A Carmelite Visit

What do the Falkland Islands, a Spanish mystic and a 24-year-old Leeds girl have in common? The answer is, in normal circumstances, very little.

But the workings of God’s Providence, as any believer will testify, tend to break through the parameters of our understanding of normality. And so it was, within a windswept Port Stanley, going on forty years ago, a young Yorkshire woman, member of the Women's Royal Naval Service, while contemplating the barren landscape, discovered within herself a yearning for contemplation. With the providential visit of a naval chaplain, who happened to be a Carmelite, contemplatives par excellence, it wasn’t long before she discovered St Teresa and was exchanging stark, southern-hemisphere skylines for an inner city, four-walled monastic cell.

Madness, one might say; one would say! But the secret, she informed us, as we hung on her every word within the austere monastery parlour, is the friendship she has built up with the other occupant of that barren Carmelite cell: the risen Lord himself.

Being with him, talking with him, sharing, adoring him, in faith, the spiritual window to not vast, but infinite horizons, constitutes the very core of their spirituality. It is very simply what has kept her happily in her Notting Hill monastery for all these years and the foundation of her vowing to stay there till the end of her days, one day at a time. In more to down to earth terms, we were also very privileged to learn just a little of what fills all those days: a healthy, holy routine, one day at a time.

It was a wonderful visit, as I said in my letter of gratitude, not only because we were privy to a hidden, on the whole, unknown (and if known, certainly under-appreciated) world, able to absorb something of the Carmelite life from a real live, in situ Carmelite. But it was also marvellous because we experienced a little of it ourselves, even if just the slenderest slither of it, as we prayed in silence, within the silent stillness, (so still and silent that it was almost palpable) of the calm Carmelite church, just behind our bustlingly busy Sixth Form College.

A gift of a Wednesday afternoon it certainly was, and thank you Sr Carmelite, ex-Wren, ex -South Atlantic contemplative and St Charles Square neighbour!