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. 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.” 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:
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. 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. 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.” 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. 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:
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:
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...