Advent calls us into the darkness of winter to wait for the coming Light. For the great Carmelite mystics, this season speaks to them of their lived experience of faith – the tension between absence and presence, longing and fulfilment, darkness and the promise of dawn. Their writings offer us a contemplative path through these weeks of expectation.
Teresa’s Longing Heart
St Teresa of Ávila knew something of holy longing. Her autobiography and spiritual writings pulse with desire for union with God, yet she also understood that much of the spiritual life involves learning to wait in love. In The Interior Castle, she describes the soul’s journey through seven mansions toward intimate union with God, but she emphasises that we cannot force our way into the inner chambers. We can only prepare ourselves and wait for God’s invitation. Teresa writes in her Meditations on the Song of Songs: “Oh, how long the wait seems to the soul when it sees what must still be suffered in the absence of its Beloved!” This captures Advent’s essential character – the soul’s deep cry for the Beloved who seems delayed. Teresa teaches us that this very longing is itself a form of prayer, a way of making space within ourselves for God’s coming. Advent invites us not to anxious striving but to the cultivation of desire, to letting our hearts expand with longing for the One who comes.
John’s Dark Night of Waiting
If any saint understood waiting in darkness, it was John of the Cross. His Dark Night of the Soul describes the purifying experience of God’s seeming absence, when all spiritual consolations are withdrawn and the soul must walk by naked faith. Advent’s season of diminishing light mirrors this interior darkness that precedes divine union. In his Spiritual Canticle, John gives voice to the seeking soul: “Where have You hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning? You fled like the stag after wounding me; I went out calling You, but You were gone.” These verses capture the ache of Advent – we wait for One who has already wounded us with love, whose coming we desire because we have already tasted something of His presence in our hearts. Yet John’s great insight is that darkness itself can be divine gift. In the Ascent of Mount Carmel, he writes of the necessity of being stripped of all that is not God so that we may receive God Himself. Advent’s disciplines of penance, simplicity and silence are not punitive but preparatory. They create the emptiness that God will fill. They make space for the manger to be laid. “The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of divine union,” John warns us. Advent asks: what must we release so that our hands may receive the Christ child? John’s Romances meditate on the eternal dialogue within the Trinity about the Incarnation, imagining the Son’s eagerness to become human for love of us. In these poems, we glimpse the divine waiting, the longing of God Himself to be united with humanity. Advent reminds us that we are not alone in our waiting; God too has waited, from all eternity, for this moment of self-gift.
Elizabeth’s Indwelling
For St Elizabeth of the Trinity, we need not wait for Christ to come from some distant place because He already dwells within us as in a temple. “I have found my heaven on earth, since heaven is God, and God is in my soul.” She understood that Advent is not merely about preparing for an external coming but about awakening to the divine indwelling already present. “O my God, Trinity whom I adore,” she prayed, “help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in You, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity.” This insight transforms Advent from anxious preparation into peaceful presence. Elizabeth teaches us that while we wait for Christmas, we can already live in communion with the Trinity dwelling within us. “How good it is to be with Him as we await His return,” she wrote. Advent becomes not just waiting but abiding, not just anticipation but realisation that the One we await is already mysteriously present in the depths of the soul.
Juanita’s Incarnate Love
St Teresa of Los Andes, the young Chilean Carmelite who died in 1920 at age nineteen, radiated joy even as she understood suffering’s role in the spiritual life. Affectionately called Juanita, her diary and letters reveal a soul deeply in love with the incarnate Christ, finding Him everywhere, especially in the Eucharist and in daily duties done with love. “I am love,” she wrote in her diary, “that is the key to my personality. Everything that I do, I do for love.” This young saint’s Advent spirituality centres on the astounding reality that divine love chose vulnerability, that infinite power embraced human weakness. In one of her letters, she wrote: “Jesus became a baby in Bethlehem so He would not frighten us away. In this way, He draws us to Himself.” This captures beautifully why we need Advent – to prepare our hearts to receive such shocking divine humility. Juanita invites us to approach Christmas with childlike wonder, marvelling that God’s love could not remain distant but had to become touchable, visible, embraceable. She wrote: “I want to perform all my actions with infinite love.” Advent, then, becomes a season when wrapping gifts, preparing meals, enduring cold weather, and waiting in lines are all transformed into love offerings that prepare room in our hearts for the Christ child.
Edith’s Truth-Seeking-Incarnation
St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – Edith Stein – came to Carmel as a philosopher seeking truth. Her intellectual journey from atheism through phenomenology to Catholic faith, and finally to Carmelite life reveals Advent’s deepest truth: that Truth itself became incarnate, that the Logos took flesh. In her philosophical work Finite and Eternal Being, Edith writes of how all created things participate in and point toward uncreated Being. But in her spiritual writings, she reflects on the stunning reversal of the Incarnation – that Eternal Being entered time, that the Infinite embraced limitation. “The world is in flames,” she wrote. “The fire could also leap into our house. But high above all flames towers the cross. They cannot burn the cross. It is the path from earth to heaven.” For Edith Stein, Advent contemplates the great descent: God stooping to enter human history, the eternal Word accepting temporality, divine majesty assuming human vulnerability. In her essay on the hidden life, she reflects on how Christ spent most of His earthly years in obscurity at Nazareth. This hidden life, she suggests, teaches us that holiness flourishes in ordinary circumstances, that preparation for mission happens in silence and hiddenness. Edith’s own life embodied Advent waiting. She spent years searching for truth before finding it in Christ. Even after baptism, she waited years before entering Carmel, accepting that God’s timing differs from ours. Finally, in the darkness of the Holocaust, she walked willingly toward martyrdom, embracing the cross she had written about so eloquently. Her life whispers to us that Advent’s darkness, when accepted in faith, becomes the very place where divine light breaks through.
Thérèse’s Little Way Through Advent
The Little Flower transformed Carmelite spirituality by showing that the heights of mystical union are accessible through the smallest acts of love. Her Story of a Soul reveals a young woman who understood that spiritual childhood was the swiftest path to holiness. “What matters in one’s life is not great deeds, but great love.” Advent need not be filled with extraordinary penances or dramatic spiritual exercises. Instead, it can be lived through hidden acts of charity, through patient endurance of cold and darkness, through small sacrifices offered with great love. In one of her letters, Thérèse shares: “My nature is such that fear makes me recoil; with love not only do I advance, I fly.” Advent invites us to approach Christmas not through fear-driven perfectionism but through love-drawn desire. We prepare not because we are afraid of being unprepared, but because love longs for the beloved’s arrival.
Lawrence’s Present Moment
Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, the humble Carmelite lay brother, taught that holiness consists in “practicing the presence of God” in every moment. His simple wisdom, collected in the classic Practice of the Presence of God, offers a powerful Advent discipline: attentiveness to God’s presence right now, even as we wait for His fuller manifestation. Lawrence counselled: “The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees.” Advent is not just about future coming but present awareness. Christ comes not only at Christmas but in each moment we turn our attention to Him.
The Carmelite mystics teach us that Advent is fundamentally about making space – in our hearts, our schedules, our homes – for the One who comes. Teresa urges us to desire greatly. John calls us to empty ourselves radically. Elizabeth invites us to awaken to divine indwelling. Juanita shows us that love must become incarnate in daily actions. Edith reminds us that Truth sought in darkness leads to Light. Thérèse teaches us to love in little ways. Brother Lawrence calls us to attend to presence. Together, they offer a contemplative path through these holy weeks. As we light our Advent candles and count the days until Christmas, let us walk with these mystics who knew that the waiting itself is sacred, that longing is a form of prayer, and that the God who comes is already mysteriously present in our desire for Him. “God alone suffices,” Teresa reminds us; and in Advent, we learn again that He is enough, and more than enough, for all our longing.
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