and you yourself a sword will pierce
so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.
If we are used to hearing the title Our Lady of Sorrows we may be desensitized to just how unusual it us. There is a lot about Mary that immediately seems praiseworthy. Her faith, her obedience, and her humility all seem worth celebrating and emulating. But sorrows? Do we really want to commemorate the sorrows themselves and not some other virtues that allowed her to persist through the sorrows? Wouldn't it be better to look at her eventual victory, over her ancient enemy the serpent?
Yet the sorrows of Our Lady were not worldly sorrows. Even among the imperfect there are two kinds of sorrow.
For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death (see Second Corinthians 7:10).
Although Mary had no need of repentance, yet her sorrows did lead to salvation, because her sorrows were so perfectly united to those of her Son.
Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church (see Colossians 1:24).
We are all united in Christ. In one Spirit we were baptized into one body. Because this is true we really do receive powers that are properly speaking Christ's powers. We learn to heal and teach and work by his grace. We even learn to unite our suffering to his for the sake of others. But no heart was ever so united to the heart of Jesus as was the heart of his mother. This is why when the lance pierced the side of Christ it could truly be said that a sword pierced her own side.
Jesus himself, in his humanity, must have found some comfort and solace in the presence of his mother at the cross. In one of his final acts he gave Mary as a mother to the beloved disciple and in turn to each of us. Now, just as she perfectly embraced the sorrow of her Son for the sake of the world, so too can she embrace our own sorrows and help us to offer it for others.
Then he said to the disciple,
“Behold, your mother.”
And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.
In this world sorrow and suffering are facts. To pretend they aren't is to be ignorant rather than enlightened. But we are called to see and experience how they fit into the bigger picture, how they themselves become the vehicles by which salvation and resurrection break into the world. And so, while we don't properly celebrate sorrow itself, we nevertheless celebrate the Lady who perfectly shows us how to make sense of it in the way we live.
For he is good, the LORD,
whose kindness endures forever,
and his faithfulness, to all generations.
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