Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Calendars, Conflagrations and Hagia Sophia

At this time of year, in the Office of Readings, which some readers may follow the travails of the prophet Elijah from the Book of Kings, his battle the princes and potentates of the age – and the Jezebel behind the throne. He was indeed a ‘burning fire’, refusing to compromise or capitulate, with his vocation beginning in his retreat in the cave on Mount Horeb, wherein he hearsd God’s voice not in the thunder and earthquakes and the rending of rocks, but in the ‘still, small voice’, a whisper even, in the original Hebrew, ‘silence’.

It was in that same Holy Land, in silence, that devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, as well as the Order devoted to her, named after the place where Elijah was said to dwell in a grotto on its highest point, looking 1700 feet above the Mediterranean Sea, and where he challenged the 450 prophets of Baal to the sacrificial contest, to see whose God was the true God. Tradition has it that Jewish hermits lived there, until the founding of the Carmelite Order in the late 12^th century, during the Crusades. If the Christians could not attain ultimate victory by the sword, they could by the life of prayer and conversion.

No one knows who the human founder is – there is a reference to a ‘Brother B’ in the original rule given by Albert, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1210. We may believe that God was the founder through His Mother, in that ‘still, small voice’, through Elijah. What we do know is that a monastery was built there soon afterward, and the Carmelite way of life – simple and beautiful, of prayer, contemplation and work -spread throughout the world. That first monastery has had a history as troubled as the land itself, becoming a mosque, then a hospital, then a mosque again, then destroyed; but, thankfully, it is now again a Carmelite monastery, and we may hope is so until Elijah comes again, in fire, on that great and terrible day of the Lord.

This day is chosen as the feast, commemorating the vision given to Saint Simon Stock, an English Carmelite, in 1251, of the brown scapular which, by wearing, we share in the spiritual benefits of Carmelites throughout the world, and through which many promises are given. But the main purpose of the scapular – a sacramental version of the larger scapular worn by the fully-professed members – is to remind us of our own promises made in our Baptism, to keep the Faith, to honour God, His Mother and all the saints, as we pilgrimage through this life to eternity.

There are a few other anniversaries on this day:

In 622, the Muslims count the beginning of their own calendar, really their own history, (hence it is year ‘zero’ for them), when Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to Medina, and set up the first Islamic community, commemorated as the Hegira (the journey). They use our own Christian (Gregorian) calendar – for now. But just wait. Just as Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) was once one of the most glorious churches in Christendom, and now, by Recep Erdogan’s recent presidential decree, will soon be turned into a mosque (as it was after the fall of Constantinople in 1453), they will do the same with the very march of time. But God is in charge, through His Christ – Anno Domini! Ad ultima!

And, while we’re on Hagia Sophia, it was on this day in 1054, that the Churches of the East and the West mutually excommunicated each other, in the great cathedral of basilica. Pope Leo IX, via his two legates, laid a bull of excommunication on the altar, and Patriarch Michael Cerularius responded in kind. Although the schism still remains – the ‘Orthodox’ not recognising the full primacy of the successor of Peter – we may hope that progress in healing has been made, especially since all anathemas and excommunications were lifted by Pope Saint Paul VI, in his meeting with Patriarch Athenagoras I during the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The work of ecumenism – primarily seeking the reunion of East and West once again – continues, and we may hope and pray with Christ ut unum sint, that we may be one, before that blazing day of Elijah.

And while on fire, today is also the anniversary of the first detonation of the atomic bomb, in 1945, over the testing site at Alomogordo in New Mexico, code-named by Robert Oppenheimer ‘Trinity’, ironically enough. No one really knew what would happen when the plutonium within the core was split, but all were quite blown away by the awesome might of the conflagration, which really was apocalyptic. As Oppenheimer reportedly whispered a line from the Bhagavad Gita, as he stood miles away in the observation zone: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Indeed.

The United States is the only nation that has used the so-called nuclear bomb in war, less than a month later, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on August 6^th and 9^th. I am still flummoxed when I read of people – Catholics included – justifying this wholesale destruction of life. We may pray that, whatever God has in store for ending this world – and end it will someday – these may be the last use of atomic weaponry in war, and that Death has not the last word.

 

The post Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Calendars, Conflagrations and Hagia Sophia appeared first on Catholic Insight.