There is only one mother

Virgin, Mother and Wife: these are by no means the values that are most promoted in today's women. It is striking, however, how thousands of men and women will go out these days close to July 16 to honor the one who best represents them: Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

It seems unbelievable, but it is so. Towns and cities all over the world celebrate patronal feasts, festivals, maritime-terrestrial processions, novenas, triduums and all kinds of religious and civil celebrations to commemorate the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, which is its original name.

Moreover, the scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is one of the most popular sacramentals and countless faithful wear it and impose it on themselves every year. Those two small pieces of brown cloth joined by two ribbons or cords that are hung around the neck, symbolize the wearer wearing the habit of Mary and, therefore, the adhesion to her figure not only externally, but also internally.

Wanting to be like Mary and imitate her in her virtues is what is meant when she dresses, although, of course, few people know it and many wear it only as a kind of amulet.

It is curious that the multitudes who admire, according to the "like" counts on social networks, a model of woman totally contrary to the one Maria represents, such as that of the empowered woman, who lives for herself, free from the burden of motherhood and living for others, then go out to cheer her and have her as a reference and support in their daily lives. They remind me of those teenagers who are ashamed of their mother in front of their friends, because of the way they dress or speak, but who, when one of them betrays them, run to take refuge in their mother's comforting arms, which they know never fail.

There is only one mother, and Carmen represents, in the collective subconscious of our people, that mother that from the purest biological sense we have all needed. Someone who has lived virginity, in the sense of consecration and total surrender, because for nine months she consecrated herself totally to us. She was the only person in the world who knew us, who gave us her oxygen, her nutrients, who carried us with her everywhere and who suffered the pains of childbirth to give us life.

There is only one mother, and Carmen is the ancestral image of motherhood that we all need in the depths of our soul to feel protected and cared for. She is that lap in which we feel safe, that inexhaustible ear in which to unload our sorrows, that breast in which to satiate and comfort us, that warm voice with which to calm us...

Motherhood also makes us members of a family, of the great human family. Our Lady of Mount Carmel unites us to our closest brothers and sisters and to the extended family that is the community. Our Lady builds people, city, nation, universality.

There is only one mother, and Carmen speaks to us of an absolutely countercultural nuptiality, but very important for the development of the human being. A spousal relationship like the one the Church proposes to Christian couples, which involves literally giving one's life ("I give myself to you" they both say to each other in the ceremony), as she did, being "the handmaid of the Lord".

Being a wife or husband for life clashes head-on with the narcissism that our society glorifies. Husbands and wives do not look at themselves, but at each other. Just as human mothers break their natural tendency to overprotect their children, allying themselves with an authority other than their own - that of the father - to break the umbilical cord and find a reference that sets the limits; Mary always points to her son, who is God himself, telling us: "Do whatever he tells you".

The feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel reconciles us with the most intimate part of our being human, which is precisely to be divine. Mary is that ideal of Virgin Woman, Mother and Bride, with capital letters, which is so difficult to promote out loud today, because the great dragon of the Apocalypse is determined to persecute her and "make war on the rest of her descendants" (Rev 12:13-18).

Mary, of Carmen or any other invocation with which we address her, is, in short, a woman admired not superficially as the current model of women, but from the depths as will be seen these days in the streets and beaches. Mary is unique, because there is only one Mother.