‘You identify yourself very much with what you do, don’t you?’ my friend remarked as we sat in her car going home from a school drop-off.
I am a 61 year old Granny now and that conversation happened many years ago, but her words struck home and have never left me. She was quite right.
From my earliest years I had the sense that in and of myself I was not sufficient as a human being. It was therefore incumbent on me to create an identity acceptable to myself, to the world and to God. You might think that because of this I forged a high flying, over-achiever’s career, but not at all. A combination of circumstances meant that I never really got properly started on any career before marrying and having children. Subsequent to that I had a number of part time jobs of different types, studied various courses and spent years as a stay at home mum – a somewhat confusing medley of self-created identities and none of which I felt quite passed muster.
It would be a fair question to ask what this has to do with ‘hope in Carmel’. In answer, I turn to the bees mining spiritual honey (in the paraphrased words of Jacques de Vitry) of the first Carmelite community on Mount Carmel.
It was studying these thirteenth-century hermits, as part of a course with the Carmelite Institute of Britain & Ireland, that first drew me to my Carmelite vocation. I was not a Carmelite at the time, but found myself identifying with the first Carmelites to the extent that when reading about them I would think not ‘they’, but ‘we’. What was it that resonated so strongly with me?
The hermits were busy storing their honey and they also worked, as the Rule of St Albert bade them. They were ‘do-ing’. But what was the essence of their doing? It was, again in de Vitry’s words, ‘offering the Lord the sweetness of their spirit in their little cells’. They were primarily offering themselves – not their works or their merits.
Of course our good works are important. ‘Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds’ (James 2:18). Service is part of our Carmelite charism. What I had to learn, and what I think many people in our current social climate have to be reassured about, is that what we can do does not define who we are or what we are worth. Being ‘economically active’ is not the ultimate measure of someone’s value as a human being.
The ‘pearl of great price’ that I found in Carmel is that there is an interior cell where we can always retreat and in that cell is Someone Who accepts us. It is the love we find there that defines us – as children of God. This is the ‘one thing necessary’. I believe that this is a much needed message of hope to offer to a society that struggles with many forms of identity confusion and growing rates of mental health issues and suicide as well as a plethora of social and economic expectations and pressures. We have nothing to prove, nothing to ‘do’ to justify our worth.
Furthermore, around us are others in their cells who have discovered the same identity as a beloved child of God: our sisters and brothers with the same blood running in their veins, the same hope animating them. It is a community thing and so our safe place, our place of true identity, is also a place of belonging, in the healthiest and least divisive way possible.
Carmel therefore has an ineffably precious hope to offer our fragmented and confused world, especially to those who find themselves on the fringes of acceptability. The challenge for us as Carmelites is to ensure that we are truly living our vocation right down to our inner desires and values, so that we can be ‘lamps placed on a lampstand’. This requires ongoing purification of heart and habit. A good focus, perhaps, for our Lenten disciplines!
Anneli Figura TOC
