Our Lady of Sorrows | May 6

 Our Lady of Sorrows

The intelligent use of sorrow can take us closer to God. Sorrow is allowed in our lives for a purpose. The intelligence required to understand the purpose of sorrow is available not in us but in God. One cannot unlock the mystery of sorrow all by oneself. Seek the intercession of our Blessed Mother to gain access to the solution of this puzzle. It was during my first renewal of the Marian Covenant at Kreupasanam that Our Lady of Grace taught me this wisdom. There was a time when I had gone through immeasurable stress in life. After a period of extreme upheaval, things have calmed down due to the intercession of Mother Mary. But then, in a quick unveiling of a set of uncertainties, I was yet again tossed into the thick of things. Although I had received scriptural verses as an assurance of the Blessed Mother’s intervention in my matters during my stay at Kreupasanam, I still worried. The agony was well beyond any limit I had endured previously. I was burning inside and outside thinking about what would happen and that the whole world had gone against my family! Then in the evening, at a moment of divine intervention, I received a phone call and understood that things were now in my favour. The fathomless agony dissipated. I took it as a sign of the presence of our Blessed Mother in my life. I was filled with gratitude and I broke down in great relief. I fell to my knees and lay down on the floor, crying my heart out. As I was crying like a little child in front of his mother, I also promised Our Lady that I would never do anything in my life for which I hadn’t sought her permission. I sobbed in front of the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help that was in my room.

Our time is limited on earth. The limitations are not just temporal. The physical prowess we often take pride in, the beauty, the intelligence, and the strength, and our perfectionism all are vain in our ultimate confrontation with death. Until one hasn’t encountered a calamity in personal life or in society, where the ultimate opening seems to be annihilated by the exertion of the impeccable wantonness of abstruse reality one could never completely grasp the presence of God in life.

To see the distant star, the nearby lights should be cut off. Then the whole sky would light up with the twinkling, dazzling stars. The morbidity of some of our life’s particular problems creates in us a sensation of complete and total darkness the true beauty of God’s existence is revealed through this. The meditation on the seven sorrows of Our Lady of Sorrows is the surest way to contemplate the life of Jesus and to intelligently decipher the sorrows of our life. The seven sorrows of Mary are:

The Prophecy of Simeon (Luke 2:34-35)

The Flight into Egypt (Matthew 2:13-21)

The Loss of Jesus for Three Days (Luke 2:41-50)

The Carrying of the Cross (John 19:17)

The Crucifixion of Jesus (John 19:18-30)

Jesus Taken Down from the Cross (John 19:39-40)

Jesus Laid in the Tomb (John 19:39-42)

I made two promises to Our Lady in consecutive months. The first one was that I will spread devotion to Our Lady and the second was to never deter from the sight of the Blessed Mother in all matters of my life. The matters of life, whether it be sorrow or joyfulness, we should give thanks to God. Every celebration in life, until it is rooted in the joy of Christ, is never meaningful. So it is with the sorrows of life. Christ, as he was walking the way of suffering, with his Holy Cross, entered a deep state of sorrow as he saw the women who wept for him. They were the women of Jerusalem. To them, he said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me but weep for yourselves and for your children.” (Luke 23: 28) Jesus Christ did not look at His own body or state of being as an observer. He wasn’t ‘self-conscious’ as we say when we go through challenges in life. Instead, He experienced all the suffering of the tortures that were given to his body. It did not create sorrow in Him for Himself.

This is where Mother Mary comes into the picture. If Jesus Christ redeemed the world with his sacrifice on Calvary, Mother Mary could be seen as a co-redeemer as she suffered in her heart, just as Simeon foretold her. Mary underwent the exact amount of suffering that Jesus Christ underwent in his way of suffering as well as on Mount Calvary by experiencing sorrow as she looked at her son. In her sorrow, deep, profound, and oriented towards the Will of God, Mary lifted her son’s lifeless body after it was taken down from the cross. With an invisible cross planted right through her heart, Mary won the battle with Satan and saved the world along with her son, just as He passed from this world to another.

As Christ’s body was taken down from the cross, Mother Mary was hung freshly upon the invisible cross of the deep sorrow she experienced upon seeing her son’s dead body. Until Easter Sunday, she remained on her cross, crucified with Christ. Just like us all, who undergo failures, hopelessness, exhaustion, suffering, pain, and depression, still trying not to complain about any of it, accepting it all as a gift from our beloved sweet Jesus. “We are children of God, and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we in fact suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” (Romans 8: 16, 17) when we suffer and are crucified with Christ, we will also resurrect with Him. On Easter Sunday, it was not just Jesus Christ who was resurrected but Mary, and all the disciples who believed in Jesus and followed him.

Even though humans did not truly understand who Jesus was, as He was in his human form. Yet, there are examples in the scriptures where demons recognise Him. Even nature shows signs of recognition as to who He is. The calming of the storm is one such event when His command settles a raging storm in the sea. Nature didn’t collapse when it saw the death of the Saviour on the Cross. It didn’t engulf the men who were responsible for the act. It didn’t scream out in agony. It waited for the next day and then the next day and then the next, until it saw the Saviour’s Resurrection. But what made nature not lose its composure? How did the natural world not collapse into itself?

I could see only one reason: Nature respecting the Blessed Mother’s Holy Cross of the sorrows. What she endured in her heart, and in the manner in which she endured it, giving complete authority to the Will of God, made her suffering another redemptive sacrifice, a divine echo of her son’s Godliness on the Holy Cross.