The Little Cloud

Marian Prefigurement in 1 Kings 18

The Carmelite tradition is something that I’m relatively familiar with. I come from a family that is absolutely loaded with Third Order Carmelites, including my own parents. While I don’t claim to be an expert on the spirituality, I am familiar with some of the saints, devotionals, and Biblical interpretations that the Carmelites have produced.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Carmelite spirituality is how Marian it is. They find the hand of Our Lady in some of the most unique places, and one of those is the little cloud in 1 Kings 18:44.

Since Carmelites trace their patronage all the way back to the prophet Elijah, it makes sense that they would spend time meditating on and praying about his life recorded in the Sacred Scriptures. It’s no wonder that they also claim the roots of their spirituality, in this case Marian devotion, is found in that same account.

To Understand the Little Cloud, We Must Understand the Immaculate Conception

The Catholic Church has irrevocably declared that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was immaculately conceived. What does that mean? The stain of Original Sin never touched her. She was conceived 100% sin-free.

The exact theology of how that all works is a bigger topic that deserves its own post, or maybe even series of posts, and Fulton Sheen even produced on an entire book on the subject, The World’s First Love. I don’t plan to give the full explanation here, but I am open to it in the future if that’s something you readers would like to look into, so let me know!

For now, it’s enough to say that God’s being outside of time means that the graces of Christ’s death and resurrection, the antidote to Original Sin, could be applied at the beginning of time to preserve Our Lady from Original Sin entirely. Because of that, the Church elevates Our Lady as a woman of purity and holiness, unique from any created being to ever exist. She is entirely without stain, and was full of grace even before Christ restored the Divine Life into our souls.

What Even is Grace?

Grace was lacking in the world from the fall of Adam and Eve until the death and Resurrection of Christ. . . With one exception- Mary.

The simplest definition of grace is “participation in the life of God.” With the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, humanity lost that intimate dwelling with God. In other words, Original Sin killed the life of grace in the souls of all humanity.

Keeping that in mind makes the words of the Archangel Gabriel more profound. In a world that is devoid of the Divine Life in the soul, one woman is “full of grace” (Luke 1:28). This would be like finding a beautiful, lively rose in the midst of the desert. There hasn’t been water in ages, and yet the most perfect flower has bloomed.

This leads to why the Carmelite tradition views the cloud from 1 Kings 18:44 as symbolic of Our Lady.

Like Water to a Parched Land

A cloud in the desert is uncommon because clouds are composed of water. Just as water is nowhere to be found on the ground, so there is no water to be found in the air either. That sounds exactly like the situation that Mary was born into that we described above!

It took an intervention of God- the Immaculate Conception- to have even a small glimmer of the life of grace come into the world. (Not that Mary’s Immaculate Conception is a small deal, but just to say that she was one person among the entire Earth’s population.) Spiritually speaking, the entire world was in a drought of grace when Mary was born.

In the book of 1 Kings, we read that there is a three-year-drought in the land because of idolatry. This reaches its climax on Mount Carmel when Elijah confronts the priests of Baal, slaughtering them and cleansing the land of its sin (1 Kings 18:40).

That is reminiscent of Our Lady. Just as the appearance of the cloud, as the reader will see, is connected to the spiritual warfare of Elijah, so Mary’s coming into the world fulfills a prophecy in Eden that stated, “‘I will put enmity between you and the woman. . . she shall crush your head’” (Genesis 3:15). Her appearance in Salvation History is the beginning of the conquering of sin and death- the ultimate spiritual combat.

It is then that, “Elijah went up to the top of Carmel, crouched down to the earth, and put his head between his knees” (1 Kings 18:42). Essentially, Elijah, after rooting out the idolatry in the land, begins to pray that God end the chastisement of the drought.

It is then that Elijah’s servant reports seeing “‘a cloud as small as a man’s hand rising from the sea’” (1 Kings 18:44). Just as it was with Our Lady (before the birth of Christ), there is only a small glimmer of the life of grace. Even her Magnificat is reminiscent of the cloud, “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38).

Then, that small cloud becomes an entire storm, “All at once the sky grew dark with clouds and wind, and a heavy rain fell” (1 Kings 18:45). With her Fiat, Our Lady allows Christ to come into the world and absolutely flood it with life of grace.

Just like the cloud showed up to signal the defeat of the sin of idolatry in the land, Our Lady is born to signal the defeat of all sin and death by Christ.

Marian Devotion is Scriptural

To wrap all of this up, the Carmelites identifying the cloud as symbolic of Mary just shows that the Catholic Church has always had a thorough understanding of Scripture. “Typology” is a term that refers to an Old Testament foreshadowing of a greater person/event in the New Testament. The Carmelites recognizing the little cloud as a foreshadowing of Mary would be a perfect example of that.

This also is a perfect example of how Our Lady doesn’t replace Christ. The cloud is small, and it isn’t until God Himself acts that the storm begins and ends the drought. In the same way, Our Lady is given the grace, but she is not the source of the grace- that’s Christ alone.

I really enjoyed looking into this! What other Scriptural foreshadowings should I cover? I am curious to see where else the Church’s Tradition has found interesting foreshadowings in the Old Testament. Leave a comment! I’d be happy to research and write an article about it. Until then, consider sharing this post and subscribing for more content like this. God bless!