Transcript of the Recording.

In her recent apparitions, Our Lady has chosen to call herself Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Understandably, Carmelites see this, not just as a commendation of their religious order, and of their spirituality, but in particular of the teaching on prayer of their three great doctors of the Church, St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and St Thérèse of Lisieux.

Although I’ve never lived as a Carmelite, I always turn to the teaching of the two great Carmelite contemplative doctors for myself, and whenever I teach contemplative spirituality to others.

However, I’m quite sure that as well as trying to associate herself with the long and holy contemplative tradition of the Carmelites, Our Lady had another reason for calling herself Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

You see for between 40 and 50 years of her life at Nazareth, she had daily seen Mount Carmel, home of hermits and prophets since the time of Elias, only a few miles south of her home.

Now, I’m convinced that as a modern mystic has confirmed, that this was the place, where her own divine Son regularly went to pray for prolonged periods of time throughout his hidden years.

If, as St Luke insisted, Jesus always went away into solitary places for prolonged prayer after his day’s work (Luke 5:16), it would be inconceivable to believe that this was anything other than the continuation of a lifetime’s practice that was learned during His hidden years.

How many times had Our Lady prepared food and clothing for his departure, for the place where in prayer, He received the infused wisdom to understand more deeply the profound God-given spirituality that He would share with His mother and with His foster father.

What was learnt in prayer was put into practice with His mother and with His foster father.

In this way, the old moribund spirituality of the Jewish faith that they had inherited and that He continually criticised, not for what it originally was, but for what hypocrites had made of it, was transformed into the new Catholic spirituality that He would introduce into the early church through His mother and through His disciples.

In many ways then, I believe that Mount Carmel was the place where Our Lord received the infused wisdom that would enable Him to reflect on the God-given spirituality that He would bequeath to his infant church.

It was a family-based spirituality that was first practised, homed, and perfected in His own family over many years in Nazareth.

Mount Carmel then was the crèche where the Catholic Church, over which Our Lady presided as mother, was first conceived on earth by Her beloved son, thanks to the Holy Spirit.

For it was the Holy Spirit who taught Him in His solitude how the family to which He belonged at Nazareth would become the perfect paradigm of future holy families, which would become the spiritual building blocks of God’s Kingdom on Earth.

It was in order that we could imitate the example of her son, most particularly in the way he prayed, that the second word Our Lady used in her message to the modern world was Prayer,

In imitation of the prayer to which her son continually turned every day of His life.

Without prayer, He would not have received the wisdom to see His Father’s plan for the future church. Nor would He be given the strength to practise it, preach it, and die for it on the Cross.

There is, however, a difference between His prayer and our prayer, as we will see. But first, let us look at the similarities.

Firstly, He always said His morning prayer called the Shema, His Morning Offering, in which He offered the forthcoming day to God, His Father, together with all that He said and did in that day.

The Shema was the forerunner of our Morning Offering, to which we must immediately return and without delay, if we would imitate His example.

I can best  describe the second similarity between His prayer and our prayer by telling you a story.

In the late 1970s, I was invited as a guest speaker to address over 500 charismatics.

I decided to begin by grabbing their attention with a statement that I knew would shock them, even though it was true.

I simply said, “Jesus Christ, Our Lord, had to repent”. Before I could explain myself, a large contingent of the congregation stood up and walked out.

The noise was so loud that I could not explain myself, at least until they had all left the hall. Yes, it was an ill-advised opening, but like Miss Jean Broady I was in my Prime and like Miss Jean Broady I was also ruled by  my Pride. 

I could see that even those who remained behind would be difficult to win over.

The reason why so many had been shocked by my opening statement was because those who left, together with those who remained behind, were sinners and sinners only have one understanding of the word repentance.

For sinners, repentance means to turn away from a sin that has been committed, and it is usually associated with feelings of guilt and shame.

But that is a very narrow definition of repentance. repentance means far more than just turning away from sin that has just been committed.

Now, I must press the point that I’m trying to make because it is in the full meaning and understanding of repentance that we can come to a far deeper understanding of the spiritual life and of our own prayer life in particular.

Let me now, therefore, return to the rather injudicious statement that I used to draw the attention of my audience.

Yes, Jesus Christ, our Lord, did repent. This is made quite clear in the epistle to the Hebrews that states quite clearly that Christ was tempted in all things as we are tempted, but He did not sin.

What did He do then? He turned away from the temptations that threated to draw His attention away from God and turned back to continue loving His Heavenly Father to receive His infinite loving in return.

Furthermore, that He did indeed do this is made quite clear by Christ himself. In fact, He went out of His way to show us that He was tempted and tempted most especially in prayer, as we can read for ourselves in the scriptures.

Firstly, when He was at prayer in the desert, just before He began to preach the coming of God’s Kingdom. Secondly, in the Garden of Gethsemane, just before

His passion and death on the Cross. Please notice that nobody else was present on these two occasions, or at least those who were there in Gethsemane fell asleep.

So our Lord must have, as I’ve already hinted, gone out of his way to tell others of what happened to Him. This was to teach those of us who’ve committed ourselves to imitate His example, what will happen to us too, if we try to pray as He did.

We too will be inundated by distractions and temptations.

Furthermore, from His example  we will learn something that is absolutely vital about our own personal prayer life.

It is the essential and most important lesson that we have to learn, because it is about the very nature of love that is the heart and soul of our personal relationship with God.

He wanted us to know that He too, had to face temptations, and that it is in turning away from those temptations that we, like Him, are continually making acts of love.

These acts of love eventually enable our acts of love on earth to form a habit of selfless loving that enable us to unite ourselves with Our Lord’s great act of loving in heaven, that then unites us through Him with God the Father.

Repentance then, in its fullest sense, means not just turning away from sin, but also, and this is the key point that I have to make, it means turning away from the temptations to sin, too.

It does not just mean turning away from temptations, it also means turning back to God.

Continual repentance then involves making endless acts of love as Christ did. Acts of love that enable us to freely choose to turn away from the temptations and the distractions that are trying to turn us in upon ourselves in order  to turn to God instead.

It involves dying to self, dying to our own wills, dying to what we want, and submitting ourselves to God and to what He wants instead.

When we perform these actions in imitation of Christ, then we are practising and therefore learning the most important act that any human being can learn, and that is love.

Not any form of love, but more precisely, the love of God. We have the example of our Lord Himself to inspire us.

If we imitate Him in doing this, we not only learn from Him how to love God, but how, therefore, to receive from God all the infused virtues, all the gifts and fruits that are given to us, as His love, in which they are all contained, possess us ever more fully.

That is why a great mystic called Angela of Foligno, called prayer the Schola Divini Amoris or the School of Divine Love, because it is the place where we go to learn to love God.

The immediate and practical lesson that we can all learn in this school is this. If you have 101 temptations and distractions in your prayer time, then take heart, because it means that 101 times you have said no to self in order to say yes to God.

You have therefore been relentlessly turning away from your own petty whims and wishes, from your own flights of fantasy and wishful thinking in order to turn back to God.

In effect, you have been practising dying to self, saying no to self, time and time again. And most important of all, you have been making many many, sacrifices.

These sacrifices will be united to the supreme sacrifice of Christ each time you go to Mass to receive in return the love of God, to suffuse and surcharge your weak human love so that you will be able to continue making sacrifices to Him in all that you say and do in the forthcoming week.

Perhaps the greatest preacher in the early Church, St John Chrysostom, put it so simply when he said, “Everywhere, and wherever you find yourself , you can set up an altar to God in your mind by means of prayer”.

Then the first offering that you make to God is the most precious thing that you have and that is your time.  

You say no to what you would rather be doing to amuse yourself, to satisfy your senses, or to indulge in your favourite pastimes, in order to offer that time as a sacrifice to God.

Then when you begin trying to raise your mind and heart to God inside of prayer you make further sacrifices. They are made each time you turn away from the temptations and distraction that will always be there to turn you in upon yourself as you try to turn away from self and towards God.

This is how selfless loving is leant by making endless little acts of love. If you persevere in your endeavour to keep raising your heart and mind to God, then these acts of love  enable God to pour His Holy Love or His Holy Spirit into you.

In this way His love is gradually infused into your loving, suffusing and surcharging it with divine love, enabling you to begin, and to continue on your way, or rather in The Way, which is Christ, onward, into the Divine Union for which God created you. 

That is why St Teresa of Avila says that you cannot pray without distractions and temptations, at least until God leads you into a profound form of  mystical prayer which she calls Full Union in her masterwork Interior Castle.

If you are not prepared to do this and do it daily, a little at a time, please be sure that you will be, at best, no more than a nominal Christian, and  you will not make any progress at all in the spiritual life, and the union with God to which you aspire will have to remain no more than a pipedream.

If however you do daily practice what I have proposed, you will be imitating Christ from the inside and following His call to take up your cross in order to follow Him by practising for yourself, the sacrifices that will enable you to unite yourself with the sacrifices that He made for us every day of His life.

In this way, you will eventually, with the prayer that is generated in the meditation, that I will explain later, be led into another form of prayer that we do not initially share with Christ.

That form of prayer is called Mystical Contemplation. Because there was no sin in Him, when He went to spend the night in prayer after His daily work, as St. Luke tells us, then He was immediately engrossed in the love of His heavenly Father.

It was St. Thomas Aquinas who details how it is in this profound contemplative prayer, that when a person receives the love of God in return, that love contains within it all the infused virtues and the gifts and the fruits of the Holy spirit, just as a beam of light contains within it all the colours of the rainbow.

As we will see, it usually takes many years, firstly, practising the meditation that will be described later in my videos and other podcasts, before we are led into this profound contemplative prayer.

And even then, as we are sinners, it will take many more years, usually decades, before we can be perfectly united with Christ and with His contemplation of His Father.

It is then that we will be able to receive what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation that gradually makes saints out of sinners.

Beware, however, of some modern pseudo-Thomists who seem to think that the infused virtues can be practised this side of the contemplative prayer that they have long since forgotten, if they ever knew what it was.

They are, in fact, modern stoics who have the arrogance to think that they can obtain for themselves what only God can give?

I will, of course, explain all these matters in far more detail in my books, videos, and podcasts, particularly beginning with a podcast of a retreat that I gave to a group of laity at Belmont Abbey.

But now I want to move on to speak about the last word that Our Lady used after the words, Repentance and Prayer, and that is the word Sacrifice,

a word that is sadly anathema to a modern world in which people have long since been accustomed to live for themselves, for their own pleasures, their own pastimes, and for their own personal self-indulgence.

Nobody can be changed, nor can the world we live in without people, God’s people, freely choosing to take up their daily cross to follow Him.

Whenever this had happened before, people  were changed, and so was the world that they lived in.

What was done in the past can be done again now in the present, simply by putting into practice the simple message of Mary our Mother.

Then, contrary to what we may think, self-sacrifice, living for others, and above all, living for God leads to a life of joy.

When most people seek happiness, they tend to turn to pleasure-seeking, and happiness eludes them.

When the most selfless man who ever existed, spent His life seeking the happiness of others, He became a man of joy, as He called Himself at the Last Supper.

Seek to do the will of God and to serve others, and you will find the joy that cannot be found elsewhere, it will  eventually enthral you, and what St Paul called the peace that surpasses the understanding will progressively envelop you, as you are drawn ever more deeply into Christ the Prince of Peace.