My name is Br. Jonathan Maria of the Cross.

I came to the U.S., from Denmark, in 2019 to enter the Order of Discalced Carmelites of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and was received into the novitiate May 31st 2020.

I was confirmed into the Church in June 2014 after a period of much sorrow and despair in my life. It was an encounter with God that brought me out of the darkness of the atheism I had championed and into the light of the Truth. Encountering God became the moment that defined my life.

Before being confirmed I started to pray, but it was my father, a secular Carmelite, who, by introducing me to the Carmelite tradition and Spirituality, gave my prayer-life contours and definition. With his help I began the practice of mental prayer, devoting an hour a-day to it and coupled it with meditations on scripture or spiritual literature. It was through this that I came to understand something of the intimacy that God wants to share with the soul and I got more and more taken by the desire to live in this intimacy. This gave birth to a desire for the priesthood, being, at the time, the epitome of intimacy with God in my mind.

For five years I discerned the vocation to diocesan priesthood with the Diocese of Copenhagen. I grew to love the priesthood more, but I also realized that the life of a diocesan priest does not offer the same opportunity for a life of prayer, as I had come to desire. During this period of discernment two major influences came into my life – St. John of the Cross and the Carmelite community of nuns in St. Josef’s Carmel in Hillerød, Denmark. The teaching of St. John of the Cross came into my life at a crucial time when prayer had lost its sweetness and I was in desperate need of a guide. That is probably also how I would best describe the importance of St. John of the Cross in my life – as a guide, if not a spiritual father. His writings opened me to trust God more and more and have been a pillar in my life ever since. If St. John of the Cross became my spiritual father, then the community of nuns in St. Josef’s Carmel became my spiritual sisters, and one nun in particular my spiritual mother. Some things are too precious to describe in words, so let it suffice to say that I would not be here today without my sisters and mother in Carmel.

Through the writings and example of St. John of the Cross and the support and prayers of my Carmelite sisters, I came to realize that I should discern the vocation of a Discalced Carmelite Friar. Sadly, Denmark is not exactly a hub of religious orders, the Catholic Church being a very small minority (0.01% of the population) and so I had to seek a community of religious friars somewhere else. Eventually, through the work of the nuns, I came to learn of Holy Hill and I decided to reach out. After the first visit to Holy Hill I knew God had brought me to something special and I decided that I would enter.

While all vocations entail sacrifices, I’ve come to experience that the sacrifices we make for God in pursuit of doing His will are filled with delight and that on the Cross, we also find Christ.