Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS)'s Podcast
The Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS) is a centre for research and formation that promotes spiritual formation and renewal, drawing on the rich resources of the venerable Carmelite tradition.
It is an apostolate of the Anglo-Irish Province of the Discalced Carmelites, based at the Carmelite Priory at Boars Hill, Oxford, England.
OUR MISSION
CACS strives to achieve its mission through structured study and formation programmes in spirituality from the Carmelite perspective, especially Prayer and Spiritual Direction. At the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality, you are welcome to enter into the silence where God’s voice is heard in prayer, word and sacrament, inviting you to journey ever more deeply into a place of growth and wholeness. Our goal is to bring people to experience a life-transforming friendship with God through a lived experience of Carmelite spirituality that is authentic to its biblical roots.
Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality (CACS)'s Podcast
Palm Sunday
PALM SUNDAY
Word & Wisdom is a weekly reflection on the Sunday’s scriptures and the wisdom of the Carmelite tradition. It promises to offer you real spiritual food to sustain you on the journey.
This Word and Wisdom Podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Applied Carmelite Spirituality, Oxford (carmelite.uk.net).
To receive audio and written copies, subscribe by emailing podcasts@cacs.org.uk
To connect with our Living Prayer Podcast on Youtube, kindly click: https://www.youtube.com/@CACSOxford
The readings for Palm Sunday bring us face to face with a choice we must make to turn away from Jesus or to adopt a spirit of self-abnegation, annihilating in us anything that is resistant to humble obedience to what he asks of us. Such abandonment represents the most radical truth lived by Saint Therese of Lisieux, who knew in her heart that Jesus thirsted for her as much as she thirsted for him. Living the paschal mystery of Christ's dying and rising turned this young woman away from being an immature fledgling full of faults to becoming a mature woman fearlessly committed to giving her all for God.
Her motivation for doing so was that God gives the hundredfold in this life to those souls who leave everything for love of him. The first reading for today from Isaiah is a servant song that Therese, to whom the Lord had given the tongue of a teacher, would have fully understood. Isaiah depicts the characteristics of the Messiah she loved.
Even when his back was beaten and his beard plucked, he did not rebel. Neither did he hide his serene face from buffeting and spitting. Out of love for sinful humankind, he accepted to give his life for the salvation of the world.
Psalm 22 confirms the full significance of such abandoned love. It is truly a lamentation that expresses what it is like in our own lives to have to identify with the affliction of the afflicted. In those midnight moments of our life when we feel abandoned by God and rejected even by those we trusted, we refuse to erase the counter-expressions of trust and hope in God's deliverance and our salvation.
This psalm response opens our heart to the full force of the second reading from Philippians, which portrays the humility and obedience of Jesus who freely chooses to empty himself and for our sake to choose death on a cross. Three traits of Christ highlighted in this reading are central to the Carmelite tradition—his self-emptying, his humility, and his obedience. This second reading also gives us a commission desperately needed in our world today to revere the name of Jesus and to confess that he is Lord.
The Father manifested the sovereignty of the Son by raising him from the dead and drawing him into glory. How this revelation of redemption comes to pass comprises the account of the institution of the Lord's Supper in the Gospel of Luke. We witness the awesome moment when bread becomes his body given up for us and when wine becomes his blood emptied out for us.
The Eucharist is from then to now an action of thanksgiving for sins forgiven and new life in Christ restored. An outstanding witness to what it means to adhere in all circumstances to the mystery of transforming love is Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity. In times of physical debilitation and spiritual desolation, she chose to deepen her love for Christ crucified and to identify totally with the Paschal mystery of his dying and rising.
She tells us in words that bear repeating throughout Holy Week, when everything was dark, when the present was so painful and the future seemed even more gloomy to me, I used to close my eyes and abandon myself like a child into the arms of this Father who is in heaven. May we choose to do likewise from now until we celebrate with the whole church the glory of Easter morn.