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
The Solemnity of Christ the King
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THE SOLEMNITY OF CHRIST THE KING
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
With today’s Gospel, the Church proclaims the kingship of Christ not from His resurrection, but from His exchange with one of the guilty thieves on the cross. The Church reminds us that the crown of glory cannot be disentangled from the crown of thorns. That it took a guilty criminal to perceive the royalty of Christ, which His apostles had missed, reminds us to gaze, even now, at the vulnerability of Jesus, not His triumph. On this despicable throne of the cross, suffering wounds, ridicule and taunts, Jesus exercised the kenotic power of love. Hence the unspeakable majesty of the deposition: the limp cadaver being taken down from the cross marks the now unbreakable reign of God’s forgiveness, mercy and embrace.
Jesus being acclaimed king on the cross is not to suggest it was a title He earned. Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus includes at least fifteen kings. Some, like David, were brave, if also flawed by lust and ambition. Others were simply barbaric, having worshipped false gods, desecrated the Temple, and imposed servitude on God’s people. It is shocking that Matthew situates Jesus’ birth in a genetic pool with many more moments of sin, failure and betrayal, than enlightenment. Yet this is the evangelist’s point: to show that Jesus, as Messiah, purifies all of human experience, including sin. With the Incarnation, ultimate power is made subject to the service of the people.
We may think this proclamation of kingship is ironic, or that it marks a spiritual rather than temporal enthronement. In fact, acknowledging Christ as King is a practical necessity because it provides the order based on love which nurtures true human fulfilment and social harmony. A ruler by definition sets the rules, providing authority for the ethics, values and behaviours that govern relationships and ensure our personal freedom. Without this order, chaos erupts, ensnaring us in fears which harden all too easily into hateful suspicions. Without this order we lose our identity as a people, succumbing to the physical and spiritual affliction of loneliness.
Christ the King is not just a feast, but a way of life. St Teresa of Ávila made this royal ordering the key feature of a soul’s journey. Referring to the “interior castle,” she identified the soul as a fortress, the king’s dwelling place. For St Teresa, it is this royal presence that hosts us sumptuously in the castle’s mansions and beckons us with a royal embrace into the throne room of mystical union. While this castle imagery is of her time, St Teresa’s insight was wholly prophetic: she anticipated the Second Vatican Council’s retrieval of baptism as full participation in Christ’s living prophecy, holy priesthood, and beneficent kingship.
Do we believe this is possible? Do we order our lives in fealty to Christ? Do we use our gifts as the royal sisters and brothers of Christ the King to build the reign of God’s justice and peace? These are urgent questions, especially when we reflect on why Pope Pius XI promulgated the feast of Christ the King a century ago. The world and Church in 1925 were in an agony not unlike ours. Political divisions were stark. Hateful ideologies, such as fascism and Nazism, were advancing, producing deadly rivalries between nations, as well as oppression and violence within them. Misinformation was rampant, fanning fears and accelerating what proved to be a self-defeating momentum for military rearmament.
In that moment of existential foreboding, Pope Pius pointed out that global society and Christian cultures had replaced Christ’s framework for peace with conceptions of power based on intimidation and violence. He proclaimed Christ the King, not as an ideal, but as a remedy—not as a pie-in-the-sky alternative to the dictatorships of fear, but as the only practical antidote to the contagion of viciousness.
Before Christ’s reign changes the world, it must, as St Teresa suggested, change our own hearts. Being baptized in Christ, the kingdom He announced as among and within us is already gestating in our personal charisms and hopes. Honouring Christ the King thus incites each of us to do our indispensable part in making real and fruitful the reign of God.