Carmelite wisdom to encourage & inspire
It is hardly surprising to learn that the poet Jessica Powers was a great hymn writer, too. One of the hymns that she wrote for the Carmelite liturgies appears on the Solemnity of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. In it, she mentions the gift of the scapular.
Carmelite poet Jessica Powers contemplates the image of St. Mary Magdalen, who "ran on Easter morning, her hair wind-tumbled and her cloak awry. [...] She sought, as love so often seeks and finds, a Radiance that died or seemed to die..."
This is the badge of the friends of the Man of Sorrows: the mark of the cross, faint replica of His, become ubiquitous now; it spreads like a wild blossom on the mountains of time and in each of the crevices.
One may kneel down and make a plea with words from book or breviary... But some day, hidden by His will, if this meek child is waiting still, God will take out His mercy-key and open up felicity, where saltiest tears are given right to seas where sapphire marries light
I made a covenant with my eyes not to be watching to see what beauty might come down to me. Christ is my beauty; Him alone I see.
To live with the Spirit of God is to be a listener. It is to keep the vigil of mystery, earthless and still. One leans to catch the stirring of the Spirit, strange as the wind's will.
Here is a small bird cast as John the Baptist who from my treetops is inspired to say: I come from heaven to prepare the way.
Come is the love song of our race and Come our basic word of individual wooing. It lifts audacious arms of lowliness to majesty's most amiable undoing, to Godhood fleshed and cradled and made least.
What could the wise Teresa have been thinking to set these bounds on even my little love? This walling, barring, minimizing, shrinking— how could her great Castilian heart approve?
Then why should I take fright when foes or demons assail me with their treacheries or wrath, when I have knowledge that the Queen's archangel is keeper of my path?
Life which comes as a virgin to us all, most safely came to her. Time, when she passed, remained inviolate.
God is the strangest of all lovers; His ways are past explaining. He sets His heart on a soul...
Grant us grace to climb Mount Carmel and to learn that love is loss. Guide us still our ways outdistance all earth’s treasures save the cross.
Your own reflection has revealed Your place, for she is utter light by Your own grace
I see a girl upon a donkey... I doubt the flowers; I doubt the road was kind
The Virgin Mary cannot enter into my soul for an indwelling. God alone has sealed this land as secretly His own
I entered the kingdom in Noah's week at the sign of the rainbow
Hither I came of old, bearing my myrrh and frankincense and gold
Where heart beat, there was Christ for me
Time has become a wilderness of presence which too is essence of its jubilee
Carmelite Quotes 
Recent comments