Carmel and personal development

I have been asked to give a talk as part of a Symposium being put on by the Carmelites in October in their monastery in Derry.  The talk is on Carmel and human and Christian development.  I really like this theme because I have witnessed many souls in Carmel growing and blossoming through their vocation, while receiving many blessings and graces myself.  Teresa’s Interior Castle teaches us that the journey into God is also the journey into the depths of our own being because He lives there, and with the growth of our relationship to God comes a growth in our self-awareness.  This has been intuited by popular gurus of the personal development/self-help movement like the Americans Caroline Myss and Mirabai Starr, who have based handbooks on the Interior Castle.  The only problem is that they write from an eclectic viewpoint, by which I mean that they replace the strongly Catholic foundation of Teresa’s thinking with something called ‘spirituality’.  This itself is a reminder to me that the graces promised in the teachings of the great Carmelite saints come to us through Holy Mother Church – as is made clear in the Constitutions of  the Seculars.  Our love for Carmel is the same as our love for the Church.

Intercessions:

Cancer: Brian Davis, Bernard (and wife Angela caring for him), Jacqui, Sue B, Theresa K, Fr Jon B

Siena, Elara – sick children

Matthew – six-year old boy dying of bladder cancer

Wojtek – massive heart attack leaving him incapacitated

David OCDS – housebound; Martin Gilham – unable to attend community meetings

Sophia – blind infant

Joy Smith OCDS – seriously ill

Grace – troubling ailments, job difficulties, family (deceased mother and health of father)