The Story of Carmel
The Earthy Mysticism espoused by William McNamara grew out of his experience of, and lifetime immersion in, the unique spirituality of the Carmelite tradition — the same tradition that gave birth to some of Christianity’s most famous mystics, including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux, and Edith Stein. McNamara joined the Catholic religious order of the Discalced Carmelites at the age of 13, attending the order’s minor seminary (high school) in Hubertus, Wisconsin. After college and advanced theology studies, McNamara was ordained as a Carmelite priest in 1951 and then studied for a graduate degree in psychology at Boston College. In 1955, he founded the Carmelite magazine, Spiritual Life, which still exists. Finally, in 1960, after an audience with Pope John XXIII, he received a commission to create a new form of Carmelite community that hearkened back to the original Carmelite ideal of life in the desert.
Below are the reflections on this ideal, given by McNamara and Tessa Bielecki in 2001, for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of McNamara’s ordination as a Catholic priest.
The Story of Carmel
Tessa Bielecki and William McNamara
The truth is much too large and inscrutable to be contained inside neat, tidy categorical concepts and ideas. Doctrine and theology are indispensable, but they are not enough. The Christian faith did not initially come to us as systematic theology. It came as story. The story faded and monumental doctrinal theses developed. In losing the story we have lost both the power and the glory. We have committed the unpardonable sin of transforming an exciting story into a dull system. We must recover the story if we are to recover a faith for our day. We must tell and retell the old story and in the telling of it discover and discern our own story.
The Carmelite story begins with Mt. Carmel, rising directly out of the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Mt. Carmel is the “homeland of the heart” for the Carmelite family, those who live and breathe the spirituality that grows out of the physicality of that mountain. In every century, Carmelites everywhere need to breathe the air of the heights of Carmel if they are to live. Carmelites are mountain men and women, called to match the mountain that gives them their name.
The word Carmel in Hebrew means “garden.” Nicholas the Frenchman, one of the first Prior Generals of the Carmel it Order, describes the beauty of Carmel’s garden. Relating to the mountain on a deeply personal level, he calls its hills and slopes his “conventual brethren.” As Thomas Merton notes, this love of nature is not to be called Franciscan, “as if St Francis had a monopoly on the contemplation of the Creator and his creation.” This view is essentially Catholic, Christian 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 desert plays a vastly important role in the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions and in the monasticism of both East and West. The desert is the place where we encounter God, the place where God visits his people. The desert is not merely a natural phenomenon but a way of life. The complexity of civilization vanishes in the desert. Life is reduced to simple decisions, and a wrong decision may be fatal. The desert is no place for diversions, distractions, luxuries, or trivia. In the desert we rediscover the difference between essentials and nonessentials. Mediocrity becomes impossible. God is the way of the real. The desert shatters our managerial complacency, our spiritual torpor, our barren, bloodless dalliance with the pretty poison of life, and forces us into confrontation with the real. The central pervading atmosphere of the desert is death. But it is not all that bleak. The beauty of the desert is spectacular! The life you find there in tenacious trees, blooming cactus, and hardy wild flowers is as startling as the death you find in dry creek beds, blowing “dustdevils,” and sunbleached bones.
The desert is a long arduous trek through purgation into Paradise. The experience begins with the free, deliberate decision to suffer. It ends with the uproariously happy surprise of being in harmony with the universe, in the glory of God’s presence, and incalculably in love with all that is.
The spirituality of the Carmel tradition reflects the spirit of the desert: immediate, essential, uncompromising. That means no formulas, no methods, no 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? 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,” wrote a French Carmelite. Carmelites are notoriously anti-technique. They offer freedom and simplicity to our contemporary culture where even the realm of prayer is spoiled by technology.
Elijah and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel
The Arabs call Mt. Carmel Mt. St. Elijah. Elijah the prophet is the moral founder of the Carmelite tradition, the spiritual father, the masculine archetype, in whom every Carmelite sees himself as in a mirror. The spirit of Elijah is a “double spirit” of contemplation and action. Elijah appears abruptly in Jewish history. The Bible gives us no preliminary information about him. We first meet him in the opening Book of Kings through a bold declaration: “Behold the living God in whose presence I stand” (1 Kgs 17:1). These words comprise the shortest and most effective autobiography ever written. They have remained the charter of all contemplatives ever since, particularly the Carmelite family.
Elijah walked forty days and forty nights into the desert to find God where he had first revealed himself to Israel. There in eremitical solitude, Elijah became a God-intoxicated man and a prominent, crucial figure in the most pressing and dramatic issues of his day. He resolved the problems of the Jews with desert directness. Fearlessly facing the full assembly of his countrymen on Mt. Carmel, he lashed out at their indecision with the stringent words: “How long, O Israel, will you limp between two sides? If the Lord be God, follow him! But if Baal, then follow him” (1 Kgs 18:21). He then challenged the priests of Baal to a showdown of strength, a trial by fire.
Ahab, King of Israel at the time of Elijah, called him “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! Elijah is a figure of absolutely primeval force, a wild unstemmable colossus of God, a gnat on the rump of society. The Mother of Carmel is Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Carmel lives and breathes Mary because she represents another ideal and provides crucial feminine balance to the fierce Elijan spirit.
At the end of the Old Testament, Mary, the woman wrapped in silence, emerges with incomparable feminine force. Hundreds and thousands of years of stammering quest are concentrated and burst forth in this valiant Virgin’s fiat: “Be it done unto me according to thy word” (Lk 1:38). According to the Christian tradition, in Mary culminates all the expectation of the Jewish people. Mary is the epitome and incarnation of the long waiting of twenty centuries. She achieved the indispensable human disposition: wise passiveness, openness, and receptivity. God was prepared to come as an infant once humanity had built the cradle. Mary was the cradle, the marvelous flower sprung out of the Israelite desert.
Within the Carmelite tradition, Mary first appears in a vision to Elijah, as he sat on the top of Mt. Carmel, looking out over the Mediterranean Sea. Elijah sees a cloud “no larger than a man’s hand,” which brings with it rain in torrents over the parched land of Israel (1 Kgs 18:41-46). For hundreds of years Carmelites have interpreted the cloud as Mary, symbol of the reign of grace which Mary inaugurates by bearing Christ into the world.
Twelfth and Sixteenth Century Carmelites
The first Carmelites in recorded history appear in 1155 AD., living as apostolic hermits in solitude and contemplation in huts and caves atop Mt. Carmel. As Thomas Merton explains: “The first Carmelites had initiated something quite original and unique… neither the eremitical nor the apostolic aspects of this new life were systematically organized and neither was the subject of a formal program.” Eventually these men asked Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, to draw up a rule reflecting the way of life they had spontaneously adopted. Unlike the more formal and juridical rules of other monastic traditions, there is “nothing narrowly literal” about the Rule of St. Albert. It is more like “an invitation to live rather than a formula for life.”
Many of these original Carmelites were Crusaders. The spirituality is a rugged, manly, virile piety, the spirituality the soldier, the fighter, the warrior. There is a virile note every part of the Rule of St. Albert. Under persecution, these original Carmelite hermits were forced to leave Mt. Carmel and establish foundations in Europe where they became over-organized, overcrowded and overactive. Once they moved off the mountain and out of the desert, they lost their unique and invaluable charism and ceased to make their distinct contribution human culture.
In sixteenth-century Spain, St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross were pressed by God to restore the primitive Carmelite ideal. The Teresian reform added dramatic cloistered features to make the contemplative life possible in the distracted urban life of Europe. Teresa of Avila was beautiful, charming, and full of good humor. She played the tambourine, danced among her sisters with castanets, and prayed “O God, deliver me from sour-faced saints!” Her sisters found her in the convent kitchen one day relishing a roast partridge. Seeing their scandalized expressions, Teresa exclaimed simply and passionately: “When I pray and fast, I pray and fast; and when I eat partridge, I eat partridge!”
Teresa was a remarkably wise and wild woman who reformed not only convents of women but monasteries of men. Her spirit was militant as well as matrimonial. She shows us the muscular personality needed to embrace the “double spirit” of Elijah and balance contemplation and action, work and prayer, the inner and the outer life. In her Way of Perfection, she told her nuns: “I want you to be strong men.” According to one of her own friars: “A breath of warrior energy animated her.”
Like St. Teresa, his madre and mentor, St. John of the Cross considered himself a conquistador of the spiritual life. St. John, like St. Teresa, is a Mystical Doctor of the Church, who outlines the Carmelite path as an arduous ascent up the slopes of Mt. Carmel. Mt. Carmel is the central symbol in John’s mystical theology; not only historical but trans-historical; not merely physical but metaphysical. In John’s spiritual writings, Mt. Carmel is the Mount of Perfection, a metaphor, of course, for Mt. Calvary itself, where we are all to be crucified with Christ, only then to be resurrected and made new.
The Yin-Yang of Carmel
The history of the Carmelite tradition provides a fascinating study in yin-yang, the Oriental principle of feminine-masculine complementarity in the universe. The story of Carmel shows an unusual masculine-feminine balance. We see the masculine principle in the geography of the mountain, which reaches and stretches itself out of the feminine earth into the aerie heights. Although the spirituality which grows out of the desert is rugged and virile, the geography of the desert is markedly feminine with its wide open spaciousness abandoned to the ravishments of sun and wind and rain.
Elijah is a dramatically masculine figure symbolized by fire. The femininity of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel is aptly captured in the symbol of the cloud in which she “appeared” to Elijah. Although the first twelfth-century hermits were all men, they were deeply devoted to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel and named themselves after her. They were also radically in touch and in tune with Mother Earth, as Nicholas the Frenchman illustrates.
In order to reform the Carmelite Order in sixteenth-century Spain, St. Teresa of Avila exhibited a strong animus in her “warrior energy,” but her life, letters, and mystical writings clearly indicate an utterly feminine woman, complemented by her confessor and faithful friend, St. John of the Cross, a fiery new Elijah, immersed in the “Living Flame of Love,” who once wrote: “Oh God, you make my soul feel like a woman.”
This masculine-feminine complementarity reaches its apogee in the mystery of Jesus Christ. In the Christian tradition, that dimension of the Godhead we call Wisdom (Sophia) is feminine. Feminine Wisdom unites with the masculine Jesus and the Christ emerges as the fullness of man-womanhood.
It seems natural and inevitable that the Christian spirit of Carmel which reflects such masculine-feminine balance throughout its venerable history, should result in a mixed community of men and women called the Spiritual Life Institute, a small monastic community of hermits founded in 1960 with a mandate from the visionary Pope John XXIII. This new community recaptures the spirit of the mountain and the desert, Elijah and Our Lady, John of the Cross and Teresa, and lives according to the primitive Carmelite ideal in a contemporary manner. It is ironic, and yet a typical trait in history, that such a fitting contemporary form of contemplative life in the modern world turns out to be an ancient monastic model, primitive Carmelite eremitism.
Spiritual Life Institute hermits live like the twelfth-century Carmelites who followed the example of the prophet Elijah and lived on Mt. Carmel as laymen under a common monastic rule characterized by simplicity and minimal structure to enable them to offer God a pure and undivided heart. Each one has a separate hermitage where he “meditates day and night on the law of the Lord unless engaged in some other just occupation” (Rule of St. Albert).
As the Spiritual Life Institute commemorates its fortieth anniversary year in 2000, the men and women of the community celebrate as faithful Sons and daughters of the ancient Carmelite tradition but also as pioneers, path- finders, and pilgrims of the Absolute. We must not depend too much on the story, on the map, on what is known and familiar. Dependency would kill us, for it is the unknown that gives us life. The unknown flowers when we are receptive to it and allow it to enter. The unknown carries us to the constantly forming edge of the world where light, beauty and ecstasy are found. There is no other path to the Real.
National Catholic Reporter Takes a Look at the Spiritual Life Institute
The monks at the Spiritual Life Institute are hermits focused on mysticism, yet the group embodies an earthy pragmatism, enabling them to build bridges between the institutional church and those struggling to find spiritual health and healing.
In their 40-year history, the hermits have founded four monasteries: in Sedona, Ariz.; Kemptville, Nova Scotia; Crestone, Colo., and the newest in Skreen, Ireland.
The Sedona and Kemptville hermitages have been closed because of vanishing wilderness. Residents think a border of wild lands is necessary to preserve the hermit spirit, but at these two locations developers have encroached on these borderlands.
Founded by Discalced Carmelite Fr. William McNamara, the Spiritual Life Institute began as an effort to renew the ancient Carmelite vision in a contemporary Christian community. In 1960, McNamara had an audience with Pope John XXIII, who blessed his effort and even gave advice on which bishops would support or oppose the project.
In 1963, McNamara became administrator of the Holy Cross Chapel in Sedona. Living in the high desert formed what would become known as the “desert experience,” an elemental part of the Spiritual Life Institute. McNamara believed a renewal of the eremitic Carmelite tradition required a desert or wilderness.
Striving to maintain the spirit of Vatican II, McNamara favored an ecumenical thrust, and pondered the ideal of a male-female community. The theory became reality when Tessa Bielecki came in 1967 after college. She had been impressed by McNamara during a college retreat. Bielecki is now the abbess of the institute.
The Nada–Spanish for “nothing”–Hermitage in Crestone sits at an altitude of 8,000 feet, where the vast San Luis Valley meets the towering Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains. The monks’–as both men and women here are called–small dwellings, bermed on one side with desert sand, evoke images of Colorado’s first hermits–miners seeking gold in the frigid mountains.
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Interview with What is Enlightenment Magazine
Here is an interview Abba Willie gave to What is Enlightenment Magazine in 2000:
WIE: Father McNamara, you are a Carmelite monk, a contemplative in one of the most respected monastic traditions in the world. What inspired you to renounce worldly life and set your feet to the path of asceticism and solitude?
FR. WILLIAM MCNAMARA: The original motive, affirmed and reconfirmed more passionately and intensely over the years, was and is a desire for the fullness of life. In order to be prepared for and receptive to that onslaught of life and love that the Creator provides for us in himself and through everything that is connected with him (because God is not a separate God, he is distinct and transcendental but not separate) one has to become pure, one has to become empty, one has to become responsive, one has to become alive and alert to all the possibilities of living. I wanted that fullness of life and I didn’t want to become halfhearted. I didn’t want to get caught in half-truths. I didn’t want to be stymied or seduced by mediocrity, by pseudo-events rather than events. I wanted the whole thing. I wanted utter reality. I wanted the ultimate. So I had to renounce whatever seemed to me to be less than real.
WIE: What did you see as being less than real?
WM: I found most communication an impediment to communion. We communicate so much—a veritable Vesuvius of verbiage—that we don’t hear the Word itself. The truth escapes us. I think that one of the worst pollutions in the world is verbal pollution.
So I didn’t want to be choked by verbal pollution, by a shallow, empty, febrile kind of talk. I wanted a life that was dominated by and permeated by silence. And then, out of that matrix of silence, I hoped that the deeper words would come, the primordial words. But the only words that would be worthwhile would be those which are connected with the original Word, the Word of God, the Word that became flesh.
Another thing would be the way reality escapes us, precisely because we are in such a hurry. We are in a stampede almost constantly. There’s no time to think, there’s no time to love, there’s no time to be. We’re driven to do, do, do at a rather shallow, superficial level, and that prevents us from being, which is most important. As Lao Tzu said, “The most important thing to do is to be.”
So that would be another aspect of the search for truth, the search for the Ultimate. Again, it’s communion rather than communication. If communication sets the stage for communion, that’s wonderful communication. If it doesn’t, it’s useless. The big thing that every human being is striving for is communion. And if that is not experienced on all levels—communion with God, communion with human beings, communion with animals, vegetables, minerals, the earth—then we experience the terrible affliction of loneliness and isolation. That’s what is dominating this modern society. Everyone’s lonely, everyone’s isolated. So we need time to be, we need enough silence to be, we need enough solitude to be, we need enough good communion with others to be.
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