Shoeless

Carmelite Spirituality in a Disquieted World

Donald Wallenfang, Megan Wallenfang

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781666700053
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Mystik

What does Carmelite spirituality have to teach us about living at peace in the frenetic world of ours today? Everything. Guiding the reader through a mystical maze of themes, Shoeless: Carmelite Spirituality in a Disquieted World displays the heart of the Carmelite charism and apostolate as set forth by the religious reform of Saint Teresa of Avila in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The reader will be introduced to the history of the Carmelite Order and its unique features, including its eremitic and monastic roots, attentiveness to the human soul, the virtue of humility, the spousal meaning of the body, the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the art of silent contemplative prayer. In addition, Shoeless features the testimonies of its authors and their mutual vocation to the sacrament of marriage and the Carmelite way of life. Readers will become acquainted intimately with the meaning of Mount Carmel and the peculiarity of its zealous form of missionary contemplation. A preview is given of the spiritual itinerary toward the summit of this secret height that includes reference to the interior castle and the dark night of the soul.

Charism

2

The Soul, Fraternity, and Allegiance to Christ

I. The Feminine Genius of the Soul

A. Discovering the Soul

At the heart of Carmelite spirituality lives the human soul.6 As the spiritual centerpiece of the human being, the soul includes all that is unique to each individual person: personality, conscience, spiritual affectivity, intellect, memory, and will. Intimately intertwined with the body, the soul refers to all that is most interior to the self. With Teresa of Ávila’s reformed Order of Discalced Carmelites came a new attentiveness to the human soul and its relationship with God. Twentieth-century French Carmelite Paul-Marie of the Cross puts it this way: “The desert of the soul is the very place of God’s communication.”7 Likewise, Teresa realized that authentic Carmelite spirituality had to ponder deeply the mystery of the soul as the precise locale of communion with God. As a woman, Teresa was attuned to the interior dimensions of the person in a way that men were not. She brought these attunements to the forefront of Carmelite life, making them its trademark.

Teresa’s premier work on the soul is The Interior Castle. She begins the work by admitting the common neglect of human beings to recognize the reality of the soul:

It is a shame and unfortunate that through our own fault we don’t understand ourselves or know who we are. Wouldn’t it show great ignorance, my daughters, if someone when asked who he was didn’t know, and didn’t know his father or mother or from what country he came? Well now, if this would be so extremely stupid, we are incomparably more so when we do not strive to know who we are, but limit ourselves to considering only roughly these bodies. Because we have heard and because faith tells us so, we know we have souls.8

What was true in the sixteenth century is even more true today: the soul goes largely forgotten within the culture and among all those trinkets that it prizes most highly.9 This becomes the first challenge for Carmelite spirituality—that we are unfamiliar with our souls and how they relate to God. Instead, we tend to be preoccupied with our physical bodies and their repertory of needs. Madison Avenue leads us to believe that with the right combination of vitamins, dietary adjustments, fitness plans, and wardrobe, we will arrive blissfully at Destination Happiness. Yet confronted with such guarantees, we are reminded of the words of Saint Paul: “Train yourself for devotion, for, while physical training is of limited value, devotion is valuable in every respect, since it holds a promise of life both for the present and for the future” (1 Tim 4:7–8).

Turning attention toward the soul is the beginning of understanding what is meant by contemplative prayer in the Carmelite tradition. Carmelites are led to ask questions such as these: What is the soul? How does the soul relate to God? What does God desire for my soul? How do I let my soul be shaped by the Holy Spirit? What are the obstacles in the way of the soul’s approach to God, and how do I rid myself of these? What does it mean for a soul to be humble?

B. The Soul as God’s Heaven

For the Carmelites, preoccupation about the soul does not mean devaluing or neglecting the importance of the body. Carmelite anthropology does not sever the integral union between soul and body.10 Rather, by attending first to the centrality of the soul, the dignity of the body is elevated all the more.

In her celebrated prayer to God as Trinity, Elizabeth of the Trinity places the accent on the soul’s relation to God: “Give peace to my soul; make it Your heaven, Your beloved dwelling and Your resting place . . . . O consuming Fire, Spirit of Love, ‘come upon me,’ and create in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word: that I may be another humanity for Him in which He can renew His whole Mystery.”11 She depicts the soul itself as heaven. This is a common Carmelite conviction. Though we often consider the transcendence and distance of heaven from earth, the Carmelite paradigm inverts this tendency and regards the soul as the privileged abode of God.

Indeed, this radical paradigm shift bears great fruit for self-awareness in prayer. You begin to regard yourself as the treasure that you are—God’s treasure, created to be a spiritual vessel of divine Presence, an ark of the divine Word, a womb of divine Love.

C. The Soul as Martha and Mary

In imitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who conceived the eternal Son of God in her virginal womb, every human soul is to become a fertile spiritual womb for the abiding and perennial gestation of divine Life. This is a difficult concept for a man to comprehend, for he has no experience of bearing a child in his own body. Man must look to woman—to the feminine genius—in order to emulate the empathic bearing of the other within the same. This signifies a universal human vocation for men and women alike: to bear the hidden Deity within the hospitable hollow of the soul.12 Carmelite attunement to the soul awakens one to encounter the other from without and the Other from within. Teresa of Ávila never tires of referring to the complementarity between Mary, the contemplative, and Martha, the servant:

Let us desire and be occupied in prayer not for the sake of our enjoyment but so as to have this strength to serve . . . . Believe me, Martha and Mary must join together in order to show hospitality to the Lord and to have him always present and not host him badly for failing to give him something to eat. How would Mary, always seated at his feet, provide him with food if her sister did not help her? His food is that in every way possible we draw souls that they may be saved and praise him always.13

Watching and waiting with great solicitude, the soul is vigilant before the other. With spiritual being as its essence, the soul is destined to take leave of itself in pursuit of the other, whether fellow human or divine Guest. The soul is at once womb and groom, mother and father, receptor and initiator of gift. Vacating its tendency toward self-indulgence and self-absorption, the soul commences its daily exodus, departing from itself through the desert of self-denial.

Paradoxically, the soul becomes its true self by leaving behind the mirage of Narcissus, inverting its suffocating paralysis of more of the same—the self and only the self. In evacuating itself from itself toward the other, one breathes life into the other (Martha) and receives the Breath of God (Mary). This is the meaning of love and responsibility as revealed by the theological architecture of Carmelite mysticism.

As human beings, we are tempted toward the either-or, the one-or-the-other. Catholic theology, however, reveals a paradoxical logic of both-and. Perhaps you can have your cake and eat it, too. Saverio Cannistrà and the Definitors of the Discalced Carmelites put this notion beautifully in a 2011 letter from the definitory:

We think of our communities subject to two forces: one centripetal which calls us to live interiorly, the other centrifugal which asks us to live for others. If both tensions are not brought into a positive equilibrium, the individual and the community can become a sect, the movement toward the interior prevails, or the force which called us outwards quickly flags. Probably, our present structure of life, founded many times on doing rather than being, as I have already written on more than one occasion, tends to lead us more towards a breakup, a de-structuring of community. As an answer, especially in younger religious, the call is felt to live more interiorly. But if this does not find a way to express itself, in a bodily manner of service, it ends up by being sectarian and leads to alienation and dissatisfaction in those who propose it and, in this case, express it.14

Appealing to the Catholic both-and of Mary and Martha, this exhortation shows the unified complementarity between the active apostolates and the irreducible vocation to contemplative prayer. Even Carmelites, who are especially contemplative at their core, are to live with the fluidity of adapting to the real need...