There is a photo Nicole Ingra keeps in the living room of
her Kenilworth home of “clothing day” – the day she received her habit as a
Carmelite nun. A crown of flowers rests on her head.
“That was a big day,” Ingra recalled. “It was the first
time I was called Sister John of the Cross.”
All she wanted that February day in 1984 was to spend her
life in cloistered meditation and prayer behind the walls of a Morris Township
Carmelite monastery.
“Here I thought I was going to be basically forgotten by
the world, living my life in solitude and seclusion,” she said last week. “And
look at what happened. I haven’t had seclusion or solitude since
then.”
Her dream of obscurity as a cloistered nun was lost
forever when Ingra and four other Carmelite nuns locked themselves in the
monastery infirmary in October 1988 for a nine-month protest. Their fear: that
they would be evicted because of their opposition to what they saw as attempts
to liberalize what their religious order stood for.
…”We were commanded [by the prioress] to watch a video
film, eat candy, and go outside in the parking lot, and we shouldn’t have been
out there,” she said. “Bright lights were being put in our chapel, which is
supposed to be subdued during prayers .” [Full
Story]
When St. Teresa of Avila saw the condition of the Carmelite order while she
lived she longed to return to the original Carmelite charism, thus the discalced
(shoeless) branch of Carmelites came into being. I guess now we are going to
need the dis-candied/dis-video/dis-bright light branch of Carmelites. I can
understand their being upset by a more liberal Carmelite order, but I think
obedience would have been better then locking themselves up for nine months.
This seems to be the opposite of St. John of the Cross who was forced to be
locked up for about a year. He came out of his imprisonment more in love with
God and the fruit of this was the “Ascent of Mt. Carmel” and the “Dark Night of
the Soul.” The fruit of these nuns was leaving the convent and becoming
certified in reflexology and aromatherapy. St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of
the Cross were always obedient to their superiors, whether or not they agreed
with them. Of course it is easy for me to say this sitting from my lofty perch
and looking on their actions and condemning them. I am a member of the Secular
Order of Discalced Carmelites, what use to be called Third Order Carmelites. But
most of the time I am a Disordered Carmelite.
