Twenty years ago, I was stationed in Monterey, CA. I was undergoing intensive language training as a 19-year-old newly minted sailor in the U.S. Navy. It was an interesting time as I learned to navigate a new world in front of me. I didn’t quite fit in with the military culture of binge drinking and promiscuity that were the typical outlets my friends used in dealing with the immense pressure we were all under in our studies.
I also wasn’t fully practicing my faith. I didn’t have a car and a base Mass was only offered at the Naval Postgraduate School across town, so I only attended on occasion. To be honest, I didn’t make enough of an effort to find a parish within walking distance in downtown Monterey either. I did spend many hours reading theological works and writing poetry with spiritual themes in my journal and everyone around me knew that I was not going to join in the rampant hedonism, but I was still living in between the world and my Catholic faith without a home in either one.
As I was living in this state of spiritual homelessness, something life-changing happened to me that I didn’t see until recently, almost 20 years later. It was during those days that I encountered Our Heavenly Mother in a profound way and it altered the course of my life and led me to where I am today. That encounter happened through Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
South of Carmel, on the famous Highway 1, is located a beautiful Carmelite monastery of cloistered nuns. You can see the monastery from the road and it sits across from the ocean. One day, I was driving with my roommate and happened to see the monastery and asked if we could stop there. It was the Carmelite Monastery of Our Lady and St. Therese. That monastery was the starting point of two of the most significant spiritual relationships of my life: Our Heavenly Mother and St. Therese. Both have been instrumental in my calling as a disciple of Christ called to be a wife and mother, as well as spiritual mother.
Since it was cloistered, only the rose garden and the chapel were open to the public. I quietly walked the rose gardens while my roommate patiently waited for me. I then made my way up the front steps into the chapel. As I walked in, I was overcome with a profound silence and the presence of God. Golden streams of light gently cascaded in from high windows illuminating the columns below. I sat down in the very back and absorbed the stillness of the place. I didn’t want to leave. I found the rest I had been desperately looking for without even knowing it, but I knew my roommate was waiting for me outside, so my first visit was brief, but life-changing.
That monastery became my safe-haven for the rest of my time stationed in Monterey. I could’t go as often as I wanted to, but whenever I went, I found peace and rest. I had found the love of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. My Mother who would walk with me and comfort me when, a year later, I would find myself standing in front of the wreckage of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon with 400 agonized grieving family members.
She would be with me, when the darkness of PTSD would overtake me shortly afterwards, and she would lead me down the path God has called me to after the seemingly insurmountable grief of four miscarriages and secondary infertility. She always makes her presence known when the Cross gets heavy and we begin to stumble.
Our Heavenly Mother has walked with me every step of the way for 20 years, ever since I first walked into that Carmelite chapel by the sea. She was with me before then, but it was in that moment when she made her presence known to me in a tangible way and continued to reveal that presence to me over time, especially after my consecration to her four years ago and my subsequent “call within a call”.
I didn’t understand the great silence and stillness that I encountered the first time I visited the monastery. She was planting seeds in my soul that would only begin to mature now. She was inviting me into a life of prayer and sacrifice, but that calling would not become clear until years later after my consecration to her, on the anniversary of my second miscarriage, when she called me to fight for and minister to her priest-sons, which is a calling grounded in a life of dedicated prayer in union with the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through Her Immaculate Heart.
Devotion to our Lady of Mount Carmel indicates a strong call to the interior life, which, in a very special way, is Mary’s life. The Blessed Virgin wants us to resemble her in heart and mind much more than in externals. If we penetrate into Mary’s soul, we see that grace produced in her a very rich interior life: a life of recollection, prayer, uninterrupted giving of herself to God, and of constant contact and intimate union with Him. Mary’s soul is a sanctuary reserved for God alone where no creature has ever left an imprint; here reign love and zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of men.
Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene, Divine Intimacy, #378
Our Lady of Mount Carmel calls certain souls to a more interior life, often as priests or religious, but also members of the laity who seek to live in the busyness of the world, but who withdraw into intimate union with God through Her loving guidance. These souls have missions that begin with a deep prayer life which acts as the water that brings forth good fruit in any tasks assigned to them. It is through this life of prayer that we find intimacy with God and true peace and stillness, which then animates our every action. We must follow her lead in order to enter into his greater intimacy with God.
Those who wish to live truly devoted to our Lady Mount of Carmel, must follow Mary into the depths of the interior life. Carmel is the symbol of the contemplative life, of life wholly consecrated to seeking God and tending wholly toward divine intimacy; and she who best realizes this very high ideal is Mary, Queen, Beauty of Carmel.
Ibid
In the confusion of being a young adult in the Navy, Our Lady invited me into the silence and solitude of God through Her powerful intercession. She revealed to me the deepest longing of my heart: Intimate union with God. She also set me on the path that would lead me to this greater union by guiding me towards His ultimate plan for my life through dual vocations. My military service, surrounded predominately by men, prepared me to serve Her sons in the priesthood in a role completely shaped by a deeply interior life and a fierce love for Her priest-sons that could only come from Her Immaculate Heart.
The Blessed Virgin is a Mother who clothes us with grace and takes our supernatural life under her protection, in order to bring it to its full flowering in eternal life.
Ibid
There are moments in our lives that seem simple and inconsequential at the time, but they actually shape the rest of our lives. One morning in prayer, twenty years later, the Holy Spirit opened my eyes to show me how significant that quiet Carmelite monastery near the ocean was in my life. If we prayerfully look back over the moments of our lives, we will see Our Heavenly Mother’s loving guidance along the way leading us towards Her Son and our ultimate end.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, ora pro nobis.
