Ruth Burrows (Sister Rachel Gregory) and Sister Wendy Beckett were a Carmelite nun and hermit respectively who shared a deep spiritual friendship. This Lent, we’re drawing their voices together to enrich our spiritual journey.

Each Sunday of Lent (or maybe a little before!) we will upload here a simple reflection sheet containing relevant and life-giving passages to reflect upon and some questions to ponder over. You may like to print the sheet out, or download it to a device, and have it near you during your prayer times throughout the week.

Click here for Holy Week

Click here for the Fifth Week of Lent

Click here for the Fourth Week of Lent

Click here for the Third Week of Lent

Click here for the Second Week of Lent

Click here for the First Week of Lent

The exhibition was on display in St Patrick's Cathedral, East Melbourne, throughout October last year and was gratefully received by all who had a chance to visit the cathedral. The exhibition will be back at St Patrick's from Saturday, 10 May until Sunday, 25 May.

On Sunday, 18 May the centenary of the canonisation of St Thérèse will be celebrated at the 11am Mass at St Patrick's. Bishop Rene Ramirez will be the principal celebrant for this Mass.

All are welcome! See below for more details.

Click here to learn more about St Thérèse of Lisieux.

The exhibition will be launched at 12.15pm in St Patrick’s Cathedral, East Melbourne, on St Thérèse’s feast day – Tuesday, 1 October 2024. There will be prayers and reflections followed by Mass at 1pm at the Cathedral. The exhibition will remain on display throughout October.

All are welcome! See below for more details.

Click here to learn more about St Thérèse of Lisieux. 

In his first 2024 Lent talk, Bishop Greg Homeming explores St Thérèse's experience of God – an experience that was spoken into her brokenness, vulnerability and failures. It is a moving reflection on how we too can encounter God in the most messed-up and seemingly inescapable parts of our lives.

In this second Lenten talk, Bishop Greg moves on to contemplate with us how Thérèse responded to God's loving encounter with her. How did being touched by God in the heart of her brokenness and powerlessness affect Thérèse's thinking and living?

In this third and final talk for Lent 2024, Bishop Greg asks the hard question: what do you do when God's love seems to be absent? He responds by drawing upon how St Thérèse responded when she felt engulfed in a night of nothingness. 

Tennyson, In Memoriam.

Each one of us comes into this world with a deep wound that cannot be healed by anything this world offers. The human vocation is not an easy one. By our very nature we are longing for something we have not got and what, of ourselves, we cannot attain. Within us is an indestructible urge to seek for happiness and we carry a deep-down conviction that we are made for happiness and that it is to be had. It is this desire that drives all humankind, and blessed are those who, hungering and thirsting for true happiness, know where alone it is to be found. We find it hard to realise that this open wound is our most precious treasure, an endowment our Creator will never take back from us.

We often moan, do we not? “Why must faith be so difficult? Why does God make it so hard for us? Why does he not show himself, do something that would reassure us, give us the security, the emotional, indisputable certainty we crave for?” The answer is that God cannot do so. God cannot deny his own self. God is love. Every attribute we ascribe to God is an aspect of love. We ourselves are creations of God’s love and our fulfilment is in love alone, in the absolute love that is God.

Jesus calls those who demand signs and wonders adulterous, and this, in biblical language, means idolatrous. God is love but we cannot expunge from the gospels or from the New Testament in general, expressions of divine anger. God’s “fury,” God’s “burning wrath” are expressions of a suffering love that cannot bear seeing his beloved destroy themselves. His closest disciples must watch and pray lest they fall into temptation.

Listening to the parable of the great wedding banquet I was shocked anew. How polite, how perfectly respectable the response of those invited: “I pray you hold me excused,” and so understandable! Yet terrible, terrible! The precious pearl of eternal life, the glory of being God’s cherished beloved, cast away as valueless. There are more important things to attend to. Are we surprised by God’s “groaning,” his “rage”? In a way we cannot logically explain, divine “wrath” cannot be divorced from divine love, mocked, spat upon, scourged and crucified.

“What can bring us happiness?” many say (Psalm 4).

The great cry of the human heart has been answered. The Lord of all, Creator of the Universe, Fountainhead of all that we love, desire, ache for – has shown us his face in his incarnate Word, a face turned towards us in unspeakable love and tenderness. Do we look and look at this blessed face? I fear we do not.

The gospel stories are so familiar. We tend to use them to discover how we must act, how we must be towards our neighbour, and this is, of course, important but it is not enough.

When we take up our book of the gospels, it should be with the deepest reverence; we need to reflect, to ask for light, and to affirm that what we are about to read is divine revelation. Here the divine heart, the divine face of God is revealed to each one of us in accordance with our desire. We must give the words our closest attention and ponder them with a longing desire to understand, to really know our Lord.

We must take a lot of trouble. Even as we do our part, God does his. There is a sacramental element in Holy Scripture. The incarnate Word of God touches us at a level we cannot ordinarily perceive, communicates, not merely ideas of him, but himself. Prayerful pondering of the word of God cannot be sufficiently stressed. We come to know the truth of God and faith is strengthened. To rely on our subjective faith is to build our house on sand and, come the tempests, such a house collapses. A house built on the word of God is impregnable. If our faith is grounded on the divine word it will withstand every onslaught, and God knows how assaulted we are by the society in which we live!

We often moan, do we not? “Why must faith be so difficult? Why does God make it so hard for us? Why does he not show himself, do something that would reassure us, give us the security, the emotional, indisputable certainty we crave for?”

Maybe some of us see ourselves as not very important to God and are content just to be “a good Christian” – if only I touch the tassel of his robe, I shall be made whole (Matt 9: 21) – not expecting, and therefore not seeking, an intimacy of love. It is enough, we tell ourselves, to concentrate on our neighbour, for, after all, has Jesus not declared that whatever you do to one of these you do to me?

That is true, of course, but do you reflect that you, in your turn, are the precious “one” with whom Jesus identifies? Are you convinced that Jesus loves you in your absolute uniqueness? We are not a faceless crowd, as the sick woman in the gospel was to realise. Jesus turns and looks at her, eye meets eye. The Lord is not content that you are content with touching his robe, he wants to be face to face with you. He wants your embrace, your kiss of love. No one can give him the particular love and the special joy that you can give. He does not want you merely as a labourer in his vineyard, no matter how diligent a one, but a loving friend with whom he can share his deepest self, and who will labour side by side with him.

If we really know Jesus, who is our God, we cannot seriously cry: “Why does God make it so hard for us?” Look, for instance, at Matthew 4: 23-25 … “healing every disease and every infirmity among the people…and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics and he healed them…” Notice the “all, every,” “throughout all Syria.”

Is this a God who sends illnesses and afflictions to try us, to make things hard for us? How can we really look at him, the image of the Uncreated Creator and think he does? He has plunged defenceless into our human existence, knows it inside out from sheer experience. At the same time as he tastes the bitterness of human finitude, helplessness and pain, he is revealing to us the very nature of our God, the way God is.

Do you reflect that you are the precious “one” with whom Jesus identifies? Are you convinced that Jesus loves you in your absolute uniqueness?

God does not play games with us. God does not send hard things to try us, to test our faith. These things happen because we are human. Oh, we shall see one day the glory of being human. How blessed, how happy we are if, in the dark, in pain, confusion, bewilderment, with prayers and questions seemingly unanswered, we trust unswervingly in his love!

May God give us “that holy chivalry of the heart which flies to the defence of defenceless truth, the watchfulness of spirit which recognises truth even in the dark, the sharp ear of love and the intuitive strength of desire” (Romano Guardini, The Lord).

Source: https://www.alivepublishing.co.uk/2011/11/fully-human-fully-alive/

At a time of great violence, anxiety and suffering in our world, Pope Francis has just released a new Apostolic Exhortation, drawing a message of hope from the wisdom of our beloved Carmelite sister and Doctor of the Church, St Thérèse of Lisieux.

The document, C'est la confiance, takes its title from Thérèse's famous statement, “It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love.” According to Pope Francis, these words “sum up the genius of her spirituality. . . . It is trust that brings us to love and thus sets us free from fear. It is trust that helps us to stop looking to ourselves and enables us to put into God's hands what he alone can accomplish. Doing so provides us with an immense source of love and energy for seeking the good of our brothers and sisters” (paragraphs 2 and 45).

Click here to read the Apostolic Exhortation

In his third and final Lent talk, Bishop Greg speaks about St Teresa and prayer and how, for Teresa, prayer is about responding to the love of Jesus in a spirit of intimate friendship.

In this second Lenten talk, Bishop Greg explores three virtues essential to St Teresa of Avila's teaching: love, detachment, and humility.

In this first of three Lenten talks, Bishop Greg Homeming talks about the life of St Teresa of Avila and why she is so significant in the life of the Church. 

By Andrew Armond

And my answer, invariably, was the same as well: “No, I haven’t! But I know why I have each one, and if I have a question about something, I know where to find the answer!”

One of the most important realizations you begin to have when you age is the unfinished character of life. I’ll never read all those books. I’ll never finish all the projects I’d like to finish. I’ll never accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish. And so, in many respects, we could call those unfinished things “failures.”

But failures in life are inevitable. Embracing failure, imperfection, and incompleteness can be a spiritual practice that brings us closer to the heart of God in Jesus Christ.

After all, Jesus, too, was a failure. This is the central message of Lent and Holy Week! Jesus, in fact, could only complete the work God had for him to accomplish if he “failed,” gloriously, in the eyes of the world. Condemned to die in the way of a common and unheralded criminal, he cries from the cross “It is finished,” which can also be translated “It is accomplished” or “It is completed.”

Embracing failure, imperfection, and incompleteness can be a spiritual practice that brings us closer to the heart of God in Jesus Christ.

This statement from our Lord and Savior, the One whom we trust in for our salvation, our life, our all, is ridiculously ironic on its face. Jesus was a young man who had only been in active ministry for three years.

There were more people he hadn’t healed, hadn’t helped, hadn’t reached. How could everything that he had intended to do be “completed” by dying a shameful death?

St. Paul answers this question in 1 Corinthians, in which he admits that Christ crucified is both a “stumbling block” and a “folly” in the eyes of the world, but in the eyes of those called by God, it is “the power” and “wisdom” of God.

We have to allow God to be God and allow ourselves to be human, accepting our frailty and limitations. And then, paradoxically, we will be truly free!

Every year, the Archbishop of Canterbury chooses a book to be recommended for all Anglicans during the Lenten season. In 2012, the chosen book was Love Unknown by Ruth Burrows, a Carmelite nun. One of the beautiful things about this book is that it highlights, over and over again, the simple fact that for us to grow spiritually, we have to be glorious failures.

We have to allow God to strip away our pretense, our pride, even the things we do that we think are pleasing to  God. We have to allow God to be God and allow ourselves to be human, accepting our frailty and limitations. And then, paradoxically, we will be truly free!

There is so much good in this book that I wanted to quote nearly every page in this short article. But I will leave you with these words, which show us the victory God achieves in our life in and through every failure:

“Our faith must be a rock-like certainty that God, in Christ, has given us everything, guaranteed an inheritance that cannot be spoiled and can never pass away. An ocean of grace is always at our disposal. Our lives should be thanksgiving and this will mean a realization that we need not rely so much on ourselves but must look towards him for  guidance and strength. We shall cease to worry as to the outcome of our effort, be it success or failure. Our works will be the works of Christ living in us and acting through us. Firm belief in what God is and has done for us, the riches that are there for us, enables us to stand erect and hold our heads high, whatever storms swirl around our defenceless head” (pages 116-117). 

The Rev. Dr Andrew Armond is the Associate Rector of St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Waco, Texas. Carmelite Spirit is grateful for Rev. Armond's kind permission to publish his article here. 

Click here to read “Finding Thérèse”. Note: you'll be asked to “Register” in order to read the article. The process is free and totally worth it!

Do you ever feel like you are not “enough”? Or, if someone encourages you to embrace your “enoughness,” do you struggle to do that? Perhaps St Teresa of Avila has some lifegiving wisdom just for you! Check out this article on St Teresa of Avila and the Search for Enoughness.