The mystics of Mount Carmel

Mystics for Our Time by Noel O'Donoghue (T & T Clark)
Sr Miriam ODC In this comparatively short book of 151 pages, the three Carmelites, Teresa of Avila. John of the Cross and Therese of Lisieux, are studied from every possible angle — literary, philosophical, mystical, cultural and dialectical (in the sense of the delicately balanced relationship between masculine and feminine in human companionship).
These "Carmelite Mediations for a New Age", as they are subtitled, are almost too stimulating. The closely packed subject-matter would suffice for a three-year course on Carmelite mysticism, from which one or two subjects from the above might be chosen in which to specialise.
That means that many lines of thought are thrown out but not pursued, leaving the reader tantalised and disappointed. However, Fr Noel says that his book is above all personal, the fruit of life-long meditation on what these three Carmelites have become for him, himself a Carmelite. They are now his close friends, and he wants to share these fruitful friendships with others.
For him Teresa is essentially a visionary, a virile woman, deeply in love with Christ, who has, and knows she has, shared in her life of prayer and self-giving something of the anguish and ecstasy of Christ Himself and His mother; and it is precisely because of her authentic gospel experiences that she remains the warm, loveable, dynamic person she is.
The four meditations on John of the Cross, "the doctor of mystical humanism", are an attempt to explain his sketch of Mount Carmel with its harsh and frightening aphorisms, and to fill it out, or transform it, into an image of the "happy adventure" which John sings of in his poem "Dark Night" and elsewhere. Fr Noel compares the ascesis of self-denial, sensual and spiritual, the "nada", to rigorous commando-training. Its purpose achieved, the "nada" is seen to be "todo". Darkness, interior and exterior, becomes illumined by the fire in the heart, pledge of the presence of Divine Beauty and Goodness, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, "the MotherGod" of the Dark Night.
Therese is placed firmly in her fin de siecle context, surrounded by her immediate predecessors and successors in the various fields of human activity, sacred and profane. Child of her time, she was raised up by God to enlighten that particular historical epoch, but a light which those who come after her, expecially Carmelites, must keep burning. This very "ordinary" young girl, who left the "house of dreams" of her pious, circumscribed childhood for Carmel, the "house of reality", was also the unnamed inspirer of many of the insights of Vatican
which renewed, and is still renewing, the Church, and leading her back to her Gospel source.
Fr Noel believes that Carmel, with its risk and challenge, high adventure and expanding horizons, the same Carmel which nurtured these three mystics of the Church, must stand as a light to us all as we prepare to go into the unknown of darkness and light of the third millennium.