The car travels up the long mountain driveway, as Joey looks out the window in the backseat. As his mom drives around each curve and up the Joey’s eyes are big and reveal the awe of a child as he watches the very tall walls pass. “Mom, why are those walls so tall?”

“Honey, those walls are to protect the monks.”

“Monks live here?”

“Yes, dear.”

Joey was intrigued. He had seen neighborhood fences and the fence at the baseball field, but never one so tall. “Mom, but do the monks ever come out from behind those walls?”

“No,” Joey’s Mom answered simply.

“Never?” asked Joey with a look of disbelief on his face.

“No, never.”

“Don’t the monks go out for pizza or to their friends’ houses?”

“No, Joey. The monks don’t go out for pizza. They don’t ever leave the monastery.”

“But why, Mom? Doesn’t it get boring living behind a tall wall all day and never going home?”

“Joey, don’t you remember? The monks are behind those walls to pray for us.”

Now Joey was really confused. “But Mom, I don’t know the monks. They don’t know me. Why would you pray for someone you don’t know?”

“Well Joey,” his mom continued, “that’s just the point. They do it because they love us and they want us to go to heaven. They live like Jesus and Mary; they live a life of love.”

Joey’s eyes seemed bigger now than before. His pure mind raced with the thought of someone he didn’t know praying just for him and living behind those walls, so he could go to heaven. “Mom, tell me about heaven,” Joey continued.

“Well Joey, that will have to wait. In a minute we will be pulling up to the monastery gate, but for now… The monks live a life very much like heaven.”

Joey saw many things that day he had never seen before. His mom picked him up, so he could peer through the small grating in the monastery’s gate at the brown robed monk on the other side. He went in the Church and heard the most beautiful singing coming from the other side of the iron grating. All of this was overwhelmingly mysterious and wonderful to the child, but what he would never forget, even as an old man, was a very simple thought: the monks are behind those walls because they love me and they are praying for me, even though they don’t know me. What could possibly be more beautiful!

Little Joey was certainly not the first to be in awe of the monastic life of Carmel. We find in the annals of history that the pilgrims of old similarly wondered at the early life led by our saintly predecessors, the hermits on Mount Carmel “whose lives we attempt to imitate”. One remarked that he was “a little curious” and another quickly observed that those first crusaders to resettle on Mount Carmel “built a small rampart with a tower and chapel.” Each pilgrim to visit our venerable Fathers on Mount Carmel remarked that these holy monks “liv[ed] in their hives of small cells, and like the bees of the Lord, ma[de] honey of a wholly spiritual sweetness.” The visitors to Mount Carmel found the solitary life of its inhabitants, who were walled about with God, to be altogether inspiring and a marvelously powerful witness to our Blessed Lord, Jesus Christ.

Let us not overlook what we have just remarked, that there on Mount Carmel the first hermits “built a small rampart with a tower and chapel.” Isn’t this curious that there, in that wild, beautiful place the hermits would find it necessary to build a wall? Surely, the hermits were concerned with far more than their mere protection from enemy invasion; this was not an earthly fortress, but rather a heavenly one where God’s intimate friends spent their days alone with Him. Behind those ramparts, warriors for souls did fight in a battle far more urgent than nation against nation.

This is the great monastic tradition of Carmel, to live in the antechamber of heaven, strictly cloistered and hidden from the eyes of men. It is indeed a most blessed life for those called to begin to experience in this life the joys and beatitude of that to come. The walls, gates and grilles are the dearest friend of the contemplative for they are the protection of the soul, allowing the monk to live a life of deep union with the Lord, unhindered and undisturbed. This solitude is extolled and praised by Holy Mother Church as a most efficacious means of making fruitful her labors and saving numerous souls.

At first glance, some may be tempted to find in Carmel’s enclosure nothing more than another prison with tall walls and locked doors. My friends, it is all too easy to overlook the most basic reality, namely, that the lock is on the inside. The Carmelite chooses to live in hiddeness, offering to God one of the things that men hold most dear: their freedom to go about as they please. Yet when we give something up for the love of God, we so often find that He gives it back to us in a greater and more astounding way. So it is with those called to the cloistered life. You see, the monk is truly free to go where he wills for by his prayers the lives of people on the other side of the world can be impacted. What an amazing reality that a life lived behind walls can be so efficacious, and therefore so necessary in leading men to Christ and to His Church.

Monks of old have forever esteemed, loved and cherished the external forms of their enclosure, such as the grating and walls. Yet, in the manly tradition of all the great monasteries, there is something more that protects the monk than just the wall, something far more basic and just as essential to the other forms of cloister. A monastery of cloistered men must also know the solitude of geographical enclosure, being in a place remote and secluded, far from the highways and city streets known to men. Was it not for this same reason that many monasteries were founded on the side of cliffs and on mountain peaks where one even wonders how to get there! In these solitary places, they found the ultimate protection of their life, which was simply able to continue from day to day and year to year as a source of grace for the entire Church.

There at the New Mount Carmel our monks shall at last know the profound impact of geographical enclosure. Being isolated and solitary off a seven mile driveway, our monastery will truly be a walled city. The walls will not be simply the wooden and stone ones, but also the slopes and ridges that make the place remote and hidden. As the prior and the novice master, I find nothing is more important than instilling in our novices the zealous love of the enclosure that only a wild and solitary place can impart.