Transfiguration on Mt Carmel as well as on Mt Tabor
31 July 1998 15:22
TRANSFIGURATION ON MT CARMEL AS WELL AS ON MT TABOR
In Sydney, Australia, during her video-taped presentation in March 1998, Vassula commented with delighted surprise on the world-wide interest shown by Carmelites of the Western Church in the messages from the Trinity which she relays.
Before the ‘Winter’ of Jansenist heresy snuffed out much Christian meditation in the West, in Spain, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, pioneered an ‘Autumn’ flowering of the “Prayer of the Heart”. This is the same infused contemplation which Vassula, the Franciscans of Medjugorje, and the Orthodox Palamite tradition, all promote, though sometimes they use different words to describe the inexpressible.
The two Spaniards insisted, as do Vassula and Fr Slavko today, and as did Symeon the New Theologian of Constantinople, a thousand years ago, that the experience of union with the Trinity through adoption, is both supremely desirable and freely available to both celibate religious and the married laity.
Like Symeon’s Greek poetry of the 11th century, the Spanish volumes written in the culture and jargon of the past, can be heavy reading.
Thomas Dubay, S.M., a retreat director (particularly to contemplative Carmelites) has written a paperback, “Fire Within” which synthesises Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the teachings of Holy Scripture.
In recent years rationalising scholars through want of any experience of the Holy Spirit’s “prayer of the heart”, have devalued, as flowery language, much that Fr Dubay says that the Apostles wrote and intended literally.
Thomas Dubay’s book was published by Ignatius Press, San Francisco in 1989.
I quote from one of the reviews on the back cover: “A practical and exciting book that can change your life. If one hundred Christians put this book into practice, we would have a worldwide revolution, for there is no more revolutionary power than prayer and sanctity.”
Today we are part of a Catholic Holiness Movement. If you think this means just pietistic navel gazing, think again.
As an Orthodox, let me illustrate with Western Church Protestants who carried the ‘fire within’ at a time that Jansenism was rampant within Roman Catholicism.
The Holiness ‘methods’ of the Anglican priest, John Wesley, partly derived from the Pietism of the Moravians, did not just lead to Method-ism, but probably prevented the anti-clerical horrors of the French Revolution from being repeated on the other side of the Channel. The spiritual revolution of his ‘class meetings’ and ‘Sunday Schools for adults’ were more powerful than the shortlived ‘Terror’ of the Jacobins.
Vassula busily does today, internationally by Boeing, what John Wesley once achieved nationally on horseback.
Another burst of fervent repentant prayer was seen in a Holiness Movement in the USA which resulted in the busy evangelism of modern Pentecostalism. Pentecostals are conventionally dated from the Asuza Street, Los Angeles Revival of 1906.
As an ordinary layman, I urge others to read and practise the “Fire Within”. With holy fire in their hearts, the saints of every age and nation experienced both purification and a taste of the beatific vision IN THIS LIFE.
With the gift of the Holy Spirit may we do the same. Without the “Fire Within” we cannot become echoes of the echo.
Derek Stone, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
