Carlo Carretto's book is a moving and inspiriting meditation on his rediscovery of and love for Mary, the mother of Jesus.
‘I must admit,’ he writes, ‘that my relations with Mary were somewhat marred by the romanticism of the type of Marian devotion that was all the rage before die Vatican Council and which gradually became empty of meaning. She is, after all, the mother of God and has no need of recommendation to be esteemed.’
His own renewal of devotion began during his long period in the desert, living among the Little Brothers of Charles dc Foucauld. The fate of one particular Tuareg girl opened his eyes to the real life that Mary lived in Nazareth. Her position there, the subject of neighbours puritanical scrutiny, Carretto follows here as, with exhaustion in her heart, she revisited her cousin Elizabeth, for it was Elizabeth who said to her after hearing her relate her story,‘Blessed are you who believed’.
Thus it was that Carlo Carretto chose Mary as his instructor in the faith. ‘I had discovered a vital contact with her. She was no longer a remote figure to whom I owed 'worship', she was the sister of my heart, the companion of my pilgrimage, the teacher in the Faith,'
