Dear brothers and sisters of the Carmelite family,
The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is approaching, a year has passed since the last feast, and I would like to wish you all the best on this occasion. This day means a lot to us. It is a joyful and profound moment in which we celebrate our reverence for the Mother of the Lord and call her by the beloved and dear name, Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
For the coming year, I want to entrust all our desires and dreams, our projects, our tasks, missions, and works of apostolate, our joys, and our worries to Mary’s intercession. May the Blessed Virgin, our Mother and Sister, obtain for us light, guide, and accompany us, that we may always remain faithful to our vocation and recognize how to generously respond to the urgent call of Pope Francis addressed to the whole Church, to be true witnesses of the Gospel.
You may recall that last year I offered you a possible interpretation of one of the icons that is typical for the reverence to Our Lady of Mount Carmel: the Blessed Virgin descending into purgatory, who through the scapular frees those who are suffering there. Again, I ask you: may each of us, like Mary, descend into the purgatories of our time, whatever their nature, and in a spirit of solidarity and compassion, help the suffering to emerge from them. In our current world, there are many such purgatories.
On this occasion, I also want to ask all members of the Carmelite family – brothers, enclosed sisters, apostolic sisters, members of confraternities, tertiaries, and lay people connected in any way to the Carmelite family – to unite in contemplation, sharing, and at the same time enhancing the beauty that surrounds us, even when sometimes hidden. From the very beginning of its existence, Carmel has been closely linked to beauty. The word Carmel is used in the Old Testament as a synonym for the term beauty, and we ourselves call Mary Mother, Ornament, and Beauty of Carmel. Our order has over the centuries become characterized by a tendency towards what is poetic, artistic... beautiful.
Therefore, it is my wish that our lives be a song of praise to God for the beauty that surrounds us and also a generous dedication to the effort that beauty is not destroyed or marred by evil, sin, and the suffering of so many innocent people who are victims of selfishness and its consequences, such as injustice, violence, inequality, etc.
May our life, in accordance with the specific situation of each of us, become a song of praise to the Creator, that like the Virgin Mary we humbly proclaim the great things that God has done and is doing in our lives (cf. Lk 1:46–55). Perhaps one of the most tragic features of the modern world is that it is unable to discover and create beauty. Today, beauty is reduced to mere self-centered aesthetics lacking a connection to solidarity; thus, it is not authentic beauty as such, but merely a sense of too much and for nothing. The ancient scholastics said: “bonum et pulchrum” (good and beauty) always go hand in hand. So it is!
When we want to discover what is beautiful, Mary, the teacher of spirituality, directs our gaze in another way: to what is small and insignificant, what is not counted... Mary teaches us to unveil beauty even amidst the various complexities of life, in everything that is noble and heroic in everyday life, even when today’s times remain blind to it.
May the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, with the preparatory novenas and devotions as well as the actual liturgical celebration, be a humble and peaceful song celebrating beauty. We must not be satisfied with mere routine, with lukewarm and half-hearted celebration, with remnants of a glorious but very distant past. We must also avoid mere external beauty, which focuses mainly on pomp or liturgical rubrics. No, on this day we must raise our hearts upwards through the peaceful and profound beauty of the liturgy, beyond all the suffering and misery of humanity, and look to Mary, “Star of the Sea,” asking her to lead us to Christ, our Lord.
A beautiful feast! May Mary, our Mother and Sister, always be with you.
With fraternal love
Fernando Millán Romeral, O.Carm.
General Prior
(From Letter of the prior general... translated by: Norbert Žuška, OCarm.)
