A Meditative Study of Liturgy and Significance of the Solemnity of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel
By Fr. Sam Anthony Morello, OCD
July 16 honors the Virgin Mary as the Patroness of the Carmelite family. The Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel demonstrates the relationship cultivated with the Blessed Virgin over the eight centuries of Carmelite history. We Carmelites are happy to be known in the Western Church as the first Order to be named after the Virgin Mary.
Since the late 13th century, the Order of Carmelites has celebrated a major Marian Feast as the special Solemnity of the Order. The Feast had a double intent: first, to celebrate the Order's particular allegiance to its Patroness; and secondly, to render thanks to God for the survival of the Order in the West. As we celebrate, we are mindful that Our Lady of Mt. Carmel is the unique title of Carmel's Madonna. It was the pilgrims to Palestine during the Crusades who named us the Brothers of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.
As Carmelites and Christ’s faithful, we now look to the sacred readings of the Solemnity to find what light the scriptures cast on the role of the Blessed Virgin as Mother of our Savior, as Mother of His Holy church and as the Mother of the Family of Carmel.
In I Kings 18, we climb Mt. Carmel with the prophet Elijah. The prophet and his attendant were suffering along with their neighbors from a severe punitive draught predicted by Elijah himself. The passage focuses on the biblical image of rain: one of the most positive nature images in scripture. The biblical desert lands were prone to aridity, and those living in the agrarian world of the Hebrew scriptures were extremely sensitive to their dependence on the weather. So, it is easy to appreciate how a gentle and penetrating rain was perceived as a blessing of the God of the Covenant: doubly so after a long drought.
A Cloud Rising From the Sea
Elijah comes to a cave on the promontory that juts out high over the Port of the modern city of Haifa. Elijah, bowed in prayer, directs his attendant to look out to the sea. Again, and again, his servant checks for any sign whatsoever from the Mediterranean Sea of any change in the weather. Finally, as if by ritual count of a completed watch of seven views of the scene, the youth reports to Elijah, “There is a cloud as small as a man’s hand rising from the sea,” or as the Latin Vulgate translates from the Greek Old Testament, the size of a man’s foot or heel.
Jesus as the Rainfall of Grace
Galatians 4 gives us the pith of all Mariology when St. Paul asserts that "In the fullness of time, God sent his Son born of a woman, born under the Law," that we might be freed from the Law, and made adopted children of God. For in Christ Jesus all graces and blessings have come to us. Together with Christ, we are now heirs of God's Kingdom, for Christ is the firstborn from the dead; and by his redemptive grace he is the rainfall of overflowing abundance: the rainfall of the Holy Spirit of Pentecost and of the Noah-Waters of Baptism, and of the Eucharistic Table. By this Messianic rainfall, the Lord Jesus is the fulfillment of the Rainfall promised the Jewish people of old. The whole universe has been watered most plentifully by the grace of the wounded and risen Warrior, Jesus the Savior.
Behold Your Mother
In John 19, we climb yet another mount: Calvary. As John the Evangelist proclaims, it is on the mount where Christ was lifted up that Mary became Mother of all the disciples of the Lord. In the fullness of Christ's crucified love, Augustine says, "Christ, though fixed fast to the cross, continued to freely walk about in charity.”
Read the full article in the Apostolate of the Little Flower, Vol. 87 No. 2