By following her example, we should obviously be other Marys. We ought to let Mary live in us. Mary should not stand outside the Carmelite, but the Carmelite should live a life so similar to Mary’s that the Carmelite should live with, in, through, and for Mary. Mary, Hope of all Carmelites In 1939 Titus wrote a Way of the Cross for a pilgrimage. At the ninth station, when Jesus falls under the Cross for the third time, he prays: O Mary, who has observed with admiration and motherly compassion the final efforts of your Son, help me to remember this when the fulfilling of my task in life becomes too heavy. Perhaps this prayer was with him when he was arrested in January 1942 and sent initially to the prison of Scheveningen. There Titus transforms his prison cell into a Carmelite cell with a picture of Christ and a picture of Mary: In the part of the breviary we are using now and which was luckily left to me, is the beautiful picture of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. So now my breviary is standing wide open on the topmost of the two corner shelves, to the left of the bed. When sitting at my table I only have to look a bit to the right and I can see her beautiful picture; while laying in bed my eye is firstly caught by that star-bearing Madonna, Hope of all Carmelites. With the eyes of his heart fixed on Mary and with Jesus at his side Titus continued his own way of the cross from Scheveningen to Dachau. There he died on 26 July 1942. May his example inspire us to live a Christian and Marian life. SAINT TITUS BRANDSMA Prayer God of peace and justice, you open our hearts to love and to the joy of the Gospel even in the midst of countless forms of violence that take away the dignity of our brothers and sisters, fill us with your grace, so that like Saint Titus Brandsma, we may in tenderness see beyond the horrors of inhumanity and contemplate your glory that shines forth through the martyrs of every age, and so become your authentic witnesses in the world of today. Amen. carmelites.org.au/titusbrandsma 25
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