Published by My experience with living a Carmelite devotion at home began with my parents. They belonged to Carmel when I was about six years old. This coincided with the showing of the Movie, Marcellino, which was shown in a Philadelphia Theatre for a week. I remember my mother buying the book and reading it to us. It is the story of a little Spanish boy, an orphan, who finds a life size crusifix in the attic of the friars who adopt him and makes friends with Jesus who does indeed take him home to heaven. The message is how real Jesus is on our lives.
My parents joined the third order of Carmel for men and women, not religious. Once a month they would attend meetings at the Carmelite monastary in Philadelphia. Both of my sisters Chrisy and Joanne and myself were baptized with Godparents from this third order. We visited the monastary fairly frequently as a family close up and until my mother’s death in December, 2007. I am now fifty years old and the perfect life for me is synonomous to being a good Carmelite as my husband’s wife.
I have not desire to live in a monastery. Carmel almost wholely, now, is a devotion lived at home. My devotion to Carmel is most important in keeping up with a prayerlife and making the right kind of decisions. My mother’s interest in a Montessouri type education for her children became an enthusiasm for a life of contemplation for all of us which she understood as not wasting a single talent. I and my brother and sister had the education in and out of school of Kings and Queens. My father would grin and bear it.
My desire to become all God wanted me to be was all consuming. I became a lawyer to work with my father as a advocate for neighbors with as many problems as I myself could have. When my husband came into my life, God claimed my father and the emphasis switched as a new home became my most important goal.
To my mind Carmel is the perfect home life. Jesus said, “In my house there are many mansions.” These are not the Srawberry Mansions of Philadelphia, these are our multitudnous homes that can become in time the bridge to our heavenly home that will last forever, and bring us incredible happiness, more than we can ever have on this earth.
If you can accept the Lord’s great friendship, as Marcelino did, your home life is the substance of this friendship and a fortaste of heaven. This is the Carmelite Devotion. The desert call explains that friendship with the Lord means putting him first, as he is God. This is not hard to learn, as it is natural, but sacrifices are always there to be made and we must not be afraid of these, as life is a matter of rising to the occasion.
May our home be blessed as those first godly homes were blessed on the first Passover with the blood of the Lamb and may we live in anticipation of the eternal joy of being reuinited with out loved ones and all of the family of God, just as Cana, an land flowing with milk and honey was the reward of those saints of the first Passover.
