The Sorrows of Our Lady

It is a natural human tendency, among those who believe in Him, to regard God as the power who will deliver them out of sorrow into joy. Pain at our own incompleteness, pain at the difficulties of others, the pain of various relationships clumsily handled, the piercing pain of knowledge of our precise page 457 moral defects – we call on God consciously or unconsciously to deliver us from these things; and when we are not delivered, we are inclined to grumble inwardly, or at least to grow bewildered. In dealing with any fact of the inward life of Christians, it is my own habit to turn quickly and look at Our Lady; for, as Thomas Merton once wrote, without Her our knowledge of Christ is a merely abstract knowledge. I cannot see that devotion to Our Lady is just the icing on the cake; if Merton is right, it could be a large part of the filling as well. And so, when I think of our own attitude to pain and sorrow, the best way I know of shedding new light on the matter is to turn and look at the sorrows of Our Lady.

God did not deliver Mary from sorrow until He took Her to Himself and crowned Her. (‘Ah’, the honest Protestant critic might say – ‘you use capital letters when you write about Mary; unconsciously you must regard her as the equal of Christ!). But the Protestant critic is mistaken; it is rather that one sees Her as the perfect type of the Mystical Body, the representative of the whole community of Christian believers on earth and in Heaven, and so the Bride indissolubly joined to the Divine Bridegroom. Still, God is not a typographer, and if I now choose to drop the capitals to please the troubled Protestant at my elbow, it is in the spirit of humility in the Magnificat. God did not deliver Mary from sorrow. This was not because she needed to perform any works of penance whatever on her own behalf, but because, in union with her Son, she carried our faults mystically as if they were her own. At least, that is the way I see the matter. And when we ask God to deliver us from sorrow (it is natural to ask, but I mean rather an incessant and irritable demand) we may in fact be asking to be excused from following in the footsteps of Mary.

I do not propose to make a formal examination of the seven dolours of Our Lady. Some may indeed find this a valuable exercise; but personally I find it more helpful to recognise that Our Lady’s life on earth was in general deeply sorrowful as well as deeply joyful, and to find ways of linking my own troubles and those of my neighbours to hers, so that they may be transformed from something barren to something fruitful.

The Church habitually gives to Our Lady the title – ‘Refuge of Sinners’. And I think the central nature of Our Lady’s sorrow can best be seen in relation to the massive spiritual fact which this title implies. The sorrow of a perfect Mother for the wounds – sometimes what could be, without her intervention, death wounds – and the endless short-sightedness of her imperfect children has in it no trace of rejection, no trace of anger. In this respect it is quite different from our grief over the shortcomings of our friends and neighbours – there is always a certain point where we say – ‘This is too much!’ – and begin to withdraw into self again, losing our patience and feeling more or less comfortable by a refusal to accept the unwelcome pain of the relationship. But for Our Lady the possibility of this alleviation never occurs; for her love for her children is in fact a human version of the love of page 458 God towards men, and as Her Son preferred to suffer the full weight of the Passion rather than to close His Heart for a moment to those disorders in us which were the cause of His pain, so she also has a heart perpetually open towards us, continually pouring out towards us that mercy which is its very life-blood. For this reason I have often thought that if one kneels down before an image of Our Lady and says, vocally or silently – ‘Mother, I love you’ – this action of the soul always carries within it an implicit act of love towards God Himself – since Mary is herself the clear glass through which the maternal aspect of God’s love for us shines on us and never ceases to shine.

When she sees us wounded by our sins, she sees in us her Son dying and wounded on the Cross; no, I would emphasise, that she sees our sins as the cause of His suffering – though that also is true – but that she sees Him in us, and feels towards us the same agony of solicitude that she felt towards Him. Here one is dealing with a mystery more powerful than dynamite. It accounts, I think, for the blessed fact that where Marian devotions are performed with real wholeheartedness, moral miracles seem to be the order of the day – and also (what perhaps we notice more directly) those practical and providential helps of the kind that any mother will provide intimately for her children – a danger averted, a request granted that might seem unimportant to anyone else but is at the moment all-important to the supplicant – these things proceed from a love that carries sorrow as well as joy at its centre. The mother who sees her child attacked by a wild animal is glad to bear the marks of the teeth and claws in her own flesh and let the child go free. It was the same for Our Lady when she endured with an absolute sympathy Our Lord’s Passion. She could not free Him from the pain of the Cross; but she does shield us from the effects of our own evil, and always at the price of sorrow endured. And if, as we grow more mature, she lets a little of her sorrow come our way, we should be glad of it, not sorry, for where our Mother is, we wish to be also.

There is at times a false shrinking from Marian devotion on the part of those who feel that their obsessions and faults are too gross to be exposed to the pure gaze of Our Lady. It is a false shrinking; for we may say of her with certainty – ‘She has seen it all already.’ She has seen it in the Body of her Son torn on the Cross. And because she had never a trace of attachment to any such fault or imperfection, she is free of that squeamishness which sometimes narrows the sympathy of otherwise right-minded people. The coarsest man alive can come to her feet, knowing that here is no limited earthly mother, wishing well but not understanding the peculiar vagaries of male psychology – no one is dealing with the Fountain of Wisdom herself, who has all the advantages of motherly understanding and none of its limits. It is true that she leads us towards chastity; but not in a prudish and shamefaced manner; and a devotion which fails to recognise the absolute sanity of the Mother of God is in that respect an infantile devotion. She has not come among us to page 459 keep us children, but to turn us into wholehearted men and women. In the Scriptural sense, to be like a little child does not mean to be childish, to be infantile, but to be childlike, to accept the virtue of a powerful simplicity that sees the essentials in life and discards the inessentials.

Yet there is an infant alive somewhere in the soul of every adult. A man who has acquired many habits of sin and harmed himself and others could well come to Our Lady’s feet, and say – ‘Mother, I have never grown up. People expect me to behave like a man, but I have not the capacity. My soul is weaker and more helpless than a child crawling on the ground. Mother of God, hide me in your womb, till I have grown enough to be born and walk and talk.’ It is a bold prayer and might seem to some believers inappropriate; but I am the man who used it, and she did as I asked. Perhaps I am now able to walk and talk a little.

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