The Seven Sorrows of Our Lady

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

40 days had passed since the angels sang their glorious to the white chalked hills of Bethlehem. It was now the 2nd of February. According to Jewish law, every mother after giving birth to a male child was to present herself at the temple of Jerusalem to be purified and to offer her child to God in testimony that all gifts come from him. Thus it was that the Lord of the temple was brought to the temple of the Lord.

The proper offering on such occasions was a yearling lamb for a burnt offering and a young pigeon or turtle dove for a sin offering. The poor were permitted by the merciful Mosaic legislation to bring instead either two turtle doves or two pigeons. Such was the offering of Mary, who possessed no wealth except the riches of the Lord of heaven and earth.

The priest at the temple on that day was Simeon, a devout Israelite, already bent with the burden of years, but happy in the divine intimation that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah who was to come. Simeon was the living representative and symbol of the old Jewish law, which for 40 centuries had been expecting the Redeemer. He was the end of the race of Adam, the crown of the Old Testament, the fruit of its maturity, the end and consummation of Israel's gift to the world.

When our blessed mother laid the divine child in his arms, it was the moment of union of the Old and New Testaments, or better, the passage from the old to the new. That gesture meant that all the promises of the Old Testament were accomplished and all the prophecies of God's chosen people fulfilled. Antiquity had said its last word. History, which had until now recorded its battles and set down the rise and fall of its kingdoms as events before Christ, would henceforth write them down as happening in the year of Our Lord.

Once Simeon's weary arms bore the weight of the eternal, and yet refused to break, once aged Simeon embraced youth who was before all ages, he could now take his leave, close the book of prophecies, and bid adieu to his own life. In that age when old men cease to sing, Simeon opened the vents of song, and in the silence of the temple, there arose like sweet smelling incense the sweet strains of the Nunc Dimittis. It was the compline of his life, as it is now the daily compline of the Church, the song the Church will sing in her old age, when the Lord comes in the clouds of heaven on the day of the sunset of the world.

We read in St. Luke, “Lord, now let your servant go in peace. Your word has been fulfilled. My own eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people. A light to reveal you to the nations and the glory of your people Israel” (Luke 2:29–32).

But all that light which flooded Mary's soul was soon obscured as a black cloud sometimes hides from us the face of the sun. Simeon's words of joy turned into sorrow as he spoke of the part mother and son were to play in the redemption of the world.

“Behold, this child,” he said, “is destined to bring about the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed. And a sword will pierce your own soul so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:34–35).

It was a solemn announcement that she was to guard the victim until the hour of sacrifice, and be the shepherdess until the lamb should be led to the slaughter on the sign of contradiction which is the cross. It was an echo back to the Garden of Eden where a tree brought the ruin of the first Adam, and at whose gate stood an angel with a flaming sword to guard the gates until the appointed hour of salvation. Simeon was now saying that the hour had come.

The tree of paradise that brought ruin would be transplanted to Calvary and be his cross. The sword of the angel would be lifted from his hands and driven into Mary's heart, as a first witness that only those who are pierced through and through with the sword of sacrificial love shall enter the everlasting Eden of heaven. A sign that will be opposed.

As Mary left the temple that day, she understood as she never understood before why the magi brought their joyous gifts of gold and incense and with it the bitter, sad, and sorrowful gift of myrrh. She saw now that the law that had bound him would also bind her, and that while he would have the tree, she would have the sword. As he was the new Adam, she would be the new Eve. As Eve was instrumental in the fall, so she would be instrumental in the salvation as the mother of union and of the Redeemer Christ.

So we can pray, Mary, if you had been disjoined from your divine son, like a quiet peaceful garden with the sun playing on it, far away from the storm-enveloped glory of Calvary, you would never have really been our mother. How terrible the sea of human sorrows would be were not your moonlight shining upon it. But now you are called to co-redeem with our Redeemer. You have become the mother of all the afflicted. Wipe away our tears, for you understand our sorrow. Mend our broken hearts, for yours was broken too. Draw out all swords, for the hilt is in your hand. Mary, you are the mother of sorrows. If you were not, then you could never be the cause of our joy.

Centuries and centuries ago, the people of Israel in Egyptian bondage made their exodus to the promised land. History now reverses itself. The exodus is towards Egypt, and the leader is not Moses but the infant Savior. The occasion which prompted it was the order of Herod the Great that all male children under two years of age in Bethlehem should be put to death by the sword.

Herod heard from the wise men that they sought a child who was to be a king. He was fearful of his power, as if he who brought the golden kingship of heaven would ever think of taking away the tinsel kingship of earth. But the wise men did not return to Herod after seeing the child, for one always takes a different road back after seeing God.

Herod's jealousy may have been aroused by the prophecy later recorded by Tacitus that from Judea was to come the master and ruler of the world. Tacitus's fellow Roman historian Suetonius quoted a contemporary author to the effect that the Romans were so fearful about a king who would rule the world that they ordered all children born that year to be killed. An order that was not fulfilled except by Herod.

Herod may have recalled these things, but in any case, he ordered the massacre of the innocent children. His whole career was red with the blood of murder. He caused his brother-in-law, the young Aristobulus, to be drowned before his eyes. He ordered the strangulation of his favorite wife, the princess Mariamne, his three sons, and the father and mother of his wife, likewise perished by the sword. Even those who survived were more miserable than those who suffered.

Hence it was not hard for him to order the slaughter of the babes, for their blood was but a drop in the crimson river of crime. It was hard on the poor mothers of Bethlehem, whose cries mingle with Rachel, who would not be consoled. But it was harder still on Mary, whose only crime was that she bore in her arms a child who sheathed the beautiful grandeur of the Godhead in the scabbard of an infant's flesh.

On a dark night, when poor mothers who denied her a home on Christmas Eve wondered homeless through the streets, an angel appeared and bade Joseph to take Mary and the child and flee into Egypt. Mary had no treasures to gather up, but only the treasure which she bore in her arms. The wilderness, the desert, heathendom confronted her.

As the nice winds stirred, and the moon which was one day to be pictured beneath her feet, now shone above her head, she stole out of Bethlehem into the sands. Another Joseph was going with her and the child into Egypt to save it again from a famine, not with the meat which perishes, but with the bread which endures into life everlasting.

This exile of the Creator from his chosen creatures was the second sword to pierce the heart of Mary. It was all the more keen because her child was hated. Why should anyone hate a baby? What had he done to a king that he should be so unkingly? Jesus was hated. And yet he was more helpless than herself. She knew how lovable he was, and how much welcome he deserved after 4,000 years of waiting. Why then should they make him fly before he was able to walk?

The bitterness of this sorrow was that it seemed, and I only say seemed, to be so much outside the order of divine providence. We can all easily bear the sorrows which come to us directly from God. His very fingers which reach the tiny crosses to us seem to lighten them by his touch. The sorrows of the other mothers were softened in later years by the sweet thought that God did not permit their children to grow up and shout Hosanna on Sunday and crucify on a Friday. They saw their sorrow was directly from God. A sickness we can bear or even a death, because they too come directly from God. But the injustice and ingratitude of men, this is the more terrible, because we never know when it will end. God is more merciful.

Thus when David, because of his sin of pride, was offered a choice of punishment, the injustice of men or a pestilence, he cried out, “Let us fall by the hand of God, for he is most merciful. But let me not fall by the hand of man” (2 Sam. 24:14). So he chose the pestilence.

Mary's sorrow was of that more bitter kind. It came from the wickedness of men, from the injustice of a pagan. It therefore seemed all the more terrible because God did not seem to have a hand in it. But added to it was all the tragedy that this sad note had to be struck far down in the scale of sorrows, in a stranger's land away from home.

We can say to Our Lady, Mary, by this your second sorrow, teach us that God's ways are hidden in everything, even in those things that seem as far away as Egypt. Often during our life, when we are asked to leave the peace and quiet of religious contemplation, where we are so much at home, to take up those duties and tasks of a workaday world, which seem in comparison like an Egyptian exile, remind us that there's nothing in life that cannot be spiritualized and turned into prayer, provided we do it in union with your son and Mary. I am slow to learn, tardy to understand, but impress me with the great truth that we can make a holy land out of the pagan Egypt of our daily toil, provided we bring with us your infant child.

The only time artists ever represent Our Lady without her child is when she's joyfully looking up to heaven, as in the Immaculate Conception. But there was one time when she was childless and did not look up. That was when she looked down to the desert in the sorrowful quest of her child.

Our Lord was then 12 years of age. It was the age at which, according to Jewish legend, Moses had left the house of Pharaoh's daughter, and Solomon had given the judgment which first revealed his wisdom. And Josiah had first dreamed of his great reform.

In that year, he went up to Jerusalem at the Passover with Mary and Joseph. According to tradition, he went on foot. Nazareth, their home, was about 80 miles distant from Jerusalem. Leaving the garden garland of hills which encircled the little town like the petals of an opening flower, they made their way to the holy city, where the profane plumage of the eagle wings of Rome was swinging from the gates through which they passed into the temple for the celebration of the Pasch.

Many an old man in that temple was sighing at the memory of better days, when the great Isaiah and Jeremiah thrilled all Israel with their prophecies. And yet how feeble these great prophets were compared to a venerable man and a beautiful mother kneeling on the temple steps, with a child between them whose name was eternal, and yet who was only a dozen years of age as we count circling seasons and empty moons.

The choirs of angels must have hushed as the prayers of God the Son on earth floated away into invisible shades to his father who is in heaven. Mary and Joseph must have ceased to look at the veil behind which stood the Holy of Holies, but fastened their gaze between them and confessed with ecstatic prayer the divinity of the boy whose uplifted eyes were then fixed on the heaven that he left to set the world alight.

The great mystery was that the very stones of the temple did not cry out, and the sun stand still, and the cedars of Lebanon prostrate themselves in adoration of a God whose earth-visiting feet were now bringing eternity to time. Was it not strange that earth should go on with its buying and selling, its commerce and its wants, without so much as a smile of consciousness to the one who was teaching us how to exchange humanity for divinity and nothingness for everything?

When the feast was over, the throngs departed, the men by one gate, the women by the other, to be reunited at the resting place for the night. The children went either with the father or the mother. Each suspecting the divine child was with the other, it was not until nightfall that his loss was discovered. Never before were there two such lonely hearts in all the world. Not even when Adam and Eve were driven from the garden of pleasure.

For three days they searched and finally found him in the temple, expounding the law to the doctors, and astounding them with his wisdom. We're told in St. Luke, “When his parents saw him, they were amazed. And his mother said to him, ‘Son, why did you do this to us? You see, your father and I have been looking for you, worried to death.’ And he said to them, ‘Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know that I have to concern myself with my father’s affairs?’” (Luke 2:48–49).

But Mary and Joseph must have searched for him in the temple the first day. Where was he then and during the nights? We can only conjecture, but I love to think he probably visited the future scenes of his passion, stopped outside the fortress of Antonia where Pilate would later wash his blood from his hands, gazed in at the house of Annas, who would later charge him with blasphemy, made his way outside the city walls to a little hill where the world would erect a cross and call it his throne, and finally spent a night in the Garden of Gethsemane under the full Paschal moon, where 21 years later his apostles would sleep as he drank the bitter dregs from the chalice of man's sin.

But wherever he was until the third day, in this third sorrow, Mary's soul was plunged into the densest darkness because she had lost her God. It was in this sorrow that the Mother Immaculate became in a more true sense the refuge of sinners.

It strikes us first as being incongruous that she who was sinless should be the harbor of the sinful. How could she who never had remorse of conscience give refuge for those whose conscience is full of bitterness? How could she who never lost her son, who never lost her God, know the pangs of a soul that through sin lost its God?

The answer is this. What is sin? Sin is separation from God. Now in these three days lost, Mary was physically separated from her child, and she too had lost her God. The physical separation from her child was but a symbol of the spiritual separation of men from God.

The third sorrow makes it possible for her to divine the feelings of sinners and still keep her soul inviolate. She knew what sin is. She too had lost her God. Thus she was suffering in atonement then for all minds who once had faith and lost it, for all those souls who once loved God and then forgot him, for all those hearts who once prayed and then abandoned him.

All the spiritual homesickness for divinity, all the nostalgia for heaven, and all the emptiness of hearts who emptied them of God, Mary felt as if it were her own, for now she was without her Redeemer. If an earthly mother weeps at the physical death of one of her children, what must have been Mary's grief at the spiritual death of millions of men whose mother she was called to be by God?

We can turn to Our Lady and say, Mary, by this your third sorrow, teach us that if we should be so unfortunate as to lose God, we must not seek him in new faiths, new cults, and new fads. He can be found only where we lost him, in the temple, in prayer, in his church.

Also at the times when our soul is as arid as a desert, our heart seem cold, and we find it hard to pray, and even begin to believe that perhaps God has forgotten us because he seems to be so far away, whisper gently to us the sweet reminder, even when we seem to have lost him, he is still about his father's business.

I thank you my God for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW

From The Eternal Galilean, Chapter XIV, Fulton J. Sheen (1934)