Our Director of Studies, Br. Pat Mulins O.Carm., has written a few 300 word reflections for those interested in Carmelite tradition. The second of these is below:
St Titus Brandsma once said that he had chosen to become a Carmelite because of their spirituality and especially their life of prayer and their close relationship with the Mother of God. Mary was formally recognised as the Mother of God (theotokos, literally ‘God-bearer’) at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and, at the International Mariological Conference at Tongerloo on the five-years-late 1500th anniversary of Ephesus, in 1936, St Titus suggested that each Carmelite is called to share in Mary’s motherhood in the sense that, like Mary, ‘We should … receive God into our hearts, carrying him within our hearts, nourishing him and making him grow so that he might be born from us and live with us as God-with-us, the Emmanuel’. Mary was God-bearer both bodily (it was from her womb that Jesus was born) and spiritually (it was by her ’yes’ to God’s request that she become the mother of God’s only Son that she conceived) and we are called to become ‘God-bearers’ spiritually, in the sense that Jesus, our Lord, comes to live, as a little child, in the soul of each one of us when we believe in Him. He grows to maturity as our faith comes to maturity, so that we become able to testify to God’s dwelling within us, and, in this way, invite others to faith, so that, in turn, Jesus comes to live in their hearts. In his book, Carmelite Mysticism, or The Beauty of Carmel, Titus says that we can all share in fullness of Mary’s holiness through our spiritual union with her in prayer, through our reflection on her becoming one of the disciples of her own divine Son, and through our desire to model our lives as disciples on hers.