Carmelite Conversations
A Pure Heart: The Transformation of Desire
Wednesday 11 November 2026
10.30am – 12.00pm (Melbourne Time)
Online via Zoom
You are welcome to join from other time zones, for example:
India/Sri Lanka: 6am • Thailand/Vietnam: 7:30am • Perth/Singapore/Malaysia/Philippines: 8:30am • Timor-Leste/Japan/Korea: 9:30am • Papua New Guinea: 10:30am • New Zealand: 12:30pm • Hawaii: Tuesday 2:30pm • Los Angeles/Vancouver: Tuesday 5:30pm • Denver: Tuesday 6:30pm • Chicago: Tuesday 7:30pm • New York/Toronto: Tuesday 8:30pm • Brazil (São Paulo): Tuesday 9:30pm
It is easy to lose heart.
Our own sufferings, frustrations and fears, and the state of our world and its plight, can wear us down. When this is our lived experience, it is understandable that we may feel abandoned by God.
But our God is there, seeking us out.
This Season of the Heart is an awakening to the love of a God who seeks us out as beloved, and who approaches us all with a capacity to transform and heal.
What have you been working hard to earn?
What might change if you received it as a gift?
Where is even the smallest movement of love, desire or hope stirring in you?
The Carmelite tradition invites us to awaken, reminding us:
- God seeks us out as beloved.
- What we strive to earn is always freely given.
- Even the smallest movement of love can place us in God’s presence.
- A pure heart is a heart open to communion.
A Carmelite response to desire
To follow Carmel is to be loved into allowing the sacred into our lives. From there we are led into the world, where we cannot help but make this love a reality. This awakening often happens once we see how devoted we have been to earning what is always freely given.
This process of allowing confronts our well-honed efforts to direct and control. Turning to the Carmelite saints can help. John of the Cross teaches that even the smallest movement of love, desire or hope can place us in the presence of God’s unfolding through us. For Teresa of Avila, to pray is to move closer and closer to communion with God. Prayer purifies our capacity for love and inches us closer to who we have been called to become.
A Pure Heart: The Transformation of Desire will explore the pure heart as a heart open to this communion in ever-deepening ways, participating in God’s loving and healing presence.
Entering Carmel means entering the encounter between our spirit and God’s. As we open ourselves to God’s loving, pure essence, we can be changed to more readily see, accept and offer the presence of God within us. Filled with this love, we can envision and enact our longing for wholeness, peace, security, joy and unity.
“The important thing is not to think much but to love much.”
— St Teresa of Avila
Facilitator
Br Daryl Moresco O.Carm. is an Australian Carmelite friar, born in Wonthaggi, who brings a deep love of Carmelite spirituality to his ministry of prayer, formation and spiritual accompaniment.
In 2001 Daryl went to the United States to study Carmelite spirituality. For the US Province of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, he directed pre-novitiate formation from 2007 to 2017 and was Novice Director from 2017 to 2020. Most recently he was Managing Director of the Center for Carmelite Studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
Since returning to Australia in July 2024, Br Daryl has been the Carmelite Delegate to The Carmelite Centre and Chair of the Provincial Formation Commission. He is a spiritual director, retreat director and workshop facilitator. He is also an icon writer and leads the Centre’s Praying with Icons sessions.
You are welcome to join from other time zones, for example:
India/Sri Lanka: 6am • Thailand/Vietnam: 7:30am • Perth/Singapore/Malaysia/Philippines: 8:30am • Timor-Leste/Japan/Korea: 9:30am • Papua New Guinea: 10:30am • New Zealand: 12:30pm • Hawaii: Tuesday 2:30pm • Los Angeles/Vancouver: Tuesday 5:30pm • Denver: Tuesday 6:30pm • Chicago: Tuesday 7:30pm • New York/Toronto: Tuesday 8:30pm • Brazil (São Paulo): Tuesday 9:30pm
Join us as we explore how our deepest desires, opened to God’s love, can be transformed, and how a pure heart becomes a place where that love is made real in the world.
The Carmelite Centre
214 Richardson Street
Middle Park VIC 3206