The Carmelite Story & Our Story
Donald Kinney, OCD
Father Donald Kinney (picture shown below) is a member of the Carmelite Community of San Jose, California, where he serves as novice master for the California-Arizona Province. He translated the critical edition of The Poetry of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. He has been spiritual assistant to several communities of Carmelite seculars and gave a major address at the 2007 OCDS Congress in Seattle. This article is based on that conference.
In the beginning, God created man and woman to live in intimate union with him. In the garden, Adam and Eve spoke with God face to face. They lived in peace and joy with him and with each other. But when they disobeyed their Creator and sinned, they separated themselves from him. We read in Genesis that God said to Adam and Eve:
Because you have done this ... cursed be the ground because of you! In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you ... By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground from which you were taken; for you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.
Ever since the fall, we are condemned to a life filled with trials. Yet the Father has given Jesus to us in the Spirit to be with us always. For the Christian, our greatest longing is to be one with him. Likewise for the Christian, our greatest suffering is to be separated from him.
In the beginning of our Carmelite vocation, God gave each of us a longing for intimate union with him through prayer. As diverse in background as we may be, we Carmelites share a special yet common call through the Rule of St. Albert to be one with the Lord by prayer. We know that he has called us to this Order to speak with him, to listen to him, and to love him through prayer. The foundation of our Carmelite vocation is prayer. The vocation of every Carmelite is to make "the whole of their life a prayer, a search for union with God."
In this article, I would like to write about this yearning for God and how to be one with him through our busy, complicated lives. My title is:
Work Through Prayer for Union With God:
The Carmelite Story and Our Story.
Here are my three main points:
First, we work through prayer, by means of prayer for union with God. By the word "work," I mean everything we do, activity in its broadest sense: all our tasks, duties, roles, and occupations. Everything we do in life has meaning through our prayer. Prayer must always come first. So we "work through prayer for union with God."
But there is a double meaning here that I hope to explain in a second part: prayer itself is often work—hard work. Living a life of prayer means to persevere through many trials. We have to work through prayer—we have to labor for union with God.
In a third part—and the best part—we will see how work is meant to bring us back to prayer. If we work through prayer for union with God, if we are faithful to our calling, if we persevere, with God's grace, we will indeed be one with him in the end.
I will explain this Carmelite quest to work through prayer for union with God with examples from Scripture, from our Carmelite Rule and history, and from the lives of our saints. My subtitle "The Carmelite Story and Our Story" means "the Carmelite story is our story." We find guidance and companionship on our journey through Our Lady and the saints. Where they have gone, we hope to follow. The struggle between prayer and work—between our longing for God and all the things that keep us from him—began the moment Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. We can imagine them digging in the dirt, yet looking up to heaven, longing to regain the paradise they had lost.
Many a spiritual writer has used the Gospel story of Martha and Mary to talk about this tension between prayer and work, between the contemplative life and the active life: One day when Jesus visited their home, Mary "sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak. Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, 'Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.' The Lord said to her in reply, 'Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.'"
We Carmelites know full well that prayer is our priority. Each of us likes to identify with Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to him speak. Each of us is deeply grateful that the Lord has given us "the better part" in our vocation. At some time or other, most of us have known the supreme consolation of sitting at the Master's feet as Mary did, just lingering with the Lord in love and wishing we could stay with him forever. But we must admit that because of our own weakness and sinfulness and because of the hectic lives we lead, we can lose sight of this "better part" of lingering with the Lord. Like Martha, we are often "burdened with much serving." And we have to admit that Jesus often confronts us to come back to him, just as he did Martha: "Father Donald, Father Donald, you are anxious and worried about many things."
Looking at Martha and Mary in this Gospel scene helps us see ourselves in the prayerful, peaceful Mary but also as the active, agitated Martha, a tension we know only too well. Work is good in itself, and it is necessary. Before the fall, God told Adam to "cultivate and care for" the garden. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that in the beginning "Work was not yet a burden, but rather the collaboration of man and woman with God ..." It is when work interferes with prayer—or when prayer interferes with work—that the balance is lost.
(Note: If you want to read the entire article on "Work Through Prayer for Union With God: The Carmelite Story & Our Story," you may do so by ordering a copy of the Spring 2008 Issue of Carmelite Digest – see below.)
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