that deep and solid virtue based firmly in God.
I now understand Hope as the dynamic core of my Christian life. I picture it as the inner fire of golden energy that is just gratuitously there. It can’t go away; it can’t be extinguished; it is of God and enables my life in Christ. It is a far cry from a mere “whistling in the dark” which is how many think of hope. Why should hope inevitably be seen against a dark back-ground?
St Paul has a great deal to say about Hope, that confident, expectant, joyful knowledge that we are being changed by God, and having been conformed to His Image, will one day see Christ face to face. Hope is based firmly on God’s faithfulness to keep His promise. What is more, “If our hope in Christ has been for this life only, we are the most unfortunate of creatures” (1Cor v19)
If that is true of every Christian, then it is certainly true of Carmelites. Life in Carmel simply does not make sense without hope in the Pauline sense. As one novice memorably put it: “I must be mad to voluntarily opt to be banged up with a load of women, not of my own choosing.” Life in Carmel should not work, but by God’s Grace and Will, it does.
Those great Carmelite saints, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and Therese of Lisieux, each have a great deal to teach us about living Hope. I find the writings of St Therese to be the more accessible and helpful, for here she is writing about problems all Carmelites very quickly find a challenge: Boredom, fatigue, dryness in prayer, and the daily irritations and struggle for charity encountered simply because other sisters are different. Harder perhaps than all this is lack of recognition and the fact that my opinion may be listened to – but then ignored.
Therese’s answer to all this is to use everything, however petty, as a springboard to launch herself into the arms of God. Hope was both the God-given energy that enabled her to make that leap and the assurance that she was, as her faith told her, leaping somewhere. Like St Paul, Therese saw hope as the absolute guarantee of our life in Christ, “Through whom we have gained our reconciliation.” (Romans 5 v11) and like Paul she knew that this astonishing gift was totally gratuitous. Not only is it a free gift, but Therese realised that trying to earn it, which is a very human response since most of us cannot believe in such extraordinary unconditional love, is counter-productive. Trying to earn such a gift cramps God’s style of giving. Is it not an insult to his generosity? No, Therese saw that the only thing that she had to do was “to remain small and humble in the arms of God, relying to the point of rashness in His fatherly goodness.”
I began this meditation on the feast of St Stephen, 26th December. That his feast is so placed is not so much to remind us that followers of Christ have to suffer but to proclaim the message of Hope that the Christ Child came to bring.
“Stephen filled with the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at God’s right hand. I can see Heaven thrown open, he said, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”
The realization of that Glory awaits us all.
Sr. Penelope O.C.D – Carmelite Monastery, Quidenham
