Our Lady of Mount Carmel
July 16, 2004 Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Reading I (1 Kings 18:42b-45a) Reading II (Galatians 4:4-7)
Gospel (St. John 19:25-27)
In the Gospel reading today, we hear about
Our Lord giving us to His mother and giving His mother to each one of us. Now
each one of us is called to be that beloved disciple of the Lord; and as the
beloved disciple of the Lord, He tells us that we are no longer slaves but we
are His friends. And more than that, because of the sacrifice of Our Lord, He
has drawn us into His very heart. Through Baptism we have become members of
Christ Himself, and therefore we can call God our Father. Well, if we are
members of Jesus Christ and we can call God our Father, we can therefore call
Mary our mother. If we share a common Father, if we are members of the same
Person, we also have to share a common mother.
If we need any clarity about that, again we see in
the Gospel that He gives His mother to us. Now one could say, “He gave His
mother to Saint John to take care of,” but the reality is, as we pointed out
many times before, in Saint John’s Gospel there are two people whose names are
never used, and that is Our Lady and Saint John. The reason Saint John’s name
is never used is that he is simply called the “beloved disciple”, and that is
because he represents each one of us who is a beloved disciple. What we have to
ask our own selves then is if we are living as a beloved disciple, that is, if
we are truly seeking to do God’s Will, if we are living as children of our
heavenly Father, and if we are opening our hearts to receive our mother into
our home. Not so much into our physical home, although obviously we want to
have some shrine or statues or pictures to honor our Blessed Lady, but it is in
the home of the heart where she needs to have a place – a very, very special
place.
We want to have Our Lord present within us, and
indeed He dwells within us if we are in the state of grace, along with His
Father and the Holy Spirit. But the reality is that you cannot separate Jesus
and Mary. As we know, every single time that we see Our Lady mentioned in the
Gospels, she is wherever Jesus is. She is never appearing on her own someplace,
but rather she is where He is. If He dwells in our hearts, so does she. If He is
present in Holy Communion, she is going to be there; not that we receive our
Blessed Lady when we receive Holy Communion, but rather when we open our hearts
to receive Our Lord we should also be opening our hearts to receive our Blessed
Lady. So as we receive Holy Communion, one beautiful practice is simply to ask
Our Lady to place her Immaculate Heart within you so that as you receive her
Son in Holy Communion it is she, in you, who will receive our Blessed Lord so
that He will be able to enter into an immaculate place – her heart, that He
will be loved with her love, that He will be loved perfectly. That is what we
want to be able to give to our Blessed Lord.
The goal for all of us is to be able to live
the life of Christ. If we want to live the life of Christ, we need to learn
from His most perfect disciple: His mother. So we want to be able to imitate
her in all things because she is the one who was most perfectly like her Son.
Obviously, none of us is going to be without sin, but what we need to do is
strive to remove sin from our lives. Each one of us is able to climb that
Mountain of Carmel to be able to look out over the sea and to be able to see
our salvation coming forth. As the opening prayer said, that Mountain of Carmel
is Jesus Himself. And Saint John of the Cross makes very clear that the way to
climb Carmel is the way of nothing; it is pure faith. It is to rely solely on
our Blessed Lord and to walk straight up the Mountain. That is exactly what Our
Lady did, so she has already cleared the path for all of her children to be
able to walk the Mountain, to be able to find union with Christ.
So it is for all of us to realize, and what a
wonderful gift it is, that Our Lady wants nothing more for each one of us than
union with her Son. What she desires more than anything else is that we will be
perfectly united with her Son, that we will love her Son as perfectly as we
can. If we are willing to allow her, she herself will arrange for that. She is,
after all, a mother, and so she will take care of everything for us, tidying
the home of our heart, if you will, and preparing that home to be a worthy
dwelling place for her Son. But that requires first that we have to open our
hearts, our homes, to be able to receive her, to be able to learn from her, that
as the apostles in the Acts of the Apostles gathered around Our Lady and she
taught them how to pray and she taught them how to understand the truth and she
taught them how to do the Will of God, we need to go to the exact same place,
to the one who has done it perfectly, and we need to ask her to teach us how to
love her Son, how to do His Will, how to make sure that we are seeking perfect
union with Him in prayer. She is the one who will teach us. She has already
done it, and it is more than anything what she wants for each one of us because
she wants her Son to be loved perfectly. What a joy if we would be able, with
Our Lady, even in this world, to love Jesus perfectly, to grow to such a degree
of holiness that we will have union with Him so that when we get to heaven we
will continue to love Him perfectly. We will have that perfect union, that
face-to-face union which will only be in heaven, but it begins now by seeking
union with Jesus Christ. And the perfect way to union with Jesus Christ is
union with His mother.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.