“What Do You Desire?” Our Sisters from the Carmel of Flemington offer this charming explanation of the beauty enclosed in every Carmelite’s “Clothing day”!

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Our Sisters from the Carmel of Flemington offer this charming explanation of the beauty enclosed in every Carmelite’s “Clothing day”!

The day of a postulant’s Clothing is a beautiful day, a day of joy and of hope for both herself and the Community which she joins. She passes from the life of the world to the life of a religious, of a spouse of Christ, and this Passover is signaled by the reception of the religious habit. She puts aside her secular clothes and is invested with the garments which signify that she is to be clothed with Christ. And it all begins with a question. The postulant kneels before the Prioress who asks her the simple question: “What do you desire?” What do you want? What do you ask for that we can give you? What is the longing of your heart?

The reply is ritual: “The mercy of God, the poverty of the Order and the society of the Sisters.” Such words resonate with an otherworldly echo. They have a truly religious sound to them. They really ring out as a fitting expression of this simple, solemn ceremony. Yet do we often reflect on what they mean? What was I asking for when I said them, on that day years past (or not so long ago)? What does it mean to desire the mercy of God, the poverty of the Order and the society of the Sisters?

The mercy of God

Every act of God which helps us in any way is ascribed to His mercy, but the supreme act of God’s mercy is the forgiveness of sins. The two are inseparably linked in the penitential rite of the Mass where the priest says, “May almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life.” The forgiveness of sins is part of Carmel’s very life from the beginning. In 1226, Honorius III approved the Rule of St. Albert for the Carmelites “for the remission of your sins.” This is explained by Fr. Carlo Cicconetti, O.Carm in “The Rule of Carmel,” (p. 99): “Carmel’s vitae formula insured a penitential mode of existence imposed by Patriarch Albert to whom obedience was owed. Later with papal authority Honorius III (1226) put his stamp of approval on Carmel’s life of penance. His office of pope guaranteed efficacy of Albert’s formula to achieve satisfaction and sanctification….Candidates, serious about renouncing the world and its values, need not worry about being misled when they embraced Albert’s formula. Nor scruple that Carmel’s vocation was inadequate to bring them to sanctity and salvation.”

Three years, later, in 1229, Gregory IX confirmed the Bull of Honorius “of happy memory, given to you for remission of sin.” (Ibid. p. 102) Thus, within about 20 years of its writing, the Rule of St. Albert had received the confirmation by two Popes that it was a sure way to holiness.

Our Holy Mother St. Teresa was well aware of this aspect of the Rule, for she writes in her Life, “Another brother* of our Order, a good friar, was very ill; and when I was at Mass, I became recollected and saw him dead, entering into heaven without going through purgatory. He died, as I afterwards learned, at the very time of my vision. I was amazed that he had not gone to purgatory. I understood that, having become a friar and carefully kept the Rule, the Bulls of the Order had been of use to him, so that he did not pass into purgatory. I do not know why I  came to have this revealed to me; I think it must be because I was to learn that it is not enough for a man to be a friar in his habit—I mean, to wear the habit—to attain to that state of high perfection which that of a friar is.” (Life 38, 40) Her reference to “the Bulls,” referring to the Bulls of Honorius III and Gregory IX, shows her clear understanding of what a truly faithful adherence to the Rule can accomplish.

* (Commentators say that this was Fr. Diego Matías, a Calced Carmelite, who had been for a time the confessor of the Nuns at the Incarnation.)

On her deathbed, our Holy Mother St. Teresa urged her Nuns “I beg you, for the love of God, to observe them (the Rule and Constitutions) perfectly and to obey your Superiors. If you do this, as you are bound to do, no other miracles will be required for your canonization.” If we did not know of her reference to the Rule in the above-quoted passage from her Life we would be tempted to consider this last phrase a bit of pious hyperbole!

So, the life of Carmel is a life geared to bring about the forgiveness of our sins. But this is not an end in itself. The forgiveness of sins is aimed to bring us to union with God in Our Lord. But forgiveness does not just mean that my sins are wiped out, washed away, forgotten. This is what forgiveness does to the past, and it is good and necessary. But the main goal of forgiveness concerns the future and it involves the forging of a new relationship between God and myself.

This is the essence of forgiveness in any relationship. When I forgive someone or ask forgiveness of one whom I have injured, the two of us cannot just go back to where we were before the injury took place. This is to place ourselves open to a repetition of the same injury. If I hurt you and you forgive me, going back to where we were, without any change, means that I will hurt you again in the same way. I hurt you because there was something wrong on my part in our relationship. I hurt you because there is an untruth in the way I relate to you. I was not acting according to the way God made me and I was not treating you according to the way God made you. I need to purify myself of that untruth and learn to relate to you in harmony with the truth of each of us. Papering over the injury does not in itself heal what was wrong in the relationship. The only way to avoid a repetition of the injury is for me to change in the way I relate to you and act in truth and love, and this will change inevitably our whole relationship.

This holds true even more in my relationship with God. He forgives me for the way I hurt Him, but He also needs to bring me to a new way to relate to Him in order for me to avoid committing the same sin or imperfection. If I do not change the way I relate to Him, I will simply go around in circles committing the same sins. He needs to pour out His mercy upon me to change me and elevate me to a new relationship with Himself.

This explains the existence of Carmel. Carmel is geared toward the forgiveness of sins, and it surrounds me with the place, the atmosphere, the social setting which allow God to change my relationship to Him. I do not enter Carmel simply to continue the relationship which I had with God before I entered, and to live that former relationship now in a congenial setting. I enter to put myself in a setting where I will have to let myself by changed by Him. I enter to become a vessel of His mercy, a vessel continually on the potter’s wheel and continually worked by the divine hands.

The poverty of the Order

In order to be totally malleable and flexible in God’s hands, I must be totally poor. This means that I don’t hold on to anything. I leave much when I enter the Monastery, but I must learn to leave everything. The poverty of the Order does not just mean the poverty expressed in the Rule and the Constitutions. The poverty of the Order is that “God alone suffices.” I must give up my attachments to external things, and, even more, I must give up my attachments to internal things. I must give up my likes and dislikes, my 20 ideas, thoughts and opinions, and “put on the mind of Christ.” I must set aside my abilities and talents and accept to be weak in Him “that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”

The society of the Sisters

I entered Carmel to be united to Our Lord. The spirit of the first hermits on Mount Carmel is at the heart of our vocation, and there is very much the sense that here I live “God Alone and I.” But this is only part of our Carmelite vocation. As Fr. Daniel Chowning pointed out once, Carmel is “’God Alone and I’ and a few other people!” I entered to be united to Our Lord, and as this gradually comes about through my cooperation with His grace, I will discover that being united to Him means being united to every one of His members, and His members with whom I have the closest contact are my Sisters in this Community. In Carmel, I live in continual contact with Him, in the Eucharist and in my Sisters. He works to transform me through His grace and through my Sisters, and I can love Him interiorly in Himself and exteriorly in my Sisters.

Conclusion

It does not take much thinking to realize that in answering the Prioress’s question “What do you desire?” and in giving the ritual answer, I am asking for the three things that St. Teresa demands of her Nuns: humility, which makes me perfect clay in God’s hands, detachment from all created things, which opens me to transformation into Him, and love of my Sisters, which carries His grace to every member of His Church. I am sure that few of us had more than a vague inkling of what we were letting ourselves in for on the day of our Clothing any more than Teresa did when she ran away from her Father’s house. But He can work through that inkling, if we hold on to it and are true to that vision, and He can bring about a masterpiece of His grace in each one of us. That is what He desires and may His desires come to their fulfillment in us!

March 2018