Our Lady of Sorrows: A Meditation

Our Lady of Sorrows: A Meditation for the Feast.

Each year we come to this celebration like a full stop.

It arrests us, holds us, freezes us as we look inwardly at that scene we think we know so well.

The Woman and the Man,

the Mother and the Son…

and the Cross; always the Cross…

Mother of Sorrows we call her and she is the Mother of Sorrow today, for her Son is not just the God who is Love, but the God who is the Sorrow that Love becomes when it is refused, rejected, even hated…

In a universe of hate and betrayal she will be the one point of pure light, the one point of pure love, the one point of pure sorrow over Sorrow’s pain.

Mother of Compassion we call her. “Cum Passio” is the phrase at the root of this word; to be with the suffering. For all she can do is be with Him in His Suffering and long, as so many mothers have longed over countless ages, to end His suffering, to take His place, to stand in the place of her child.

How many war zones, sick beds, hospitals, prisons have been hallowed by such prayers over the ages?

In a universe of pain and suffering she does not look away, she stands, strong for Him who has become weakness itself in this moment, that the wound at the heart of it all may be healed. She chooses yet again, as surely as she chose in the light of the Angel all those years ago. She utters a Yes once again, this time not with words but with presence. Words without presence mean nothing… but presence, even when it is silent, is louder than thunder.

Mother of the Seven Sorrows we call her. Her life graced and blessed has been punctuated with pain. The pain of the moment and the pain of knowing, darkly at least, what is coming. Seven great sorrows we name, but they are only the beginning. Every mother knows sorrow… the sorrow of knowing that her child is not her own, not really, not in their essence, and that they must be set free to become all that they were meant to be. For her this natural letting go is revealed as a graced begetting of blessedness anew. She will let Him go, she will let Him go to His death and her faith will be the point of light and love that will call Him home to her when first He rises. The prophecy of Simeon, the Flight to Egypt, the first Loss in the Temple, the Meeting on the Road, they will all lead inevitably to the Cross, to holding her dead Son in her arms, to entombing in the womb of the Earth the One she had carried safely in her own womb. And yet, when all will be death and despair she will stand as Woman, as Mother, as the faithful witness, as the one who walks the path of living martyrdom, as the one who, on our behalf, believes past believing; doing this as only a mother can, as only a woman can, winning the victory by the purest kind of faith, unselfish Love.

Our Lady of Sorrows we call her. Ours! Yes she is ours… for in the moment of her greatest pain she says Yes to another, deeper call within her consecration. His last words will bequeath His greatest gift. Present to Him with all her love, with all her still strength and grace she is now ours too. Behold your Mother. This is the generosity of God, of Grace, of Love itself… holding nothing back for itself it gives its greatest gift away. This is the generosity of Mary that she says Yes and accepts us all in the very moment of our greatest rejection of her Son. At the pinnacle of hate she becomes the very first fruits of love, and compassion, and peace, the place where the fruits of the Cross are first tasted, the one through whom grace is liberated and the one in whose immaculate heart, pierced in the piercing of her Son’s the song of our resurrection will first be sung.

Our Lady of Sorrows, Mother of Compassion be with us and help us to carry our own Cross in faith and hope and love.

Pics above: The First is the famous rendering of Our Lady's face based upon the proportions of the Face of the Holy Shroud. The second is by Angela Yerber.