Welcome to ‘Traces of Him’

On 16th November 2020 participants at the Spirituality Summit ‘Teresa of Avila: Teacher and Guide’ celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Doctorate of Santa Teresa of Jesus.

As part of this celebration, in his address, Cardinal Anders Arborelius encouraged us all to participate in the sacrament of the present moment (opening up to God, and His glorious eternity, in the everyday and the here and now), finding traces of Him in all that surrounds us.

Please see video below of the full presentation.

Traces of Him: Lenten Encounters

Moved by this, over the season of Lent, members of our Carmelite family and Friends-in-Carmel – from across the world – used digital cameras/mobile-phone cameras to support an open-hearted attentiveness to the particularities and details of our everyday lives.

In her 2013 book, Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice, Christine Valters Paintner suggests that such attentiveness is a practice of “holy seeing” (p.2) – which gently sensitises us to the myriad of ways in which: “God is moving through our lives and how we are being invited to respond… and [to] pay attention to what is actually unfolding within us” (p.3).

Settling into what Christine characterises as the slow, gentle “art of beholding’”(p.15), we opened to, and beheld, the sacredness in the ordinary. When so moved, from time to time, we photographed something that pertained to an encounter with Him.

Each person’s photographs were, of course, deeply personal, bearing witness to their own path of sacred seeing.  But some have generously shared a single photograph, arising from their Lenten attentiveness to His traces.

So it is these images that we have compiled here. Each image testifies to His presence in our everyday lives. Together they also serve as a prayerful response to, and legacy of, the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Doctorate of Santa Teresa of Jesus.

The images are now yours to receive. Click on the embedded video presentation to view them, the entire presentation lasts approximately 29 minutes. We hope you enjoy these precious encounters.