A Novena to Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Flos Carmeli
A Little Cloud
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
The story of Elijah's servant looking toward the sea seven times before seeing a small cloud, the sign that a three-year drought was ending, is told in 1 Kings 18:41-45 and became Carmel's own founding image of watchful, patient prayer.
The Mountain
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
Hermits are recorded living in caves on Mount Carmel, on the coast of modern Israel, by the twelfth century, adopting a rule of life around 1210 from Albert of Jerusalem, the Latin Patriarch, which became the basis of the Carmelite order.
The Scapular
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
According to Carmelite tradition, Mary appeared to the English Carmelite Simon Stock on 16 July 1251 at Aylesford and gave him the brown scapular, promising protection to those who wore it; the earliest surviving account of the vision dates from more than a century after the date it describes.
Hiddenness
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
The Discalced Carmelite reform, which produced most of the order's best-known writers, imposed strict enclosure on its nuns, meaning a Carmelite sister ordinarily leaves the convent grounds only at death.
Dryness
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
The Spanish Carmelite John of the Cross described the experience of prayer without felt consolation in his treatise The Dark Night, written in the 1580s, distinguishing a passive purification of the senses from a much rarer and deeper purification of the spirit.
Teresa
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
Teresa of Avila began her reform of the Carmelite order in 1562, at the age of forty-seven, after nearly three decades in a convent she later described as too comfortable for genuine prayer, founding the first reformed convent, San Jose, in her own city.
The Souls in Purgatory
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
The Sabbatine Privilege, the belief that Mary assists scapular wearers out of purgatory on the first Saturday after death, is traditionally traced to a bull attributed to Pope John XXII in 1322, though the document's authenticity has been disputed since at least the sixteenth century.
Elijah’s Cave
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
After his contest with the prophets of Baal, Elijah fled to a cave at Horeb, where 1 Kings 19 describes God passing by not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire, but in a still small voice, or in some translations, a sound of thin silence.
Thérèse’s Way
The Novena Prayer
Flower of Carmel, tall vine blossom laden, splendor of heaven, childbearing yet maiden. None equals thee. O Mother so tender, who no man didst know, on all Carmel's children thy favors bestow, star of the sea.
Therese of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun who died in 1897 at twenty-four, described her approach to holiness as a little way of small, ordinary acts done with love, in an autobiography published after her death that became one of the best-selling Catholic books of the twentieth century.
Flos Carmeli, the prayer that opens each day, is the medieval Carmelite antiphon, given here in its familiar English translation. What follows each day is a fact from Scripture, from Carmelite history, or from the lives of the order's own saints, one per day; the last day looks toward St. Thérèse.
