The Love of the Immaculate Heart
“Jesus wants to use you to make Me known and loved. He wishes to establish the devotion to My Immaculate Heart throughout the world. I promise salvation to whoever embraces it…”
– Our Lady of Fatima
Dear Friends of Carmel,
On August 15th, we celebrated the great Feast of the Assumption. It is the most glorious of the Marian Feasts, since it celebrates her glorious end. For having so perfectly accomplished God’s great Will for her life, she was given a “wonderful and unequaled joy” and attainment of the “fruit and purpose of all virtue,” meriting “at last to enjoy the glad sight of Him Whom she so greatly loved…” (St. Peter Canisius, Matins for the Feast).
The Feast of the Assumption begins this time of “Our Lady’s Thirty Days”. These weeks between August 15th and September 15th are interspersed with Feast days in honor of the Blessed Mother, Saturday, August 22nd, is a special one for our Carmel. It is the other Titular Feast day for our Carmelite Monastery of the Sacred Hearts (the first being the Feast of the Sacred Heart), the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. So a very blessed Feast Day to you!
Religious art represents the Immaculate Heart, like the Sacred Heart, as a symbol meant to teach us. We see a heart, not small, but big – and a sword right through it. This sword that pierced Our Lady’s Heart, is a reference to the prophecy of Simeon and the great sorrow and suffering she embraced as Mother of our Redeemer and our Mother (Lk. 2:34-35). We also see a crown of roses around the heart, representative of Our Lord Himself, Who completely encompasses her. There are lilies, symbol of her Immaculate Conception and her singular purity. And there is fire – flames of fire – the same flames we see always present in depictions of the Sacred Heart. These flames are, of course, the symbol of Love. Is not the heart itself primarily the symbol of love? But this particular heart, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, burned with the most perfect and sublime love of all – Divine Charity. The Sacred and Immaculate Hearts possess the one, same incomparable love, burning and consuming, healing and saving.
In the book, Our Lady Queen of the Religious Life, Father Louis Colin dedicates an entire chapter to this singular, ineffable quality of the heart of Mary – her love. He tells us that her love is a love both virginal and motherly, singular, yet expansive. Her heart belongs exclusively to God, yet as Mother of God, her heart embraces all that belongs to Him. That you might appreciate fully these lofty, beautiful and consoling truths about Our Lady’s love, we provide in PDF form Father Colin’s entire chapter to read prayerfully and at leisure. But as we know some of you cannot take the time, we have attempted to summarize a few of his lofty thoughts into a few paragraphs below:
The Heart of Mary is a religious and mystical heart, the ideal religious and mystical heart. Fullness of grace necessarily implies fullness of charity. At her conception, the Trinity filled her with an immense charity which, in marvelous and unceasing progress would go from plenitude to plenitude, from height to height.
Here below, absolutely perfect love remains for all of us an inaccessible summit. The Virgin alone reached it with one sweep of the wing, as it were. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul and with why whole mind” (Matt. 22:37). This first commandment is for mankind not so much a program as an ideal. Our Lady filled it immediately and to the letter. She loved fully and thoroughly, even to the complete exhaustion of all her capacities or potentialities for love. She could not love more; there was not the slightest deficiency in her charity.
She loved – that says everything, contains everything, sums up everything. In her, everything was love and directed to love, Saint Bernard observed. Absolute mistress of her faculties, of her passions, of her senses, the Virgin made them so many instruments of love. All of her activities, having God for their end, became works of pure charity.
In Mary’s soul, there is but one love. It was not that Our Lady loved absolutely nobody, absolutely nothing. She knew the second commandment of God: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” And her neighbor was every man created by the Most High, every soul redeemed by the blood of Christ; her neighbor was the Jewish people to whom she belonged; tomorrow it would be the Church born on Calvary from the Heart of Jesus and brought forth by her in the midst of unspeakable sufferings.
But all Mary’s human affections and the tenderness of her love, transformed and divinized by grace, are in reality only one with her love for God and Jesus. All her individual loves, innumerable as they are, are only the prolongation and radiation of her charity: they had the same root, the same sap, the same trunk, the same flowering. Without loving anything outside God, the Virgin loves everything in God and for God. All humanity is included in her love for the Most High, for the mystical Christ.
Unicity of love crowned with matchless purity! Heart of Mary into which no clandestine or parasitic love has ever crept to exhaust the resources and contaminate it. It is so rare to love God with pure love, solely for Himself and without egoism! The Virgin alone escaped the corrupting selfishness of love which consists in loving self at the expense of God, of His will, His glory, His good pleasure. Conceived immaculate, she preserved the original integrity and splendor of her heart until death.
And it is with this plenitude, unicity and virginity of love that the Holy Heart of Mary was made.
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At the Annunciation, at the solemn moment, took place what has been called the “maternization” of the virginal heart of Mary.
The maternity of Mary is a real participation in the very paternity of God; it is the flowing into the womb of a woman of that infinite fecundity by which God from all eternity engenders His Word. By an unutterable prodigy God gave to a child the womb of a mother and communicated to her a share in His own fecundity, the power to conceive and bring forth His own Son. To complete His work, “He shed upon her a ray” of His paternal love, molded a new heart for her, the heart of a mother.
There is nothing stronger, nothing more pressing, than the love Nature gives a mother for a son, and the love that grace gives for God….thus there was never an affection like that of the Blessed Virgin, since we see concurring in it the most loving nature possible and the most powerful grace. All that any mother here below experiences in her soul with regard to her child is found in the heart of Our Lady, but on an infinitely superior plane, strengthened a hundredfold, sublimated.
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Love of God and love of neighbor are two loves indissolubly united, the second commandment being only the logical and necessary consequence of the first. “He who loves God should love his brother also” (1 John 4:21). One of the most endearing aspects of the heart of Mary would escape us, if we did not mention her charity for the human race.
Here again we reach the ineffable. The love of the Virgin for us can be conceived of only by comparison with her love for the Most High. It is with the same love, with the same heart, that she embraces God and all the children of God – with the same purity, the same intensity, the same ardor. Her affection for us is only the prolongation and expansion of her love of God. Nothing escapes the radiation of her tenderness. She loves all that God loves: every creature, in each of whom she perceives some reflection of the wisdom, the power and the goodness of the Lord. The heart of Mary is open to all; there is room for everyone.
Her maternal love for Jesus, her first-born – a selfless love, a love of tenderness, of delicacy, of fidelity, of devotion, of intimacy – this is the love she has for the innumerable multitude of her adopted children. All these children of God, who have become her children, whom once she bore with Christ in her virginal womb, she now bears that same Christ in her maternal heart. Her sisterly love has changed into a mother’s love. Our Lady!…..Our Mother….our true Mother. And such a mother! Such a heart and such a love! It is especially in the supernatural domain and in the matter of eternal salvation that the tremendous and conquering intervention of Our Lady is proved. Her two-fold maternity is indeed the very foundation of her apostolate. Can the heart of a mother remain insensible to the frightful danger which threatens her children? Having done so much, prayed so much, suffered so much for them, how can she let them fall into the eternal flames of hell? She will, then be the “Help of Christians,” the “Refuge of Sinners,” the “Hope of our Salvation,” while awaiting the time when she will be the “Gate of Heaven;” a gate wide open through which the immense multitude of the elect will pass, to beatitude.
We do hope that many of you will consider reading the whole chapter. Father Colin takes a moment to expand on each of the qualities of perfect love – spontaneity, profundity, disregard of self, tenderness, delicacy, intimacy, fidelity, devotion – and how they were exemplified in Our Lady’s life. It has a wealth of thought for meditation and prayer, especially on a Feast Day such as this – and a beautiful way to share in the days ahead,“Our Lady’s 30 Days”! Father Colin mentions only in passing that many of man’s miseries are due to disordered love, and how true that is, especially in today’s world! We focus on the temporal rather than the divine. Because of disordered passions, we tend to love the wrong things and the wrong people for the wrong reasons. When we do turn our affection towards God and the divine, it is only half-heartedly, with divided attention and distracted hearts.
Our Immaculate Heart of Mary relic badge with a new updated picture of Our Lady
However, when we turn on our hearts in another, higher direction and delve into the Immaculate Heart of Mary, not only do we find the remedy. Not only do we find the exemplar, the perfect model of how to love, of how to live out the first two commandments (love of God, and love of neighbor for God’s sake) with absolute perfection. We also find a Mother whose anxious care is to make it happen in our own lives, and whose own infectious and efficacious love is like a magnetic force that draws us to her Divine Son.
Please know of our prayers for you on this beautiful Feast and through Our Lady’s Thirty Days, that we may all grow in love of Our Lady and her Divine Son.
Immaculate Heart of Mary
Pray for Us
In Christ and His most Holy Mother,
Your Carmelite Sisters
*Limited Edition Immaculate Heart Scapular*
Although devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary has a long history in the Church, it took on a new power and gravity at the Fatima apparitions. There is a close parallel between the words/apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima and the words/apparitions of the Sacred Heart, which we have detailed at length in past newsletters. In the June apparition, Our Lady actually showed her Immaculate Heart to the children and spoke these words: “My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.”
During the Miracle of the Sun, Our Lady forever connected the Fatima message to the Scapular, if not in word, by deed, when she appeared as Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
The requirement for making the Brown Scapular is that it be made of 100% brown wool. No decoration or image is necessary – but it is allowed. Often, and for understandable reasons, Brown Scapulars have embellishments that bear some reference to Our Lady of Mount Carmel: the shield of the Carmelite Order, or an image of Our Lady, etc. However, as a special tribute to Our Lady during these times, we wanted to make a scapular that focuses on the great promise that she made at Fatima: “In the end, My Immaculate Heart with Triumph.” These words, along with the symbol of that Heart and the symbol of Our Lady crowned in triumph, contain the message of hope that we wish this scapular to convey. After all, wearing the Brown Scapular is a sign of being one of her children, and is it not true that her children will triumph with her?
We chose a premium merino wool and decided to embroider the symbols directly into the wool fabric itself. The result is beautiful, but as you might surmise, these scapulars are, shall we say, “labor-intensive” to produce! They will not always be available among our regular scapular designs, but you will see them occasionally, as we are able to make them. We have them available now in limited number, so if you would like one or more, this is your opportunity – until next time!
*2027 Liturgical Calendar*
For those of you who have been asking – the 2027 Liturgical Calendar is now available! The Carmelite Edition with the Carmelite Feast days is currently at the printers, so keep an eye out for that one over the next few weeks, as well as for the popular mini-calendars.
*Marian Incense Sampler*
If you are not sure which fragrance you will like, or if you are just a person that likes variety, our incense samplers are the perfect way to try a little bit of everything! Our new Marian Sampler covers all of our Marian scents – a very fine way to celebrate all her Feasts during Our Lady’s Thirty Days.
*New Framed Prints*
We have added several new framed prints to our collection, and most of them revolve around Our Blessed Mother including a new Immaculate Heart Print and Our Lady of Fatima. Our favorite was Our Mother of Perpetual Help – the colors are stunning!
*Holy Face Items*
The Holy Face Cross of Lorraine is the official Cross of the Archconfraternity of the Holy Face, originally cast for members of the Confraternity founded in Tours, France. This design features the Veil of Veronica on the front side of the cross and the Holy Name symbol on the reverse side as well as the Latin invocations “Get behind me satan,” and “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Also see our new Holy Face medal which features Our Lady of Sorrows on the reverse.
