As a little girl there were many times I could not fully comprehend the gravity and intricacies of a given situation. Youth and lack of experience kept me in the dark. However, in some instances I simply looked at my mother's response and seeing her sorrow, I became serious and sad. I may not have understood the complete reason for her tears, but watching her grieve brought pain to my heart and made me sympathetic to the troubling situation.
The Church gives us a similar opportunity to walk with our heavenly Mother under the title of Our Lady of Sorrows, with the feast day of Sept. 15. But no matter what time of the year, it is always good to ponder the spiritual martyrdom of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to learn from her example of suffering, to apply that example in bearing with our own crosses, and to become compassionate to the sufferings of our neighbors.
As Mother of the Redeemer, Mary possessed a unique role in the drama of mankind's salvation. Far from playing the part of a passive bystander, she experienced Christ's Passion in a way no saint ever could.
The prophet Simeon foretold Mary's spiritual martyrdom when he told her, "Your own soul will be pierced by a sword" (Luke 2:35). Traditionally, Catholic devotion honors seven distinct sorrows of our Lady: the Presentation in the Temple, the Flight into Egypt, the Loss of Jesus for Three Days, the Way to Calvary, the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, and the Burial of Jesus.
While each sorrow played a valuable role in salvation history, each was fulfilled by the climax of Christ's death on the cross. Many of Jesus' acquaintances and friends ran from Calvary in fear, but St. John tells us that Mary stayed with her Son on the cross (John 19:25). She knew her place, and she held it firmly.
From this position near the cross of Christ, the Blessed Mother shows us specifically how to suffer. First, she remained next to Christ – not off in a corner wallowing in her own grief. Secondly, she stood; she did not swoon or make a scene. She courageously bore the crushing blow of watching her Son die in agony, and her tranquility flowed from a docile spirit. Her directive from the Annunciation reverberated in the consummation of her Son's sacrifice on Calvary, "Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46).
St. Bernard explained Mary's spiritual and emotional anguish poignantly when he wrote, "Perhaps someone will say: 'Had she not known before that He would die? Undoubtedly. 'Did she not expect Him to rise again at once?' Surely. 'And still she grieved over her crucified Son?' Intensely. Who are you and what is the source of your wisdom that you are more surprised at the compassion of Mary than at the passion of Mary's Son? For if He could die in body, could she not die with Him in spirit? He died in body through a love greater than anyone had known. She died in spirit through a love unlike any other since His."
Why was her love unlike any other since Christ's love? St. Teresa of Avila once said that to be a woman means to love and to suffer, and St. Gianna Beretta Molla pointed out that a person "cannot love without suffering or suffer without loving." Mary was the perfect woman. Her capacity for loving was greater than any other person's, and her capacity for suffering reached beyond our comprehension.
However, hers was not a suffering of despair. Even in her pain, though, our Blessed Mother remained sensitive to those around her. Jesus told her to take John as her son (John 19:26). What sacrifice it must have been to offer her perfect Son in exchange for broken humanity! Yet, she wholeheartedly embraced all of us and intercedes for us daily.
In our spiritual lives there may be times, when in our weakness and helplessness, we struggle to carry our crosses. Maybe we fail to understand the depth of Christ's sufferings, or the sufferings of our neighbors. If we look to the sorrowful heart of Our Lady, though, she will enlarge the capacity and sympathy of our own hearts to love at all cost.
Sister Mary Raphael is a member of the Daughters of the Virgin Mother, a community dedicated to serving the spiritual and practical needs of the sacred priesthood and of seminarians in the Diocese of Charlotte.
What we think is the right road
We know so much. We know science and mathematics; we know architecture and engineering; we know sociology and criminal justice. We have made so much progress in so many fields, and everything is getting better and better. All we have to do is to trust our leaders and ourselves, and we can have heaven on earth.
But it's the wrong road
It's true that we have made progress in a number of areas. We humans, though, are still plagued with the sins and evils which have been always been part of history. In fact, the worst sin, many theologians have told us, is the kind of pride represented in the notion that we can build paradise, or perfect ourselves, right here and right now (for reference, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church 57, 1784, 1866 and 2094).
One could mention the Fall, the Tower of Babel, or our human tendency to exalt ourselves by minimizing God and divine authority. There is, however, one largely unknown scriptural verse which seems to capture the gist of any serious conversation about what we know, or don't.
As the Israelites were building their country, they were attacked by a large army and disaster appeared imminent. On the verge of military doom, they desperately appealed to God: "But as we know not what to do, we can only turn our eyes to thee" (2 Chronicles 20:12 DRB). This translation (from "ut oculos nostros dirigamus ad te") is important because it gives us the core of Catholic moral teaching: our eyes should be always on God, who is our help, our joy and our destiny, if we keep him paramount in our lives. The secular world tells us to "keep your eyes on the prize." Baseball coaches, similarly, tell their hitters to keep their eyes riveted to the ball.
This is precisely the meaning of the quotation from Chronicles, quoted above. When we transfer our vision, our trust, our faith, from God to our leaders and ourselves, we invite chaos and corruption into our personal and national lives (see Proverbs 29:18 and 14:34). When we lose the humility of God's righteousness, we fill the void with our own pride – and with false leaders, who, appealing to our bloated self-importance, tell us that we are on the long march to personal or earthly perfection.
Here, then, is the great good sense of the traditional prayer at the foot of the altar (which is Psalm 42, or 43 in recent translations), where the priest and people pray: "Defend me, take up my cause against people who have no pity; from the treacherous and cunning man rescue me, O God. ... Send out your light and your truth. ... I shall go to the altar of God, to the God of my joy." Light and truth are found, not in fleeting and fraudulent promises from the false gods of merely human endeavors but, rather, from the God we worship at Mass.
Not for nothing does the Bible sternly warn us against putting too much trust in our political leaders (Psalms 118:8, 146:3). That is true as well of trusting too much in any other humans, in any other field.
A key point of traditional Catholic philosophy is the importance of our knowing what we do not know – by which is meant that we must keep our eyes first and foremost on God, not accepting mountebanks who promise us paradise if only we will be progressive enough to reject "false Catholic teaching." It was the French Catholic writer Charles Peguy who said, "It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive." And it was Padre Pio who told us that, without God's grace, all we know is how to sin.
When we are asked, directly or indirectly, what we know for sure, the secular world replies with a comment about death and taxes. Catholics, however, have a surer and more serious response: we know that we are sinners in need of a Redeemer. And we know, with Job, that our Redeemer liveth (19:25).
It is to God that we turn, praying, "Open my eyes that I may see the wonderful truths in your law" (Ps 119:18 GNB).
Deacon James H. Toner serves at Our Lady of Grace Church in Greensboro.