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Our vocation has a strong eremitical orientation. This ‘desert’ spirit pervades Carmel and is combined with a call to bear witness to the world that we desire to belong entirely to God.
The ideal of Teresian enclosure goes back to the early Church and the desire to live as hermits in the desert. This desire was inspired by the biblical image of the desert as a place of encounter with God.
Those called to Carmel seek to live a life of greater solitude so as to become totally devoted to God in prayer, in service of the Church. As she reformed Carmel in the 16th Century, St Teresa of Avila saw enclosure as an essential means to recreate this desert environment that would allow the contemplative ideal of Carmel to flourish once more.
“No one but those who experience it will believe the joy that is felt in these foundations once we are enclosed where no secular person can enter, for however much we love them, it is not enough to take away this great consolation in finding ourselves alone.”
~ St Teresa of Avila
It is the structured lifestyle that enclosure provides that enables us to live at that depth of prayer to which God invites us. We are asked to share with Jesus, in a particular way, the joy and pain of being human.
We do not seek to evade life’s realities. On the contrary, by freely submitting to the restrictions and limitations of an enclosed life, including its lack of diversion, we are brought face to face with aspects of ourselves, some of which can be painful realisations of our own shortcomings, selfishness and immaturities.
A structured daily life with less ‘busyness’ or distractions can also provide a space to discover and develop gifts or skills we never knew we had.
The enclosure is the area delimited for the use of the community alone. It is meant to help us preserve the silence, the solitude and the rhythm of life necessary for the vocation to which God has called us. Its limits are clearly defined with a material demarcation such as the grille between the Choir and the Chapel.
For these reasons we do not leave enclosure except in specific circumstances such as:
- Medical reasons
- To exercise civil duties/rights
- For work or business which cannot be handled otherwise
- To visit gravely ill relatives or members of our community
However, it is important to remember that for our foundress, St Teresa of Avila, enclosure did not mean isolation. Enclosure is essentially an interior disposition requiring a minimum of material expression.
She took from the Carmelite Rule the contemplative ideal of continuous prayer as the primary activity of the Carmelite nun (see Rule, no. 8). Thus, our prayer life is not a rigid practice but a way of living the Christian mystery as fully as possible.
