9. Mary, the Mother of God

To Jesus with Mary

Our Lady held a special importance for Titus Brandsma throughout his life. As a young boy Titus became familiar with various Marian practices including the rosary which the Brandsma family prayed on a daily basis. This Marian devotion would last a lifetime for Titus who even in prison organised several rosaries for himself when his one was taken from him.
In addition, Titus became familiar with the idea that we ﬁnd Jesus by going through Mary. With Mary as a mother and as a sister, he followed Jesus on his way to the heavenly father.

My soul magniﬁes the Lord

Titus entered the Carmelite novitiate out of his desire for a more intense prayer life and because of the Order’s great devotion to Our Lady. Later, Titus places on the picture for his ordination the words of Mary in her Magniﬁcat: My soul magniﬁes the Lord. He who is mighty has done great things to me. (Luke 1: 46, 49) During his Roman years (1905-1909) Titus visited the catacombs, where an ancient image of Our Lady, called the Orante, impressed him. This he refers to as the image of the praying Church and to the image of Mary who sings her Magniﬁcat. In a Marian magazine, Carmelrozen, which he co-founded, Titus wrote dozens of articles so as to foster love for Mary through an increased knowledge about the diﬀerent forms of veneration of Mary, her feast days, Christian art work and the teaching of the church and councils on Mary.

Mary’s divine motherhood

Of special importance to Titus was the Council of Ephesus (431) which had declared the dogma of Mary as Theotokos (God-bearer). Titus reﬂected on the divine motherhood of Mary writing:

In Mary we see the most beautiful image of our union with God. She, the bride of the Holy Spirit, teaches us how we also, though not in the fullness of grace but in a wider sense, must be brides of God, in order that he be born in us, united – also in us – with human nature, our human nature. Under the beneﬁcent inﬂuence of the Holy Spirit we must be born to a new life with God, who lives in us more than we live of ourselves.

Increasing our devotion to Mary means learning to imitate the attitudes she has in her life. And so, we too are called to become like Mary: bearers of the divine life.
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 July 26th 1942. May his example inspire us to live a Christian and Marian life.

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