The Carmelite story begins with a place, not a person, not a man or a woman, but a mountain. “Mount Carmel: tall, massive, brooding at the water’s edge,” wrote one historian who’d never seen it. I’ve seen it, as the mountain begins abruptly at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Mount Carmel climbs directly out of the blue water to a height of eighteen hundred feet, joining a range of hills that hug the coastline for twenty-one miles.

Carmel is hardly “tall” by Colorado standards. I lived for years in a hermitage beneath Colorado peaks that rose fourteen thousand feet into the sky. The “fourteener” closest to me was called Kit Carson. I began to call it “Kit Carmel” at first, then finally called it Mount Carmel.

The Mountain

Outside of Haifa in the state of Israel, the first Mount Carmel is part mountain, part symbol, the site of innumerable dramas in the Hebrew Bible as well as later history. The fiery prophet Elijah lived there, and then his disciple Elisha with his “school of prophets.” The author of the erotic Song of Songs uses the image of Carmel to describe the bride’s beauty, which we interpret as the beauty of the human soul. Early Christians made Carmel their retreat, prayed and lived there in its caves, beside Elijah’s well. And marauding armies climbed its steeps for battle and bloodshed: Saracens, Crusaders, Turks, French troops under Napoleon.

Mount Carmel is the “homeland of the heart” for the Carmelite family, those who live and breathe the mountain’s spirit, no matter where they live in the world. Carmelites are mountain men and women, called to match the mountain that gives them their name. According to Carmelite friar William McNamara, “The stellar moments of human excellence were celebrated by mountain men [and women] who climbed to the pinnacle of passion, the mountaintop, and were there transfigured…. [those who] enjoyed such peak human experiences were like the mountains themselves: ethereal and earthy, eerie and erotic.” He meant erotic in its real meaning: “a reaching and stretching with every fiber of one’s being for the fullness of life.”

The word Carmel in Hebrew means “garden” or “vineyard of the Lord.” Nicholas the Frenchman, one of the early and most controversial Carmelites, describes the beauty of Carmel’s garden. As he sang the psalms in his hermitage on Mount Carmel, he felt the mountains, his “brothers,” unite themselves with him “as a lute accompanying words.”

He wrote about the flowers and other “wild growing things,” the silent light of the stars, and “our sisters, the creatures” and how they all gladdened his solitude with their “laughter,” charming his eyes and ears, giving him rest and comfort. Silently, he said, “they give forth their beauty like a song encouraging our soul to praise the wonderful Creator.” As Thomas Merton noted, we must not call this love for Mother Earth “Franciscan” as if St. Francis had a monopoly on the contemplation of God in creation. This view is also Carmelite and our universal human heritage.

The Desert Experience

 

The story of Carmel is not only the story of a mountain but the story of the desert which surrounds it. The great traditions of the “People of the Book,” as the Qur’an calls them, grow out of the desert. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the desert is the place where we encounter God.

McNamara has written eloquently about the desert not merely as a natural phenomenon but a way of life. The complexity of “civilization” vanishes in the desert. We discover the difference between essentials and nonessentials. “The desert is a challenge, an invitation to a contest.” Can we let go of projected images of ourselves and come to terms with the truth of who we really are? Can we let go of our abstract theologies of God and come to terms with the far more mysterious God of our theologies? The desert, he insists, “interrupts the ordinary pattern of our daily existence and the stultifying process of our conventional routine piety.”

The spirituality of the Carmelite tradition reflects the spirit of the desert: immediate, essential, uncompromising, without formulas, methods, or techniques. “What would men and women, fiercely devoted to spiritual liberty and accustomed to the breeze that comes from the desert, have to do with special forms and complicated methods?” asks Paul-Marie of the Cross, another of my favorite Carmelite authors. “Instinctively they cling to what is most simple and ordinary because that is what makes it possible for them to give themselves in peace to the one thing necessary.” Carmelites are notoriously anti-technique and offer freedom and simplicity to a world where even meditation and prayer can be complicated by “technologies.”

Elijah and Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Arab peoples call Mount Carmel “Mount St. Elijah.” Elijah the prophet is the moral founder of the Carmelite tradition, the spiritual father, the masculine archetype in whom Carmelites see themselves as in a mirror. Elijah appears abruptly in Jewish history. Without any introduction, we first meet him in the opening Book of Kings as he boldly declares: “Behold the living God in whose presence I stand.” Merton calls Elijah’s proclamation “an allegory of the whole Carmelite vocation.”

The spirit of Elijah is a “double spirit” of contemplation and action. King Ahab of Israel called Elijah “the man who gives Israel no rest” or “trouble to Israel.” If the Elijan spirit is a double spirit, then that spirit is double trouble! McNamara called Elijah “a gnat on the rump of society!” Since Elijah called down fire from heaven and at the end of his earthly life did not die but was taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot (“Swing low, sweet chariot,” we sing with Gospel choirs), fire is his symbol.

The Mother of Carmel is Mary, the mother of Jesus, the feminine archetype gently balancing the fierce Elijan spirit. She also represents the contemplative ideal in her stillness, pondering all things “in her heart.” In the Carmelite tradition, Mary first appears in a vision Elijah had as he sat on Mount Carmel, looking out at the Mediterranean. I’ve sat on what I imagined was this very spot, looking at the same blue sea. Elijah saw a cloud “no larger than a man’s hand,” as we read in the first Book of  Kings.

The cloud brings rain in torrents over the parched land of Israel. Since Elijah had brought about the long drought, he now relieves it with the help of Our Lady. Carmelites have interpreted the cloud as Mary, a symbol of the reign of grace she inaugurates by bearing Christ into the world. The cloud, composed of air and water, is an apt feminine symbol for Mary, filled with the Sun who is Christ.

Jessica Powers, the twentieth-century poet who became a Carmelite nun and took the name Miriam of the Holy Spirit, wrote a song about the Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel which we sang every year on her feast day, July 16, when we also renewed our monastic vows. The first verse describes the “ancient prophecy God revealed to St. Elias by an oriental sea.” Powers then played with the word-sounds of rain and reign and concluded the verse with the reign or “rainfall” of Mary’s grace. She calls Mary “Lady of the mystic mountain.”

When we built our chapel at Nova Nada in Nova Scotia, we created two stained glass windows to honor the masculine-feminine balance in the Carmelite tradition. Elijah rides his chariot on the right side of the altar with the raven who fed him in the desert as he escaped from Queen Jezebel who wanted to kill him. Our Lady of Mount Carmel is on the left, rising in her cloud and “clothed with the sun,” as the Book of Revelation describes her.

Hermits on Mount Carmel

On top of Mount Carmel in 2000, I look for Elijah’s cloud over the Mediterranean, while Dave Denny examines a hermit’s cave.

The first Carmelites in recorded history appear in 1155 C.E., living as hermits in solitude and contemplation in huts and caves on Mount Carmel. I’ve peeked into these caves on my two visits there, hiking through Wadi es-Siah. The hermits had likely been there long before. Thomas Merton describes these first Carmelites as “original and unique.” Why? Because “neither the eremitical nor the apostolic [outreach] of this new life were systematically organized and neither was the subject of a formal program.”

Here’s how Nicholas the Frenchmen described the Carmelites’ uniqueness. “…the hermits of Carmel persevered for a long time in the solitude of the desert, but as they intended to be of service to their neighbor,… they went sometimes, but rarely, down from their hermitage. That which they had harvested with the sickle of contemplation, in solitude, they went… to sow it abroad on all sides.”

Around 1209, these men asked Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, to draw up a rule reflecting the way of life they had been spontaneously living for decades. This Rule of St. Albert is not as formal as other monastic rules, a brief document of some twenty short and succinct paragraphs. As Paul-Marie described it, the rule was more like “an invitation to live rather than a formula of life.”

A fragment from the Rule of St. Albert

Some of the original Carmelites were probably veterans of the Crusades, an era I idealized in my youth. Later I learned the truth about the violent injustices of this terrible period in Christian history. So I love how my friend Dave Denny imagines the first Carmelites lamenting the destruction of their Crusader days, laying down their metal swords, and taking up the “sword of the Spirit” instead for what we call “spiritual warfare” against the false self. Carmelite spirituality reflects the rugged virile spirit of the warrior in both these understandings of crusade. “Spiritual warfare” really refers to our inevitable struggles in life. But there are so many negative connotations of this phrase in our bloody embattled world, I prefer now to speak more in terms of “spiritual chivalry.”

Under Saracen persecution, the last Carmelite hermits were forced to leave Mount Carmel by 1291 with the fall of Acre, the last bastion of Latin Christianity in the Holy Land. As they established foundations in Europe, the Carmelites became over organized, overcrowded, and overactive in order to survive. Once they moved away from the mountain and the desert, they began to lose their unique eremitical and contemplative charism.

Teresa and John

Almost three hundred years later, in sixteenth-century Spain, Teresa of Avila’s renewal of the Carmelite Order was a restoration of the primitive ideal lived by the first Carmelites on the mountain. “People say that this is a new Order and accuse us of inventing new things,” Teresa wrote in a letter in 1578. “Let them read our Primitive Rule, for what we follow is simply that Rule without mitigation.” Teresa added elements I find bizarre: cloister, veils, and grilles to separate her sisters from visitors. But these were her attempt to make solitude and a more contemplative life possible in distracted urban life. Her own contemplative prayer had been impeded by the dispersion of energy she experienced in the convent parlor.

In her Way of Perfection, Teresa encouraged her sisters to have “a stretch of land… with some hermitages (2.9).” She wrote, “the style of life we aim to follow is not just that of nuns but of hermits (13.6).… Let us remember our holy fathers of the past, those hermits whose lives we aim to imitate (11.4).” In her Interior Castle, she reminds her followers, “… all of us who wear this holy habit of Carmel are called to prayer and contemplation. This call explains our origin; we are the descendants of men who felt this call, of those holy fathers on Mount Carmel who in such great solitude… [sought] this precious pearl of contemplation (5.1.2).”

Most of us are not called to the eremitical or even monastic life, but we can incorporate some degree of solitude into our lives in the world. Solitude is a heathy and pivotal contemplative practice that deepens our personal lives, our relationships with others, and our love life with the Divine.

St. John of the Cross considered Teresa his madre, mentor, and friend. He describes the Carmelite path as an arduous ascent up the slopes of Mount Carmel. The end of this climb is the marriage of bride and bridegroom, the soul and God, as we see in John’s exquisite poetry, “The Spiritual Canticle,” based on the Bible’s Song of Songs. In verse twenty-seven, he writes about the bride entering “the sweet garden of her desire” and resting in delight “on the gentle arms of her beloved.”

The Yin-Yang of Carmel

The history of the Carmelite tradition is a study in yin-yang, the Oriental principle of feminine-masculine complementarity in the universe. We  see the masculine in the geography of the mountain, which reaches and stretches out of the feminine earth into the aerie heights. Although the spirituality which grows out of the desert is rugged, the geography of the desert is markedly feminine with its wide-open spaciousness abandoned to the ravishments of sun and wind, sandstorms and monsoon rains.

Elijah is a dramatically masculine figure symbolized by fire, while the femininity of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is aptly symbolized by the cloud in which she “appeared” to Elijah. Although the first twelfth-century  hermits were all men, they were deeply in tune with Mother Earth and devoted to Our Lady, naming themselves after her, the Hermits of St. Mary of Mount Carmel.

In reforming the Carmelite Order in sixteenth-century Spain, Teresa of Avila exhibited a strong animus in her “warrior energy,” but her life and writings indicate a feminine woman, complemented by her confessor and faithful friend, John of the Cross, a fiery new Elijah, immersed in “The Living Flame of Love,” the title of another of his poems. (Teresa has the distinction of being the only woman in the history of the Catholic Church to reform an order of men, and John was the first to join her.)

Given this masculine-feminine balance reflected in Carmelite history, it seems natural that my own Carmelite community emerged in the 1960s as a mixed community of men and women. We tried to embody the spirit of mountain and desert, Elijah and Our Lady, John of the Cross and Teresa, and live according to the primitive Carmelite ideal in a contemporary way. As William McNamara, our root teacher, wrote in 1970, the year that St. Teresa became the first woman “Doctor” of the Church: “ It is ironic, and yet a typical trait in history, that such a fitting form of contemplative life in the modern world is an ancient monastic model: primitive Carmelite eremiticism.” I was glad to be part of that life from 1967 until I left the community in 2003.

 

 

I’m happy, too, that the life I live today in my Tucson apartment, my “urban hermitage,” with Dave Denny living in the apartment-hermitage below me, continues to embody the yin-yang of Carmel. I’m not on Mount Carmel, but the distant Tucson mountains surround me as I look southwest from my balcony. I’m not on the Mediterranean, but I swim in a sea of saguaros and other cactus. I’m not immersed in the silence of Mount Carmel, living as I do above a parking lot, among city dwellers who seem to think noise is a sign of their vitality. But I do live in a contemplative solitude I carve creatively out of my life, especially early mornings and late at night while others sleep.

When I first began my Carmelite life in Arizona in 1967, I painted a river rock from Sycamore Canyon with part of verse thirty-four of John’s “Spiritual Canticle.” This sums up my Carmelite life today in an urban apartment every bit as much as it did in my first desert hermitage over fifty-five years ago:

She lived in solitude,
And now in solitude has built her nest;
And in solitude He guides her,
He alone, who also bears
In solitude the wound of love.