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
Pentecost Sunday
PENTECOST 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
As significant as is the Feast of Pentecost, we cannot forget that the momentous event we celebrate was a beginning and not a completion. Pentecost is ceaseless. It is in fact an everyday experience, animating our personal spirituality and discipleship, as well as our shared efforts in making Christ's Church.
Indeed, anything that we do for the sake of faith is animated by this daily Pentecost. While writing the interior castle, St. Teresa of Avila confronted her perceived inadequacies as a writer by repeatedly drawing on the Holy Spirit to guide the expression of her thoughts and mystical insights. This attentiveness to the Holy Spirit rooted her work and ministry in God's love, while at the same time allowing her talents to be agitated for that spontaneous and creative burst which broke new ground for personal prayer and the Church.
Reading about the tongues of fire signifying the Holy Spirit's profusion of gifts upon the gathered disciples of Jesus is wondrous. After Christ's ascension, the absence of the one they had been following was acute. With Pentecost, the soul of each disciple, with his or her own gifts, was transfused by the Holy Spirit to participate intimately in the life and mission of Jesus.
As Acts reports, they emerged from the Cynical with an overflowing energy that transmitted the holiness of the Gospel to even those who spoke different languages. The Pentecost event launched the Church, and every day since, Pentecost enlivens, provokes, challenges, reforms and uplifts the Church as a whole, and each of us as its constitutive members. This persisting and pervasive presence of Pentecost touches us on three levels.
As children of God baptised in Jesus Christ, Pentecost brings us to personal fullness, instigating the growth through life's flourishing and setbacks by which we actualise our capacity for holiness. Carmelite theologian Constance Fitzgerald noted that the Spirit comes not only in speech but in silence, especially in those moments of desolation when our defences collapse. Pentecost accompanies us in the undoing and unlearning of breakdowns, as well as in energising leaps of breakthroughs.
Another level of Pentecost is as Church. The Synodal Pilgrimage begun by Pope Francis and now affirmed by Pope Leo, inherited structures and rituals inspired by the Spirit for previous centuries and cultures need to be reimagined again with the Holy Spirit to speak with urgency and compassion to the spiritual needs of this time. It is now our turn to leave the Cenacle, our turn to dare to speak in fresh ways the truth and hope of Christ.
The third outpouring of the Holy Spirit prepares each of us to heal our culture. Both Popes Francis and Leo have identified the malady besetting global society as polycrisis. Polycrisis admits that reality is now defined by a complex interconnection of problems which compound each other.
Pentecost is the antidote to polycrisis, a source of hope in a situation of despair, an illumination from wisdom when so much information has let us down, a gift that enriches without cost or exclusion, and a light that beckons us to follow Christ and pay the price of love which alone builds and secures peace.