Quote of the day, 7 October: Anders Arborelius, ocd

The responsiveness of Mary is meant for all of us. The Church, the spotless, immaculate Bride of Christ, is always responding to her Bridegroom. In the Church, and thanks to the example and the prayer of Mary, we, too, can learn to be more responsive to Jesus. In the Church, we share all spiritual riches in common among ourselves, so we can use Mary’s responsive heart when we pray.

That’s just what we do when we pray the Rosary. We look upon Jesus with the eyes of Mary, we love Him with her heart, and we listen to Him with her ears. Prayer becomes so much easier when we try to pray in the company of Mary. Jesus becomes so much more alive when she is at our side.

The response to grace, which we seek to express in our prayer, is demonstrated to us by Our Lady in the mystery of her Annunciation…. The image of the young Mary at the Annunciation reveals so much: God’s will to become one of us through the Incarnation and Mary as the icon of human receptivity and responsiveness to God’s grace, or, put simply, Mary as the icon of prayer. She can help us to become prayer — because prayer is not something that we do, it’s something that we are and become.

Cardinal Anders Arborelius, O.C.D.

Chapter 10, To be responsive like Mary

Arborelius OCD, A. 2020, Carmelite Spirituality: The Way of Carmelite Prayer and Contemplation, EWTN Publishing, Irondale, Alabama.

Featured image: In 2016, bishops from the Holy Land Coordination celebrated Holy Mass with Jordanian clergy and the local community in the majority-Christian town of Fuheis. Many of the faithful have adorned this statue of the Virgin with rosaries. Photo credit: © Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk via Flickr (Some rights reserved).

#CardinalAndersArborelius #contemplation #inspiration #Rosary #VirginMary

Quote of the day, 24 August: Anders Arborelius, ocd

On the pilgrimage of life, we learn to be conscious of the simple and small things as signs of God’s presence and tokens of His love. On the road, God will appear to us in a thousand disguises. It is a grace to realize that we can encounter God in this humble way.

We all have the tendency to long for peak experiences, but we are invited to receive God in the drab little things of everyday life.

Our pilgrimage will hardly be very dramatic. Nothing very interesting will happen on the road. But, still, God is present. Over and over again, we have to convince ourselves of this basic truth of our Faith.

That’s why we need perseverance more than anything else. Determinada determinación, as Teresa of Avila says—a “determined determination.” It seems very hard to produce a thing like that, but it’s really a gift to be received, just as life itself.

In God’s realm, everything is grace. When we open our eyes to His presence in our lives, then we are really pilgrims. Grace is all we need. We can always walk with Jesus to the Father. He is always with us on our way, on our pilgrimage to eternity.

Cardinal Anders Arborelius, o.c.d.

Chapter 1, Pilgrim on the Way to Eternity

Note: Cardinal Arborelius refers to Saint Teresa’s Way of Perfection, chapter 21, where she encourages souls to practice prayer with great determination:

Now returning to those who want to journey on this road and continue until they reach the end, which is to drink from this water of life. I say that how they are to begin is very important—in fact, all important. They must have a great and very resolute determination to persevere until reaching the end, come what may, happen what may, whatever work is involved, whatever criticism arises, whether they arrive or whether they die on the road, or even if they don’t have courage for the trials that are met, or if the whole world collapses.

We recall the founding of the Carmel of Saint Joseph in Avila—the first monastery of the Teresian reform—on 24 August 1562 in Avila.

Teresa of Avila, St. 1985, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, translated from the Spanish by Kavanaugh, K; Rodriguez, O, ICS Publications, Washington DC.

Arborelius OCD, A. 2020, Carmelite Spirituality: The Way of Carmelite Prayer and Contemplation, EWTN Publishing, Irondale, Alabama.

Featured image: Statue of Saint Teresa by Fernando Cruz Solís (20th c.), at the Monastery of the Incarnation, Ávila. Photo: Raquel / Adobe Stock.

#CardinalAndersArborelius #determination #grace #pilgrimage #StTeresaOfAvila

Quote of the day, 3 May: Anders Arborelius, ocd

In Mary, we see the true face of the Church, for Mary wants to prepare us for the perfect union of love with Christ and to give us a part of her own relationship with Him. The scapular is the symbol and sign of this common vocation of all the members of the Church who are all called to holiness. In Mary, the Immaculate One, we see the perfect realization of this universal vocation of the entire Church.

“From the overflowing heart of the Virgin Mary, blessed by God, streamed the exultant hymn of the Magnificat,” Edith Stein says. The core of our ecclesial life is to live in praise and glory of God, just as Mary did.

This vocation to glorify God means that we, through grace, take part in His salvation of mankind. We can also say that letting ourselves be saved by Him means that we participate in His work of salvation—or rather, that His redemptive love given to us overflows to others. In the Church, spiritual treasures belong to all of us in common.

Mary lives this life of continuous adoration that implies a partaking in the act of salvation by letting herself be saved. The holy scapular reminds the Carmelite of this fact of our Faith, helping us to rely upon Mary’s maternal and sisterly care in the midst of all the hardships of life.

The scapular is a sign that we, just like Mary, are totally dependent on Jesus and His redemptive love for us and for the entire world. It helps us to see that life in the Church entails adoration and salvation at the same time.

The very act of adoring God implies an apostolic participation in Christ’s act of redemption. Thus, my more or less self-centered longing for my own spiritual fulfillment can be transformed and healed.

We could even say that the scapular, this humble little sign of Mary’s maternal protection, could help our contemporaries to be healed from the wounds of total independence, the main dogma of the pervasive individualism of our day.

The scapular helps us to find our true happiness in loving surrender and confident dependence on Jesus, through Mary. Of course, this truth needs to be explained very carefully in order to avoid the accusation of being mere sentimental and childish wish-wash.

However, I think it would be worthwhile to help our contemporaries, who desperately long for true surrender to God, to find their way through this humble and simple little object that we venerate in Carmel as the holy scapular of Carmel.

Cardinal Anders Arborelius, o.c.d.

Chapter 11, The Church in the Carmelite Tradition

Arborelius OCD, A. 2020, Carmelite Spirituality: The Way of Carmelite Prayer and Contemplation, EWTN Publishing, Irondale, Alabama.

Featured image: Cardinal Anders Arborelius, o.c.d. is seen in this 2025 file photo, courtesy of the Discalced Carmelite General Curia (Used by permission).

⬦ Reflection Question ⬦
Where is Jesus inviting me to grow in loving dependence on Him, like Mary did?
⬦ Join the conversation in the comments.

#adoration #BrownScapular #CardinalAndersArborelius #CarmeliteSpirituality #church #redemption #StEdithStein #unionWithGod #VirginMary

Quote of the day, 27 April: Anders Arborelius, ocd

As Christians, we have been given so much in Christ, and this implies that we have an obligation to be faithful to Him and the light given us.

Nothing is more tragic than a Christian who has received the light of faith and denies it. But God’s light has a tendency to overwhelm even those who deny it.

His mercy is infinite, and we know that He has many ways to reach the soul in darkness. Still, each one of us is called upon to grow in faithfulness to the light given to us. We have to open our hearts more and more to the light of Christ that is always shining in us, thanks to Baptism.

Since His Resurrection, Christ is the Light, enlightening everything. We simply have to let Him shine in our own lives.

Every day we have to be enlightened anew by the light of the Risen Lord Who wants to liberate us from the darkness of sin and self-sufficiency. All the dark spots of our souls have to be removed by Him, and we are invited to let Him work.

That’s the only thing we can do, really—allow Him to purify us.

Cardinal Anders Arborelius, o.c.d.

Chapter 6, To Belong to Jesus

Arborelius OCD, A. 2020, Carmelite Spirituality: The Way of Carmelite Prayer and Contemplation, EWTN Publishing, Irondale, Alabama.

Featured image: Cardinal Anders Arborelius, o.c.d. is seen in this 2025 file photo, courtesy of the Discalced Carmelite General Curia (Used by permission).

⬦ Reflection Question ⬦
Where in my heart am I still resisting the light and mercy of Christ?
⬦ Join the conversation in the comments.

#CardinalAndersArborelius #faithfulness #freedom #JesusChrist #light #mercy #resurrection

Quote of the day, 8 April: Cardinal Anders Arborelius, OCD

We begin with a poem of St. John of the Cross:

Mine are the heavens, and mine is the earth; mine are the people; the righteous are mine, and mine are the sinners; the angels are mine, and the Mother of God, and all things are mine, and God Himself is mine and for me, for Christ is mine and all for me. What, then, do you ask for and seek, my soul? Thine is all this, and it is all for thee (Sayings of Light and Love, 27).

Maybe we find this poem of St. John of the Cross somewhat bold and even presumptuous, but faith is bold.

We are immensely rich in Christ. Everything belongs to us, including God Himself. We are His heirs—as St. Paul says, co-heirs—with Christ. This certainty is the doctrinal basis of this poem. We may rejoice and be exultant about all the treasures that belong to us, thanks to Christ.

But at the same time, as St. John speaks about our richness in Christ, he, as all the saints, speaks also about our poverty in Christ.

Jesus Christ came as a poor man among the poor. When God became man, He preferred poverty during His life here on earth. Here we are again—one of these paradoxes of the Faith. God, Who is rich, becomes poor to make us, who are poor, rich.

This fundamental paradox helps us to adore the glory of God, where all the contrasts of ours are reconciled. Poverty and richness are united in God, reconciled in Him Who is everything but owns nothing. He is the Source of everything existing but gives it all away immediately after having created it.

Creation is generosity, prodigality, lavishness. God does not want to be the owner of it. The Creator does not keep what He has created for Himself. God just is what He is.

All through the Old and the New Testament, we hear the same thing — the “I AM” of Adonai , the Ego Sum of Jesus, but never, never do we hear, “I have this; I own this.”

Poverty is always an ideal in Christian life. Spiritual life is to be poor as Jesus, Who relied completely on His Father. Poverty teaches us to have confidence in God’s love and care for us.

Jesus tried to teach His disciples this art of spiritual poverty or, rather, poverty in the Holy Spirit, which also implies material poverty.

But poverty is not at all the same as misery. Only the poor in spirit can adore God as He wants to be adored. True adoration of God, as He is in Himself, is born from our own poverty.

All glory and honor belong to God triune. We rejoice in His glory and in our own poverty. We fall down in adoration of His infinite majesty and accept willingly that we are only poor and frail little beings. Then we become rich in Him.

Jesus became one of us to allow us to participate in His relationship with the Father, and, of course, there is no greater richness than that. Still, we can only receive this gift if we are poor. When we adore God, we grow in spiritual poverty.

Cardinal Anders Arborelius, O.C.D.

Chapter 13, To Adore and Glorify God

Arborelius OCD, A. 2020, Carmelite Spirituality: The Way of Carmelite Prayer and Contemplation, EWTN Publishing, Irondale, Alabama.

Featured image: Nativity scene by BlackMac for Adobe Stock (Stock photo, edited in Adobe Express)

#CardinalAndersArborelius #creation #gloryToGod #JesusChrist #poverty #StJohnOfTheCross #wealth

Quote of the day, 30 November: Anders Arborelius, ocd

To pray is simply to realize and accept God’s presence to us and in us. It’s by no means reserved for those who live tranquil lives in monasteries—if we happen to believe that it’s so tranquil there.

Prayer ought to be the very breath of everyone who follows Jesus and believes in the Most Holy Trinity. We have to be very practical people if we want to live in God’s presence. We have to see His traces everywhere.

Cardinal Anders Arborelius, O.C.D.

Chapter 3, To Remain in the Holy Trinity

Arborelius OCD, A. 2020, Carmelite Spirituality: The Way of Carmelite Prayer and Contemplation, EWTN Publishing, Irondale, Alabama.

Featured image: A fruit vendor pauses to pray in the market in Cali, Colombia. From the photo series Caminando por el Centro de Cali – Serie Completa. Image credit: © Cindy Muñoz / Flickr (Some rights reserved)

#breath #CardinalAndersArborelius #HolyTrinity #love #prayer #presenceOfGod #simplicity

The sophisticated world of today needs simplicity badly. Teresa of Avila reformed Carmel in order to help the Church to overcome the crisis of her time. She founded her monasteries, “dovecotes,” as she called them, not simply in order to offer an ideal atmosphere for contemplative life, but, rather, for the benefit of the entire Church.

Of course, these two aims are really one and the same. By living a true contemplative life in the constant presence of Jesus, the Bridegroom, the Carmelite becomes more and more involved in the work of the Church, becomes fruitful for the Church and for the redemption of mankind.

Once again, we realize that true adoration of God implies a participation in the redemptive love of God. “When I look at the great needs of the Church, which afflict me so much, it seems to me ridiculous to be distressed about anything else,” Teresa said.

Teresa knew all too well that contemplative life, and especially in the enclosure, can tempt the nun to be more attentive to herself and her own petty little needs than to the invisible world of God. The remedy is always to have the extensive needs of the Church present in her prayers.

True prayer is always fruitful for the Church. Growth in holiness on behalf of the Church and Her needs is the primary motivation for the contemplative nun in Teresa’s vision of Carmelite life. One could even say that there is a kind of interiorization of the Church into the very soul of the person at prayer. Once again, we see the parallel between the Church, Our Lady, and the soul.

Teresa offers us who live in an epoch of efficiency a remedy against our all-too-human expectations and our longings for success.

God can work wonders through a person who completely and totally belongs to Him—someone like Teresa of Jesus. She shows us the true image of the Church and what our role is in the Mystical Body of Christ. She shows us the fundamental unity of contemplative and apostolic life in the heart of the Church.

In that way, Teresa helps us to discover the real sense of the Church and makes us feel at home there, because the Church truly is where we receive Jesus Christ.

Cardinal Anders Arborelius, O.C.D.

Chapter 11, The Church in the Carmelite Tradition

Arborelius OCD, A. 2020, Carmelite Spirituality: The Way of Carmelite Prayer and Contemplation, EWTN Publishing, Irondale, Alabama.

Featured image: This photo of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Compiègne was taken in the choir of their post-revolutionary monastery, which was established in 1867 on the outskirts of town. The photo was captured by Jean-Pierre Gilson, a photographer from the University of Technology of Compiègne, and was published in the 1989 photographic album, Les Carmélites de Compiègne (Medialogue, Paris).

https://carmelitequotes.blog/2024/10/13/anders-stjchap11/

#belonging #CardinalAndersArborelius #church #contemplative #love #prayer #simplicity #StTeresaOfAvila

Jesus Christ has redeemed us on the Cross. The Holy Cross is the sign of our Faith, the sign of hope and grace. We venerate it, and it gives us hope, but when it really comes close to us we are terrified.

Still, as we all know at the bottom of our hearts, we have to carry our own crosses in union with our Savior. The Cross is there, and we have to accept it in whatever form it comes to us.

Sometimes it takes time for us to recognize the loving and adorable face of the Crucified Lord in the horrible and tiresome sufferings that we encounter during our pilgrimage here on earth. Our Lady can help us to see Jesus in the cross of our own existence and in the cross of humanity.

She stood beside the Cross of Jesus, and she also stands beside us when we have to carry our own crosses. As a loving Mother taking care of her beloved child, she is always there.

For many people, it seems easier to look upon Mary standing at the foot of the Cross of Jesus than to look directly upon Jesus hanging on the Cross. Being the Mother of Jesus and of us, she can unite us to Jesus and help us to recognize and adore His holy Cross in our own little cross….

When we really suffer, words cannot console us, however pious and loving they might be. We cannot be consoled in any way whatsoever, except by the simple presence of another person simply sitting down with us or holding our hand.

That is important for us to remember when someone we know suffers. To be present, to sit down at the sickbed or deathbed, to hold someone’s hand is always immensely helpful for those who suffer.

This is also the way of Mary—to be present in our dark night of the soul. She is there. It is all very simple and natural.

She is our Mother and Sister who wants to help us to carry our crosses. She helps us to see Jesus in our night. Just by being there, she points to her Son and makes us aware of His constant presence in our life.

So have confidence. In the dark night of the soul, in our suffering, Mary will be with us, silent but fruitful, because she is the Mother of Christ, the Mother of us.

Cardinal Anders Arborelius, O.C.D.

To Be Responsive Like Mary (excerpts)

Arborelius OCD, A. 2020, Carmelite Spirituality: The Way of Carmelite Prayer and Contemplation, EWTN Publishing, Irondale, Alabama.

Featured image: Crucifixion sculptures like this early 16th-century French Calvaire are found in towns and along byways all throughout Brittany. The ancient village of Rochefort-en-Terre in the department of Morbihan is no exception. This historic Calvaire still stands in the plaza next to the 12th-century collegiate church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Tronchaye in the center of town. It is so picturesque that it has been featured prominently in paintings, such as Le calvaire de Rochefort-en-Terre (or, L’Office du soir) by Ferdinand du Puigaudeau (French, 1864–1930). According to legend, the church was built on the spot where a statue of the Virgin Mary nursing the Infant Jesus was discovered in the 12th century. It is said that the statue was hidden in the trunk of a tree two centuries earlier when the Vikings were attacking the region. Another historic image in the parish is a polychrome statue of Blessed Françoise d’Amboise, the 15th-century Duchess of Brittany who established the Carmelite nuns in France. Image credit: David Matthew Lyons / Adobe Stock (Stock photo)

https://carmelitequotes.blog/2024/07/22/anders-momsis/

#CardinalAndersArborelius #darkNight #faith #grace #HolyCross #hope #inspiration #JesusChrist #MaryOurSister #Mother #OurLady #presence #suffering

"Prayer and adoration become something interior, a participation in the very act of adoration taking place within the Trinity, in which the Son is always giving glory to His Father."
-Cardinal Anders Arborelius OCD

Read more at https://carmelitequotes.blog

#cardinalandersarborelius #prayer #adoration #participation #holytrinity #jesus #sonofgod #heavenlyfather #carmelite #quotes