Cause Of Our Joy
“There stood by the cross of Jesus his mother.” During the course of her life, the Blessed Virgin Mary had to endure many sufferings. Chief of these were the seven sorrows we commemorate today. We’re familiar with them, or should be, by now: two of them in our Lord’s infancy, the Dark Prophecy of Simeon and the Flight into Egypt; one in his later childhood when they lost him for three days in Jerusalem; and the rest all one day, Good Friday, as she meets him on the road to Calvary, watches him die on the cross, takes him in her arms one last time as his lifeless body is taken down from the cross, and finally stands by as he is buried. That was without doubt a terrible day for her, and we are filled with compassion at her suffering. Let’s remember though that she gave no thought for her own anguish, most terrible though it must have been. All her thoughts and emotions were for her Son as she so bravely endured her own martyrdom at the sight of his Passion and Death.
This example she gives us is what we must focus on today. We have the whole month of September during which we can meditate on each individual event of her Seven Sorrows. Today though, we are called to meditate on something slightly different, not what she suffered, but how she suffered. Let us leave aside the details of the terrible events that caused her suffering and meditate instead on how she endured these pains most unthinkable.
She teaches us firstly to acknowledge that suffering is a necessary part of our lives. Surely, if the good Lord is ready to permit his most treasured Creation, his blessed Mother to suffer at all, let alone by sorrows so terrible that she will be known as the Queen of Martyrs, then there is no escape for us lesser beings from the trials and tribulations of life, the physical pains of illness and bodily injury, the discomforts of poverty, hunger, war, and natural disaster. We suffer also psychologically—the fears and anxieties of political upheaval, the instability of Holy Church. It all adds up to a seemingly infinite number of assaults on our peace of mind. Our lives are often beyond difficult, sometimes to the point where we think we can’t take it any more.
But all these fears are our fears. What about the pain of others? This is where our Lady teaches us about a particular kind of suffering, one we call compassion. I understand that our minds are not equipped to have complete empathy for others. We feel vaguely sorry for the victims of crime, hurricanes, earthquakes, famine and so on. But when it’s a question of thousands of people, we cannot grasp, emotionally, all the pain of every single one of them. Real compassion is limited to those mercifully few occasions when we are presented with the real and major pain of someone we truly love—a parent, a child, a spouse… Those who have been faced with such trials are aware of the feeling of helplessness and frustration we feel at not being able to stop their pain and take away their suffering. We begin to experience a fraction of the heavy weight placed on the shoulders of our blessed Lady at Calvary.
Our Protestant brethren will tell us to stop wasting our time bothering about Christ’s Mother when it is he who is suffering the real pain of crucifixion. And certainly, it is the Passion and Death of Christ that saves us all from Satan’s power. But how do we go about empathizing with our Lord, especially if our relationship with him is less close than it should be. Our compassion for our Saviour finds its limits, limits that depend on the extent of our love for him. But in the sorrowing figure of his blessed Mother we have the example we need of true compassion. She is not alone as she stands at the foot of the cross. We stand at her side, our faces beholding in turn the pain of Jesus in his last agony and the sight of Mary whose eyes never leave him, who feels with all the depth of emotion in her being every single gasp for breath he makes, every wound on his body, from the whips of scourging, the thorns in his head, the weight of the cross on his shoulder, the nails in his hands and feet. And as we see her in this her moment of deepest devastation, we grasp the extent of pain he feels and she shares. His Passion and her Compassion.
As this scene draws towards its close, Jesus turns to her and says, “Mother, behold thy son.” By this he entrusts her to the care of his beloved disciple John. But he does more than this. Are we not there in spirit, standing beside her, sharing in her pain and grief at the sight of Jesus dying? Are we not sharing in her sorrow too? And does not our blessed Lord see us there in spirit? Does he not entrust his Mother to our care too, as he says to her, “Mother, behold thy son, behold thy daughter, behold thy children?” And does he not then turn to us, and say “Son, daughter—behold thy Mother!” As we continue in our deathwatch at the foot of the cross, Mary is now not just a woman mourning her son. Now she is our Mother, and the compassion we felt for her before is suddenly deepened and more real as we dare to approach her more closely to mourn at her side.
Every Mother is a teacher to her children. And our blessed Lady teaches us on this Feast of her Seven Sorrows how to endure suffering ourselves. She shows us that none of our pains, none of our sorrows, not even our most awful moments of watching those we love endure their own pain and suffering—none of this is about us. All our suffering must be turned into compassion. Whether it be compassion for those we see suffering, or for Christ in his agony, suffering is our greatest opportunity to offer up to God the sacrifice of our own deepest feelings, the fears and anxieties, the desperate and almost unendurable pains of our own bodily failures, the agony of bereavement, the temptations to despair, to lose faith in God, there is nothing—nothing—that cannot be given to God as our most sincere prayer of adoration, of reparation for our sins, of thanksgiving for being able to give something back to God for all he does for us. And let’s not forget those prayers of petition, all those good things we desire for our family and for the world. Suffering is our currency by which we may purchase these things.
Through her instruction, we are no longer limited to idle thoughts about pain and sorrow. She shows us, by her own example, what to do and how to act when suffering strikes in our midst. Pain is pain and is not pleasant, but when we see how she dealt with it, we should be inspired to follow in her footsteps. We may think sometimes that life is just one suffering after another. Thanks to Adam, the effects of original sin, and our fallen human nature, it is true that we must suffer much in this vale of tears. But with our blessed Lady to show us the way through her own Seven Sorrows, we can see more clearly that without suffering there can be no joy in this life. She may have lost Jesus when he stayed behind in Jerusalem at the age of twelve, but after three days she found him again and the Third Sorrow of our Lady became the Fifth Joyful Mystery of the Rosary. When she watched him die on the cross, she had the peace of knowing that every drop of blood he shed meant the Redemption of mankind. When she walked with him to the Holy Sepulchre she knew that he would rise again in three days.
It’s true, is it not, that without Mary in our lives to show us the way, we would be floundering in our emotions, rudderless on the raging sea of life. But what’s the role of a mother except to guide, teach and protect her children? Today is our great opportunity to rekindle our love for our Mother in heaven, ever conscious that she is indeed a real mother to whom we turn for sympathy and consolation. Look to Mary in her grief and we will not be forsaken.