On the Integrated Vision of the Spiritual Journey That Contemplative Formation Needs Today
Jean Khoury
Summary: This article addresses a question that concerns every monastery and every formation house: why does so much faithful, generous, and lengthened formation still fail, in too many cases, to bring religious to lasting perseverance and to mature union with Christ? Drawing on the concrete experience of offering the Solid Foundations course to Carmelite communities, and on the growing conviction of novice mistresses that such a course should reach every monastery, this article proposes a precise diagnosis. The difficulty is not primarily the length of initial formation, which the Church has already extended to nine years. The difficulty is the absence, in many formation programmes, of an integrated synthesis of the spiritual journey, a coherent map that allows a soul to understand where God is leading her, what He is doing within her, and how grace ordinarily works at each stage of growth. The article reviews, point by point, the full architecture of what is missing: the meaning of contemplation, the place of Our Lady, the working of the Holy Spirit, the dynamics of contemplative prayer, the stages of the spiritual journey beyond spiritual marriage, the dark night of the spirit, the notion of ensuring steady growth, the depth of Lectio Divina, spiritual anthropology, the nuptial dimension of consecrated life, spiritual fruitfulness, fraternal charity, obedience lived in spirit and in truth, and spiritual purity. It concludes that initial formation, however well intentioned, cannot stand alone. What contemplative life requires is a continuing formation that accompanies the soul through each stage of her growth, in the conviction, ultimately theological and not merely organisational, that a renewed formation will bring a renewed Carmel, and that this renewal is itself a work of hope, given by God and built upon His gifts.
Introduction
The statistics concerning religious and contemplative life vocations are sobering. Numbers are declining in many regions, and a troubling proportion of sisters leave after solemn profession, sometimes after many years of apparently faithful religious life. The Church has responded to this difficulty in part by lengthening the period of formation, extending it to nine years before final vows. This response assumes that the principal difficulty is one of time, that candidates require a longer period of testing, maturation, and discernment before a permanent commitment can be safely made.
I want to propose a different diagnosis, born not from theory but from a concrete and ongoing experience. The Solid Foundations course, developed by the School of Mary, has been received by communities of Carmelite nuns and other Congregations. The formators have grown convinced, through direct engagement with the material and through what they observe in the souls they accompany, that this course (and the following ones) addresses a real and serious gap in contemplative formation, and that it deserves to be shared with other monasteries.
This article gathers the reflections that emerged from that experience and sets them in a single, ordered voice, so that other novice mistresses and formation directors may read them as a coherent whole. My purpose is not to promote a particular course. My purpose is to name clearly what is missing in much of contemplative formation today, to show why this absence matters more than is commonly recognised, and to draw out the practical consequences for those responsible for forming souls for Christ. I write as one who believes, with full conviction, that the difficulties facing Carmel and other contemplative families are not a sign of decline without remedy. They are a summons to a clearer, more integrated, more patient transmission of the very tradition these communities already possess. That conviction is itself a form of hope, because it rests not on strategy but on the certainty that God continues to call, to form, and to bring His work to completion in those who are docile to Him.
To understand better today’s challenges, please read:
From the “Thinking Reed” to the Unconscious Self
The Signs of the Times: A Call to Read the Gospel in Depth
A Resource for Spiritual Formation for Contemplative Communities
Cloistered nuns are, in fact, among those who stand to benefit most from a structured formation course in spiritual life, because the central elements of such a course, namely Lectio Divina, Contemplative prayer, Discernment, Growth in the Holy Spirit, Union with Christ, the Place of Our Lady in Spiritual Life, Contemplative Apostolate and a practical understanding of the Spiritual Journey as a whole, correspond directly to the very purpose of the contemplative vocation. The difficulty, therefore, is never whether such material is suitable for monasteries. The difficulty lies entirely in how it is presented.
Such material is not a programme or a methodology. It doesn’t intend to substitute itself for the community’s own formation. Such a resource is simply as an aid rooted in Scripture, in the spiritual tradition, and in the lived experience of growth in Christ. The material can be consulted by the formation director, the novice mistress, the prioress, or the abbess, on the website of the School of Mary (see the Syllabus here and the Three+ years Formation Plan here). The community can consult it and see its value for itself.
The purpose of the formation course and the entire formation is to offer a structured synthesis of spiritual life, helping souls understand how God ordinarily leads a person from conversion to union with Christ and the fullness of love. It is centred on the action of God in the soul. It is equally important to remember that such a formation course is never intended to replace the monastery’s own formation. It offers, rather, a framework that helps novices and younger sisters understand the principles underlying the spiritual life they are already striving to live.
“The training of those aspiring to consecrated life should be such that they are introduced to the spiritual life and taught to live in it.” (St. John Paul II, Vita Consecrata, 65) This passage names precisely the gap that many formation directors recognise: a gap between the spiritual practices a community faithfully maintains and a clear practical understanding of how growth in the spiritual life actually unfolds. A course such as Solid Foundations is designed to address exactly this gap, not by introducing something foreign, but by making explicit what the tradition already contains implicitly.
It is possible to adapt the presentation specifically for contemplative audiences, showing how the major themes of such a course connect with Lectio Divina, Contemplative Prayer, Growth in faith, Purification, Docility to the Holy Spirit, Contemplative Apostolate and Union with Christ. These are categories immediately recognisable within the Carmelite, Benedictine, Cistercian, Poor Clare, and Dominican traditions, and they carry an authority that no unfamiliar vocabulary could supply.
“The adaptation and renewal of religious life includes both the constant return to the sources of all Christian life and to the original inspiration behind a given institute.” (Perfectae Caritatis, 2) This principle from the Second Vatican Council’s decree on religious life clarifies why such an approach succeeds where others fail. A formation resource gains credibility among contemplative communities not when it presents itself as new, but when it is recognised as a tool that helps sisters return to the sources: Scripture, the Fathers, the great spiritual masters, and the action of the Holy Spirit Himself.
When the Course Is Already Received: Gathering the Fruit
When some monasteries undertake such formation and see the fruits for other monasteries it is no longer a matter of persuasion but of discernment: what fruit does the course actually bear within community? See Solid Foundations 000 OCD.
If the sisters find that such material helps them understand Prayer, Lectio Divina, the Action of grace, the Stages of growth, Discernment, and Union with Christ more clearly, that testimony carries substantial weight. It is the difference between a hypothesis and a testimony. This is particularly true because Carmel possesses one of the strongest traditions of spiritual theology within the Church. If Carmelite nuns value the course as being faithful to the teaching of St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, other communities can take notice, because that judgement comes from within the very tradition being transmitted.
When one asks with attentive listening: What parts of the material help the sisters most? What remains unclear to them? What do they wish had been explained differently? What do they find genuinely useful for their own formation and for the formation of those they accompany? These questions, asked patiently and repeatedly, allow a formation course to be refined by the very community it is meant to serve.
There is a further consideration worth naming clearly. Many monasteries possess an extraordinarily rich spiritual tradition, yet they sometimes lack a synthetic framework that presents the whole journey of spiritual growth in a coherent and pedagogical manner. The great Carmelite doctors provide all the essential elements of this journey, but none of them set out to write what could properly be called a modern formation curriculum. If a course succeeds in organising that inherited wisdom into a practical progression, contemplative communities are unlikely to perceive it as something foreign. They are far more likely to recognise it as a useful instrument for transmitting what they already live, but have not always found the words to teach systematically.
In this process, the judgement of the novice mistress and the formation team matters more than the individual reactions of particular sisters, because their responsibility is precisely to discern what genuinely serves formation. When those responsible for formation begin to recognise that a given resource helps them explain what they have always wanted to teach, an important threshold has been crossed. At that point cloistered nuns start to genuinely open and appreciate such approach. It helps them. And the good news spreads quietly, person to person, monastery to monastery, through trust.
Recognising the Real Gap: A Formation Problem, Not Merely an Interesting Resource
When a novice mistress can witness the fruits of such formation something significant is taking place. Such conviction, coming from someone whose daily responsibility is the formation of souls, deserves to be taken with attentiveness.
The gap such a course addresses is real. The Carmelite doctors provide the substance of spiritual theology in abundance, but they did not necessarily provide the pedagogical structure that systematic formation requires today. St. Teresa of Ávila wrote out of experience and out of the practical demands of governing her communities. St. John of the Cross wrote to explain particular stages of the spiritual life and particular difficulties encountered by souls along the way. St. Thérèse of Lisieux offered a lived witness of extraordinary depth. None of them set out, as their primary purpose, to produce a progressive curriculum capable of guiding a person methodically from initial conversion through to mature union with Christ.
A novice mistress who recognises this point is not merely observing that a particular resource is interesting. She is recognising that the resource solves a genuine formation problem, which is a far stronger and more consequential statement. The reasoning behind such a judgement is not that the material is original in the sense of containing new doctrine. It is that the material organises and transmits what contemplative communities are already striving to impart, but often struggle to present in a practical, complete and integrated way.
Elements also can be presented in a shallow manner while they need theoretical and practical clarity. Here are some: Contemplation. The Specific Contemplative Apostolate. The Place of Our Lady in our spiritual life. The Working of the Holy Spirit: General and Particular help of the Grace of God. Contemplative Prayer and Its Inner Working. The Spiritual Journey and the Stages Beyond Spiritual Marriage. The Dark Night of the Spirit and its presence in the Gospel and in St. Therese. The reality of “Ensuring Steady Growth”. Lectio Divina and Its Deeper Dynamic. Spiritual Anthropology: Spirit, Soul, and the Veil. The Nuptial Dimension and the Gift of the Whole Heart. Contemplative Apostolate: Bearing Spiritual Children. Fraternal Charity, Obedience, and Spiritual Purity. etc.
It is worth noting a certain irony here. One might assume that cloistered nuns, already living within the great contemplative tradition, would have the least need for a structured course of this kind. The opposite may in fact be true. Precisely because they know the tradition deeply, they are often best positioned to recognise the value of a coherent synthesis when they encounter one. Formation directors evaluate such matters according to a very practical and entirely legitimate criterion: does this help form souls? When the answer is clearly yes, they tend to recognise it quickly and without need of elaborate persuasion.
The True Diagnosis: Not the Duration of Formation, but Its Content and Structure
The decline in vocations in general and in contemplative vocations in particular, and the painful frequency with which sisters leave after solemn profession, are well documented realities. In response, the Church has lengthened and refined the stages of formation in recent decades, recognising that some candidates were making permanent commitments without sufficient human, spiritual, or communal maturity. This response is reasonable as far as it goes, but it rests on an assumption that deserves to be examined honestly: that extending formation and improving formation are the same thing. They are not.
If a person spends nine years in formation but never acquires a clear understanding of the spiritual life, of the action of grace, of prayer, of discernment, of the stages of growth, the deep meaning of the enclosure and of what union with Christ actually entails, the additional years will not, by themselves, resolve the underlying difficulty. Sound, deep and practical spiritual theology is at stake. The issue, in other words, is not principally the duration of formation but its content and its structure. This is a serious claim and it deserves careful investigation rather than dismissal, because the evidence of lived experience increasingly supports it.
“The whole formation process must be characterised by a deep immersion in the mystery of Christ.” (St. John Paul II, Vita Consecrata, 65)
Everything depends on what such immersion means in practice. If formation remains fragmented, offering some theology, some community life, some spirituality, some pastoral guidance, and some instruction in the Rule, Constitutions, Ratio and Customs, but without a coherent vision of transformation in Christ binding these elements together, candidates may come to know a great many things without ever understanding the journey they are actually undertaking. They may observe the external structure of religious life faithfully while receiving only a partial grasp of its inner dynamics, and it is entirely plausible that discouragement, confusion, or spiritual stagnation will follow from precisely this partiality, even after many years of apparently diligent formation.
St. Teresa of Ávila understood this danger with great clarity. She observed repeatedly that souls abandon prayer not because they lack generosity, but because they do not understand what is happening within them. “It is very important for the master to be prudent—I mean for the director; he must be experienced. If he has learning as well, it is a very great matter.” (St. Teresa of Ávila)
Her concern was never simply that souls needed more time. They needed understanding and competent guidance. St. John of the Cross, for his part, devoted entire treatises to explaining spiritual experiences with great precision, precisely because misunderstanding can discourage a soul or lead it astray at the very moments when it is closest to genuine growth. What unites both doctors is the conviction that clarity of understanding is not a luxury added to formation, but a condition for formation to bear lasting fruit.
None of this should be taken to suggest that the duration of formation, the maturity of candidates, or other human and psychological factors are irrelevant. They are not, and a great many variables, cultural, familial, and personal, contribute to the difficulties contemplative communities currently face. But the historical pattern is instructive. The great renewals of religious life in the Church’s history have almost never been accompanied merely by calls for greater commitment. They have been accompanied, time and again, by a renewal of formation and of doctrine. The founders of reform did not simply ask more of their daughters and sons. They gave them a clearer vision of what God was doing in them and of what the path before them actually required. This is the same pattern that appears to be re-emerging wherever a formation director, working directly with the daily realities of accompanying souls, recognises that a coherent synthesis answers a need that mere duration cannot address.
Such a synthesis is not an invention of modern pedagogy, but belongs to the living tradition of the Church. The great masters of spirituality never separated doctrine, prayer and transformation. For St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and the whole Carmelite tradition, the Christian life is a journey in which grace gradually purifies, transforms and unites the soul to Christ. Formation therefore cannot be reduced to the transmission of ideas, practices or external observances; it must introduce the person into the dynamic work of God within the soul.
Note: St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus exercised a direct and continuous responsibility in the formation of novices during her time as assistant novice mistress at the Carmel of Lisieux. She was in daily contact with the novices and accompanied them closely in their spiritual journey. For this reason, she is officially recognised in Carmel as “Patroness of Noviciates”. Her own testimony in Story of a Soul shows the concrete and personal character of her formation method: “I understand so well that it is only love that makes us acceptable to the good God” (Story of a Soul, Manuscript C). This indicates the deeply interior but also practical orientation of her pedagogy, where everything is ordered to leading the soul to Jesus Christ in love and truth. Her concern for proper formation and discernment is expressed in a striking way in her own words: “How many souls would arrive at holiness if they were well directed.” This reveals both her realism about the fragility of formation and her conviction that holiness depends, under grace, on authentic spiritual guidance. She also understood cooperation with divine action in formation in profoundly theological terms: “Jesus wants to be helped in His Divine cultivation of souls.” This expression shows her sense that spiritual direction is not a purely human operation but a participation in the divine work of sanctification. At the same time, she insists on discernment of grace and respect for its movement in the soul: “One must know how to recognise […] what the Good Lord asks of souls and second the action of his grace, without ever anticipating it or slowing it down.” This formulation reveals a highly refined spiritual pedagogy centred on attentiveness to God’s initiative and the rhythms of grace. The witness of her novices confirms this lived method of accompaniment, marked by attention to detail, discernment of interior movements, and a constant orientation toward Christ. She did not treat formation as an abstract transmission of ideas, but as a concrete guidance of persons in the realities of daily life. Her spiritual doctrine is profoundly shaped by St. John of the Cross, whom she called her “Doctor of Love”, and whom she read as a guide for her own interior path. In Story of a Soul she writes: “Ah! what a light have I not found in the works of our holy Father St John of the Cross!” (Story of a Soul, Manuscript A). Yet what is distinctive in her approach is the way she unites this high doctrinal tradition with a radically practical pedagogy, integrating theological depth with immediate lived experience. In this sense, her contribution is not only doctrinal but also formative in the strict sense. Her ability to use everything as a means to lead souls to Jesus, together with her spiritual maturity and clarity of discernment, makes her a model for all houses of formation. She can therefore be seen as a true patroness of spiritual formation as such, insofar as she embodies a pedagogy in which doctrine, daily life, and transformation in Christ are held together in a unified vision. We therefore need to rediscover Thérèse as mistress of novices. Properly understood, this aspect of her life and teaching can make a decisive contribution to the renewal of religious life today.
The Architecture of What Is Missing
When the difficulty is named precisely, it becomes possible to see that it is not a vague sense of insufficiency but a quite specific lack of clarity, both theoretical and practical, regarding a defined set of subjects. These are not peripheral matters. They constitute, taken together, the architecture of contemplative formation itself, and their absence or fragmentary presentation explains a great deal of what souls experience as confusion, plateau, or quiet discouragement after profession.
A person can receive many years of formation and still lack the map that allows all of its elements to come together into a single coherent vision. The danger, when this map is missing, is that religious life gradually becomes at best a collection of practices, observances, devotions, and responsibilities without a clear inner logic binding them. Where is God leading me? What is He doing in me? What is the meaning of prayer, of purification, of suffering, of obedience, of charity, and of mission? When these questions remain unanswered in any integrated way, even the most generous fidelity can begin to feel directionless.
A person may know the vocabulary of spirituality, practise the exercises of prayer, and be familiar with the writings of the saints, while still lacking a clear understanding of the path on which God is leading them. Spiritual Formation requires more than information; it requires an interior pedagogy that helps a person recognise the movements of grace, understand the stages of growth, discern the obstacles that prevent union with God, and respond freely to the action of the Holy Spirit.
Religious Life Exists for the Sake of Holiness
Another fundamental point must be recovered: the relationship between religious life and the spiritual life. Religious life is not an end in itself; it is a privileged means given by the Church so that a person may be led to holiness, union with God and a supernatural fruitfulness in the mission of Christ. The means can never replace the goal. When the particular form of life, the charism, the apostolate or the external structures become the ultimate reference point, there is a risk of losing sight of the very purpose for which religious life exists.
A religious vocation is therefore not a call merely to enter a certain style of life, but a call to allow Christ to transform the person completely. The evangelical counsels, community life, the charism of the institute and the apostolic mission all find their meaning in this movement towards holiness. They are paths that serve the work of grace; they are not substitutes for it. Religious life cannot become a comfortable or stable human framework that is preserved for its own sake. Its deepest identity is found in its capacity to lead the person into ever deeper communion with God.
From the External Form of Life to the Interior Transformation
In the past, there was often a strong confidence that the very form of religious life (i.e. the Rule, Constitutions, Customs, Horarium, Community life and the practice of Obedience) was itself sufficient to lead the religious person to holiness. These elements are indeed precious gifts of the Church and powerful means of sanctification. However, a crucial point emerges today: they cannot by themselves replace the work of interior transformation and therefore there is a deep need for spiritual formation. For many centuries, the path to holiness was often supported by what could be described as the external framework of religious life (the Style of life, Rule, Constitutions, Horarium, obedience). Because of the growing interior complexity characteristic of the present historical epoch, there is now a pressing need to turn more decisively towards interior formation.
Read: From the “Thinking Reed” to the Unconscious Self
There is an immense world within the human person that requires instruction, guidance, nourishment and a solid spiritual formation. We cannot rely only on the external structure, the ‘outer shell’ of religious life, while leaving the interior journey insufficiently explored and accompanied. This is one of the great challenges of our time: a shallow formation of the inner life can leave consecrated persons spiritually weak and vulnerable, without the necessary understanding and guidance to respond to the action of grace.
The grammar of holiness has undergone a profound shift, almost a paradigm change, which emerged in the last 60 years and is taking us by surprise (we have not yet developed a structured account of spiritual formation). This requires a rebalancing in formation, where roughly 80% is devoted to interior spiritual formation, around 10% to the external structures that support it, and the remaining 10% is devoted to a deeper theological intelligence of their relationship. This final 10% is not merely supplementary but interpretative: it expresses how the external framework and the interior life mutually illuminate and support one another. The interior life gives meaning to external practices, while the practices in turn safeguard and sustain the interior life, much like the bark protects the sap and allows it to circulate and grow within the living tree.
The shift invites us to acknowledge that the interior life cannot be reduced to a private sphere reserved only for occasional conversations with a spiritual director. The role of a spiritual director is essential, but spiritual direction and spiritual formation are not identical realities. A spiritual director accompanies a person in their personal journey; a spiritual formator helps to transmit a coherent understanding of the spiritual life, its stages, its demands, and its possibilities of growth. A spiritual formator explains the relationship between the daily practices and the interior spiritual life.
What is needed today is not a superficial approach to the spiritual life, looking only with the ‘naked eye’, but a formation capable of looking deeply into the mystery of the person and the action of God within the soul, like a microscope that reveals a reality previously unseen. St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle remains a remarkable example of this vision: it reveals the immense richness of the human soul, the different stages of its journey towards God and the extraordinary work of transformation that grace can accomplish. The Interior Castle appears as a final redefinition of religious life and contemplative life, both in terms of its goal and its means. By reading the four chapters of the Seventh Mansion, one perceives with greater clarity the governing principle that unifies everything: religious life and the spiritual life. The fruits of such a formation are immeasurable, because they lead not merely to a better observance of religious life, but to a deeper union with Christ and a supernatural fruitfulness in His mission.
For this reason, spiritual formation must be offered at the level of the claim made by religious life itself. It must truly be capable of leading a person towards holiness, towards conformity with Christ and towards the supernatural fecundity that comes from union with Him. The spiritual life is not one dimension among others of religious formation; it is the beating heart that gives life and unity to every other dimension.
This requires a genuine pedagogy of the spiritual life: an understanding of the stages of growth, the action of grace, the purification necessary for transformation, the development of prayer and contemplation, and the accompaniment needed at each stage of the journey. Without this, there is a danger that the charism, the apostolate, and the particular form of life come to replace the true goal of consecration: becoming holy and bearing lasting supernatural fruit in Christ. Linked to this, it requires a pedagogy that articulates the relationship between the interior spiritual life and the various daily practices. Such an approach strengthens both dimensions in a profound unity. The contemplative nun then learns to relate all external practices to a corresponding interior life and to an inner freedom that enables her to find true happiness and joy, drawing from each external act significant interior fruit.
A truly supernatural apostolate and fruitfulness can only be understood in the light of the doctrine taught by St. Teresa of Ávila (the “works” and “sufferings”, cf. Interior Castle, Seventh Mansion), St. John of the Cross (the pure act of love and its immense fecundity), and St. Thérèse, who shows how to “lift the world” (cf. Manuscript C, final page) and how to stand at the very heart of apostolic life by “sitting at the table of sinners” from within.
Note: We have often relied on the Sacraments, especially the frequently received Sacraments of Confession and the Eucharist, considering that their reception alone was sufficient to lead us to holiness. The Second Vatican Council, aware that something more is required than the mere ex opere operato efficacy of the Sacraments, offered a renewed perspective through the concept of “fruitful participation” (see Sacrosanctum Concilium 14-20). This applies not only to the Mass but to the whole sacramental life. It is by studying contemplative prayer according to St Teresa of Ávila, especially the “Prayer of Quiet” and God’s supernatural intervention through the “particular help of His grace”, and by studying spiritual Communion as she describes it (cf. Way of Perfection, chapter 34), that we begin to perceive what authentic spiritual participation in the Sacraments could mean. This represents a true “gold mine” that remains to be explored and developed. Such a perspective would profoundly transform, for example, our participation in the Mass: “Lift up your hearts” would become not only a liturgical invitation but a lived spiritual reality. Likewise, by studying the relationship between the two parts of the Way of Perfection, we would better understand how to dispose ourselves so that Holy Communion may bear greater fruit within us. Indeed, if we do not work on the virtues to perfection, we remain spiritual dwarfs (receiving Communion will not give its expected fruit). This simple observation is of paramount importance, because it has the capacity to transfigure the whole of sacramental life. We need to enter more deeply into the workings of God’s grace within us at the moment we receive the Sacraments, so that we may receive their fruits with greater openness and cooperation. This also invites a deeper reflection on another fundamental reality: the sacramentality of the proclamation of the Word. Spiritual theology has the capacity to profoundly renew and transfigure our understanding and living of the liturgy. We understand better, therefore, that an implicit reliance on the ex opere operato of the Sacraments, without sufficient attention to the conditions required for their fruitfulness, represents one of the most serious deficiencies of our time. The renewal of sacramental life will come not simply through external adjustments, but by entering more deeply into the liturgy itself and into the action of the Holy Spirit, allowing this renewal to take place from within.
Read: Liturgy as Prayer II (With St. Teresa of Avila)
A Renewed Formation Brings a Renewed Carmel
What this list of subjects reveals is not, fundamentally, a lack of information. It reveals the absence of an integrated practical vision of the spiritual journey. This is a precise diagnosis and it changes considerably how the present difficulties facing contemplative life should be understood and addressed. A person can receive many years of formation, attend many conferences, and read many excellent books and still lack the map that allows all these elements to come together into a single coherent whole.
In a sense, theology already possesses this kind of synthesis in its own domain. A seminarian does not simply read St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, St. John Henry Newman, and Joseph Ratzinger independently of one another, hoping that some coherence will emerge of its own accord. The Church has developed curricula precisely in order to organise theological knowledge into a coherent progression, so that each author and each insight finds its proper place within a larger architecture. The same achievement has occurred far less successfully in the domain of spiritual theology and spiritual formation. Many souls read Teresa, John of the Cross, Thérèse, Elisabeth of the Trinity, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventura and Francis de Sales, often with great love and genuine profit, but frequently without a clear map of how these various elements fit together into a single, unified journey of transformation.
This is precisely the gap that a well-constructed theoretical and practical synthesis can address, not by replacing the tradition, but by making its inner architecture visible again. The great Carmelite doctors provide the majority of the essential elements of this architecture, drawn from their own profound experience of God, but they did not write what could be called a modern formation curriculum, because that was simply not the task before them. A synthesis that organises their wisdom into a coherent and pedagogical progression performs a genuinely different service, complementary to theirs rather than competing with it.
If formation directors and novice mistresses, working independently in different monasteries, begin to arrive at this same conclusion, this would constitute strong evidence that the real difficulty facing contemplative life today is not simply the length of formation, but its quality, clarity, and integration. A renewed formation, in this light, would not produce a renewed Carmel merely by producing more vocations or by enforcing stricter observance, however valuable such things might be in themselves. It would produce a renewed Carmel by forming women who understand, with real clarity, that Christ has called them, that this is the journey He is leading them on, that this is how grace ordinarily works within them, that this is how they are to receive Him, that this is how they are gradually transformed, and that this is how their hidden life becomes genuinely fruitful for the Church. That is precisely the kind of synthesis that an attentive formation director recognises as missing and precisely the kind of synthesis that, once supplied, restores to view the inner architecture of a tradition that was never lost, but had become, in places, difficult to see whole.
The renewal needed today is therefore not a departure from Carmel, but a deeper return to its heart. A renewed formation does not replace the wisdom of the saints; it serves the transmission of that wisdom. It seeks to make explicit what is already contained in the Carmelite tradition: that every Christian vocation is a call to holiness, that contemplation is not reserved for a few, and that the ultimate goal of formation is the transformation of the person in Christ.
Note: It goes without saying that renewing spiritual formation in the monastery necessarily implies a proper preparation of novice mistresses according to the principles outlined above. Those entrusted with the responsibility of formation must themselves receive a deep and structured formation in how to offer spiritual formation and in the pedagogy of accompanying souls towards holiness.
An Entrance Gate, Not the Whole Journey
One further point must be stated with complete clarity, because it bears directly on how any such course should be received and used within a monastery. A course such as Solid Foundations is only the entrance gate to a full formation that must follow the successive stages of spiritual growth. It would be a serious misunderstanding to treat it as sufficient in itself, as though a single course, however well constructed, could address the entire span of a soul’s growth from initial conversion to mature union with Christ.
The proposal of the School of Mary therefore extends across five years of spiritual formation, each year built around a series of courses designed to strengthen spiritual life at a specific stage of its development, to nourish what has already been received, and to support the soul through the particular demands proper to that stage. Initial formation alone, however solid its foundations, is never sufficient by itself. Formation has to continue, and it has to be shaped throughout by a clear notion of growth and by an accurate understanding of the different needs that arise at each successive stage.
This requires, on the part of those responsible for formation, both an understanding of each stage in itself and the practical capacity to provide what each stage actually requires. A novice mistress who grasps the early stages well may still find herself without adequate guidance when a sister, years after profession, enters the more demanding passages of the journey, including the dark night of the spirit or the questions that arise after a deep experience of union. This is precisely why an integrated, multi-year vision of formation matters so greatly. It allows the formation team to recognise where a given sister stands on the journey, to anticipate what she will need next, and to offer that accompaniment with confidence rather than improvisation.
General Conclusion
The difficulties currently facing contemplative communities are real and they should never be minimised. Yet the diagnosis proposed here, drawn from direct experience and confirmed by the discernment of at least some novice mistress working daily with the realities of formation, suggests that these difficulties are not a sign that contemplative life itself has lost its power to attract and to hold souls for Christ. They are, rather, a summons to recover something that the tradition has always possessed but has not always succeeded in transmitting clearly: an integrated vision of the spiritual journey, capable of guiding a soul with precision from her first conversion through every successive stage, including the most demanding ones that lie beyond spiritual marriage.
This recovery is, in the deepest sense, a work of hope. It is not hope built on strategy, on better recruitment, or on adapting religious life to contemporary expectations. It is hope built entirely on God and on His gifts, on the certainty that the Holy Spirit continues to lead souls toward union with Christ, and that He has given the Church, across centuries, the doctrine necessary to accompany that journey faithfully. What remains is the patient, often hidden work of organising that doctrine into a form that can actually be transmitted, stage by stage, to those whom God is calling today.
Vatican II reminded the Church that all Christians are called to holiness, and religious life exists as a particular sign and witness of this universal vocation. The renewal of consecrated life therefore depends profoundly on the quality of formation offered, because formation is the place where a person learns to allow Christ to take shape within them. As St. Paul writes: ‘My little children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you’ (Gal 4:19).
A renewed formation will bring a renewed Carmel, not because formation is a technique capable of producing vocations on demand, but because clarity serves love. A soul who understands what God is doing within her, who can recognise the stage she has reached and the meaning of her trials, and who knows that an entire and well-tested tradition walks beside her, is a soul far better equipped to persevere in love to the end. This is the hope I wish to leave with every novice mistress who reads these pages: not a hope that depends on us, but a hope that depends on God, who, having begun this good work in each soul He has called, can be trusted to bring it to completion, provided we give Him the clarity and the patience that formation, rightly understood, exists to provide.
I deeply believe that God continues, and will always continue, to call women to follow Him closely through the contemplative life. The issue is not a lack of vocations, but rather the way we form those who enter, and the way we accompany and support them throughout their journey of growth. Mary, Queen and Beauty of Carmel, is waiting for us to help Her in the sacred work of spiritual formation. Amen.
– Solid Foundations for Carmelite Nuns: SFOCD