The Liturgy of the Hours, or Divine Office, is not something we Lay Carmelites have to do but something we want to do....

Fr. John Malley, O. Carm, in a talk titled Introduction to the Use of Scripture, offers a practical approach to prayer using Scripture. It may be summed up in four words beginning with the letter “P”: Place, Passage, Presence of God, and Pray....

Being a hermit is harder than I thought. The biggest hurdle — praying. Not that prayer is difficult, but a concentrated discipline of prayer is. I told myself that prayer is now my “job” and I would have to work at it, like any job....

‘Centering Prayer’ is a phrase which has been generically applied to a wide variety of practices. In the Carmelite world, it is a reference to a method for centering oneself on Christ, focusing one’s heart and mind on Christ. However, the phrase has multiple meanings and not all ‘Centering Prayer’ is the same....

Our retreat master, Rev. Francis Amodio, O. Carm., quipped that Mt. Carmel is our foundation, that we were founded by “dirt”. I was not sure if he said this in jest or seriously, yet it seemed to me to have a lot of truth. Dirt is a common feature of two important symbols of Carmel, the desert and the garden....

“We are perishing.” I say that as a quote, not as a statement of fact. These are the words of St. Teresa of Avila as she writes in the Way of Perfection in the sixteenth century just after the Protestant Reformation had triggered one new denomination after another to shred the body of Christ....