WHAT WE WANT
Since we have no active apostolate or ministry, our main responsibility in the Church is to live and pray in a small community where silence and solitude and the charity entailed in community living, done with and in Christ for the good and salvation of others, is our main work. St. Therese once described her life and ours as being love in the heart of the Church without which there would be no one to preach or be missionaries or martyrs. It’s a difficult life to describe because so much of it is about the interior life of prayer.
“But whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
St. Teresa of Avila, who established our Carmels, realized that all change for the good had to begin within herself, and that can cost because it is a life of going against our self-centeredness. She was a very outgoing and capable woman, yet while living at a time in history when so much was going wrong in the world, God led her to this kind of life. This love in the Church’s heart is like the sanctuary lamp in the Church that must always be kept lit. It’s a life of union with God, with Christ, and—as Teresa once said—that union isn’t possible without prayer because it is the door that leads to the center of our being where He dwells.