The Gift of Self in Love

“A Carmelite is one who has beheld the Crucified, who has seen Him offering Himself to His Father as a victim for souls, and meditating in the light of this great vision of Christ’s charity has understood the passion of love that filled His soul and has willed to offer herself as He did.”

—St Elizabeth of the Trinity

Called to live "in allegiance to Christ and to serve him faithfully with a pure heart and a good conscience, we as Discalced Carmelite Nuns make it our purpose to follow the evangelical counsels with utmost perfection. Our basic obligation is to give ourselves “entirely and without reserve to him who is everything” and “to imitate Christ in everything by conforming our lives to his, while meditating on it in order to know how to imitate it". We "resolve from the very start to follow the way of the cross, since it is the way of perfection in which the Lord walked". (cf. OCD Nuns’ Constitutions #22) 

The vowed life is a life of love where we seek to turn away from everything that would hinder us from a whole-hearted following of Christ. The vows are not about saying no  to life and love; they are a profound “yes” to the Giver of all gifts; a radical response of love to the Lord who first loved us: 

“She knows of her immense indebtedness to God for having created her solely for Himself, and that for this she owes Him the service of her whole life; and because He redeemed her solely for Himself she owes Him every response of love.”

— St John of the Cross

The deepest meaning of the evangelical counsels is their expression of the love of the Son for the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. The consecrated life makes present in time and place Jesus’ own way of life: His way of living in chastity, poverty and obedience appears as the most radical way of living the gospel on earth, a way that may be called divine, for it was embraced by him, God and man, as the expression of his relationship as the only Begotten Son of the Father with the Holy Spirit. (Vita Consecrata, n.18). 

At its heart, a religious vocation is a call to follow Christ more closely, a call which “springs from the interior encounter with the love of Christ.” (Redemptionis Donum, n.3) It is a call to imitate Christ’s own way of life ~ chaste, poor, obedient, humble, cross-bearing.

The evangelical basis for the consecrated life is found in a special relationship with Christ, a special grace of intimacy “which makes possible and even demands the total gift of self in profession of the evangelical counsels.” (Vita Consecrata n.16). It is a call to be with Jesus: this is the “radical nature of the vocation to consecrated life: how good it is for us to be with you, to devote ourselves to you, to make you the one focus of our lives! ” (Vita Consecrata n.15). 

Our Formula of Profession uses imagery from our Holy Rule to express this following of Christ – a life of allegiance to Jesus Christ, that is, total adherence in faith to the Risen Lord. Flowing from our baptismal consecration and the full flowering of it, our religious consecration establishes a new bond between a Carmelite and Christ her Spouse; a true wedding with Christ in a renewed covenant of love, which shows forth the mystery of the Church as Bride.

“The choice of Christ, which characterizes a religious vocation, is an extreme, absolute, irrevocable choice, after which there is no strength to choose anything else… We must be persuaded that a religious vocation is an irrevocable event, an affair of radical extremism, not because we have courage or because we are strong and generous, but because Christ has grasped us, making us His own, taking us into His arms and overwhelming us with the power of His grace.”

—Anastasius Cardinal Ballestrero OCD