Today, Monday, September 15, 2014, is the Feast of of the Seven Dolors of the Blessed Virgin Mary in September, following by one day the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, and the beginning of Ember Week in September.
Although devotion to Seven Sorrows of Our Lady dates back to Twelfth Century as the fruit of the devotions practiced by the Cistercians and the Servites. In a particular way, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, whose tender, filial devotion to the Mother of God sparked a flame that reignited many hearts that had grown cold during a century when many of the clergy were morally corrupt. Saint Bernard wrote as follows about the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady that pierced her Immaculate Heart through and through as a result of our sins:
The Martyrdom of the Virgin is set before us, not only in the prophecy of Simeon, but also in the story itself of the Lord’s Passion. The holy old man said of the Child Jesus, Luke ii. 34, Behold, this Child is set for the fall and the rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; yea, said he unto Mary, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also Even so, O Blessed Mother! The sword did indeed pierce through thy soul! for nought could pierce the Body of thy Son, nor pierce thy soul likewise. Yea, and when this Jesus of thine had given up the ghost, and the bloody spear could torture Him no more, thy soul winced as it pierced His dead Side His Own Soul might leave Him, but thine could not.
The sword of sorrow pierced through thy soul, so that we may truly call thee more than martyr, in whom the love, that made thee suffer along with thy Son, wrung thy heart more bitterly than any pang of bodily pain could do. Did not that word of His indeed pierce through thy soul, sharper than any two-edged sword, even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, Heb. iv. 12, Woman, behold thy son! John xix. 26. O what a change to thee! Thou art given John for Jesus, the servant for his Lord, the disciple for his Master, the son of Zebedee for the Son of God, a mere man for Very God. O how keenly must the hearing of those words have pierced through thy most loving soul, when even our hearts, stony, iron, as they are, are wrung at the memory thereof only!
Marvel not, my brethren, that Mary should be called a Martyr in spirit. He indeed may marvel who remembereth not what Paul saith, naming the greater sins of the Gentiles, that they were without natural affection, Rom. i. 31. Far other were the bowels of Mary, and far other may those of her servants be! But some man perchance will say Did she not know that He was to die? Yea, without doubt, she knew it. Did she not hope that He was soon to rise again? Yea, she most faithfully hoped it. And did she still mourn because He was crucified? Yea, bitterly. But who art thou, my brother, or whence hast thou such wisdom, to marvel less that the Son of Mary suffered than that Mary suffered with Him? He could die in the Body, and could not she die with Him in her heart? His was the deed of that Love, greater than which hath no man, John xv. 13; her’s, of a love, like to which hath no man, save He. (Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Matins, Feast of the Seven Dolors of Our Lady.)
Yes, Our Lady is indeed the Queen of Martyrs. She is our Sorrowful Mother whom our sins brought tears to her eyes and sorrow to her Immaculate Heart as those sins, having transcended time, took their toll on her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Devotion to the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady spread throughout Europe in the Second Millennium, and, under the title of Our Lady of Compassion, and it was in 1727 that Pope Benedict XIII (there have been only fifteen Successors of Saint Peter named Benedict, thank you) established a universal feast on the Friday before Palm Sunday, where, of course, it remains to this time, although under the current title of the Seven Dolors of Our Lady. Pope Saint Pius X, only a year away from his death, established a second feast in honor of Our Lady's Sorrows on September 15, and it is, of course, that feast which we celebrate today, although a second feast had been observed for nearly a century prior to that time on the third Sunday of September.
Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., wrote the following reflection at the beginning of his commentary on this important feast day that contains a brief history of the placement of this feast in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church up to the time of his own writing in the Nineteenth Century:
'O all yet that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow!' Is this, then, the first cry of the sweet babe, whose coming brought such pure joy to our earth? Is the standard of suffering to be so soon unfurled over the cradle of such lovely innocence? Yet the heart of mother Church has not deceived her: this feast coming at such a time, is ever the answer to that question of the expectant human race: What shall this child be?
The Saviour to come is not only the reason of Mary's existence, He is also her exemplar in all things. It is as His Mother that the blessed Virgin came, and therefore as the 'Mother of sorrows'; for the God, whose future birth was the very cause of her own birth, is to be in this world, 'a Man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity.' 'To whom shall I compare thee?' sings the prophet of lamentations: 'O Virgin . . . great as the sea is thy destruction.' On the mountain of the sacrifice, as Mother gave her Son, as bride she offered herself and as Mother, she was the co-redemptress of the human race. This teaching and these recollections were deeply engraved on our hearts on that other feast of our Lady's dolours which immediately preceded Holy Week.
Christ dieth no more: and our Lady's sufferings are over. Nevertheless the Passion of Christ is continued in His elect, in His Church, against which hell vents the rage it cannot exercise against Himself. To this Passion of Christ's mystical body, of which she is also Mother, Mary still contributes her compassion; how often have her venerated images attested the fact, by miraculously shedding tears! This explains the Church's departure from liturgical custom, by celebrating two feasts, for different reasons, under one same title.
On perusing the register of the apostolic decrees concerning the sacred rites, the reader is astonished to find a long and unusual interruption lasting from March 20, 1809 to September 18, 1814, at which latter date is entered the decree instituting on this present Sunday, a second Commemoration of our Lady's Dolours. 1809-1814, five sorrowful years, during which the government of Christendom was suspended; years of blood which beheld the Man-God agonizing once more in the person of His captive Vicar. But the Mother of sorrows was still standing beneath the cross, offering to God the Church's sufferings; and when the trial was over, Pius VII, knowing well whence the mercy had come, dedicated this day to Mary as a fresh memorial of the day of Calvary.
Even in the seventeenth century, the Servites had the privilege of possessing this second feast, which they celebrated as a double of the second class, with a vigil and an octave. It is from them that the church has borrowed the Office and the Mass. This honor and privilege was due to the Order established by our Lady to honour her sufferings and to spread devotion to them. Philip Benizi, heir to the seven holy Founders, propagated the flame kindled by them on the heights of Monte Senario; thanks to the zeal of his sons and successors, the devotion to the Seven Dolours of the blessed Virgin Mary, once their family property, is now the treasure of the whole world.
The prophecy of the aged Simeon, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the divine Child, the carrying of the cross, the Crucifixion, the taking down from the cross, and the burial of Jesus: these are the seven mysteries into which are grouped the well-nigh infinite sufferings which made our Lady the Queen of martyrs, the first and loveliest rose in the garden of the Spouse. Let us take to heart the recommendation from the Book of Tobias which the Church reads during this week in the Office of the time: Thou shalt honour thy mother: for thou must be mindful what and how great perils she suffering in giving thee birth. (Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., The Liturgical Year: Time After Pentecost, Book V, pp. 208-210.)
As we know, only a handful of genuine mystics, such as the Venerable Anne Katherine Emmerich and the Venerable Mary of Agreda, and truly great spiritual writers, such as the late Father Frederick Faber of the Brompton Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, have been able to comprehend fully the depth of the pain and sorrow that pierced Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart during her life. Most of us erring sinners, while relying upon her maternal intercession as her consecrated slaves, do not meditate too often or too deeply on the sufferings Our Lady endured as her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, bore the weight and the horror of our sins to redeem us on the wood of the Holy Cross. One of the ways to meditate more frequently on the sufferings of Our Lady is to pray the Seven Dolors of Our Lady, reflecting on the seven dolors or sorrows that Our Lady experienced as she fulfilled her role as the Co-Redemptrix of the human race.
Each one of our sins, no matter how small or venial, caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer unspeakable horror in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death. Those sins also caused Our Lady to suffer in a perfect communion with the sufferings of her Divine Son. Having been preserved from all stain of Original and Actual Sin, Our Lady's Immaculate Heart was perfectly joined to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. His sufferings were her sufferings. Her sufferings were His sufferings. The matchless union of hearts that existed once in time and exists in Heaven for all eternity between Our Lady and Our Lord requires from us a response of total surrender and submission. We must detest each one of our sins and seek to do penance for our forgiven mortal sins and for all of our venial sins and our general attachment to sin. Although our sins are wiped away in the Sacrament of Penance, the debt we owe for our forgiven sins remains. We are thus called, as one of the prayers in the Miraculous Medal Novena notes, to "recover by penance what we have lost by sin."
Sorrow entered the world as a result of the effects of Adam's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. It was Our Lady, though, the new Eve and the Ark of the New Covenant, that took sorrow unto herself as God's handmaid and made it an instrument of our salvation in cooperation with the Redemptive Act of her Divine Son. Our Lady, who is the Mother of Sorrows, reminds us that there is no suffering or pain or difficulty that we can endure in this passing vale of tears that is the equal of what she suffered in perfect communion with her Divine Son. Our own sorrows, as real and as intense as they may be, pale into insignificance when we meditate upon Our Lady's sufferings. Indeed, an honest assessment of our lives teaches us that we deserve as sinners to suffer and that it should be our joy to help to make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world by offering all of our sufferings and sorrows up to Our Lady's Immaculate Heart as her consecrated slaves. The more we love Our Lord and His Most Blessed Mother, the more we, like Saint Therese of the Child Jesus before us, will pray for sufferings and humiliations so as to be refined as we keep Our Lady company at the foot of her Son's Holy Cross.
Indeed, a true priest I know told me years ago that there were times he wished he could just go off to a monastery and spend the rest of his life weeping for his sins and doing penance for them. Another individual, a lay man, told me that he said the following during a time of intense personal crisis and grief, "If only I wept for my sins the way that I am weeping for myself right now." Such sorrow and contrition for one's sins are representative of an understanding of the horror contained within every sin we commit. Catholics know that we are powerless of our own accord to deal with this sorrow, which is why so many people who not only commit but persist in mortal sins unrepentantly must seek to anesthetize their sorrow and/or seek the affirmation and approval of others.
That is, even people who do not understand or accept the objectively evil nature of their actions will suffer the sorrowful effects of sin in their lives without attributing their depression and malaise or anxiety to the sins they are committing, which is why they must seek to flee from the misery into which they have plunged themselves. As sinners who have received the grace to be Catholics, we know that Divine absolution is available to us in the Sacrament of Penance as the merits of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus Christ are applied to us by an alter Christus acting in persona Christi. And it is Our Lady, the the Mother of Mercy--our life, our sweetness and our hope, who intercedes for us to be humble enough to cooperate with the actual graces that flow out of the Mass to get ourselves into the confessional and to make a firm purpose of amendment to sin no more, thereby making it possible for us to be less of a source of sorrow and grief to her Immaculate Heart. As the Mediatrix of all graces, Our Lady is indeed our hope as we attempt to walk on the rocky road that leads to the narrow gate of life won for the many by her Divine Son's Redemptive Act.
A brief review of the Seven Dolors of Our Lady, complemented by brief excerpts from Father Faber's The Foot of the Cross (published originally in England in 1857 under the title of The Dolors of Mary), might be instructive at this juncture.
The Prophecy of Simeon
The aged Simeon waited patiently in the Temple, confident that God would fulfill the promise He had made to him in his youth, that he would not die before his eyes had seen and he had beheld in his own arms the Messiah. Simeon must have been thought to be something of a religious fanatic to his relatives because of all of the time he spent waiting for the Messiah to be revealed to him. God had revealed to Simeon much more than the fact that he would not die before seeing the Messiah. God had told Simeon what the Mother of the Messiah, Mary of Nazareth, would have to suffer, giving him the words that he would utter to the woman who made possible our salvation when she presented her infant Son in the Temple.
And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary his mother: "Behold this child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted; and thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed." (Lk. 2: 34-35).
Our Lady heard these troubling words from Simeon, storing them in her heart. God was telling her through Simeon that her present joy would be replaced with the sorrow of seeing her Son, who was to be and remains the Sign of Contradiction, suffer. Our Lady trusted in God totally and without any reservation. Her acceptance of Simeon's prophecy teaches each of us that we, who are baptized to be living signs of contraction in imitation of the Sign of Contradiction Who our sins hung on the wood of the Holy Cross, must be ready to accept suffering as the price of our discipleship. We must accept it in our lives. We must understand that those we love will have to be refined in the crucible of suffering, uniting it all to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart and to be thus used be her as she sees fit for the greater honor and glory of the Blessed Trinity and for the salvation of souls. Mothers and fathers have to understand that their children are going to suffer. Some may die at an early age as a result of an incurable disease or an unexpected tragedy. Others may go through life suffering one humiliation after another because they remain steadfast in their defense of the Holy Faith. The first dolor of Our Lady reminds us that no suffering any of us endures is the equal of what she endured to bring us forth in great pain at the foot of the Cross as adopted children of the living God.
From Father Faber's The Foot of the Cross:
Another lesson to be learned is, that in this world sorrow is the recompense of sanctity. It is to the elect on earth what the Beatific Vision is to the saints in heaven. It is God's presence, His manifestation of Himself, His unfailing reward. We must not be amazed, therefore, if new efforts to serve God bring new sorrows in their train. By the supernatural principles of the spiritual life they ought to do so. If we are able to bear them, these sorrows will come at once. Their delay is only the index of God's estimation of our weakness. yet we need not fear that they will be disproportioned to our strength. God's blows are not dealt out at random. Our crosses are poised to a nicety by divine wisdom, and then divine love planes them, in order to make them at once smoother and lighter. But we can have no real comfort in devotion if we are without trials. We have no proof that God accepts us, no security against delusion. We know that the stars in in their old places in the sky; but in different states of the atmosphere they seem much farther off than at other times, or again much nearer, like teardrops of light on the very point of falling to the earth. So it is with God. Joy makes Him seem far off, while sorrow brings Him near, almost down into our bosom. When sorrows come, we feel instinctively their connection with the graces which have gone before, just as temptations so often have an odor about them of past victories. They come up one after another, dealing their several blows upon our poor hearts, with such a modest heavenly significancy upon their faces, that it is easy to recognize angels beneath the thin disguise. As we touch them, even while the thrill goes through us, we feel that we are almost handling with our hands our own final perseverance, such solid evidences are they of our adoption, so full of substantial graces in their presence, and leaving such a legacy of blessings when they go. A heart without sorrows is like a world without a revelation. It has nothing but a twilight of God about it.
Furthermore, our sorrow must be our own. We must not expect any one else to understand it. It is one of the conditions of true sorrow that it should be misunderstood. Sorrow is the most individual thing in the whole world. We must not expect, therefore, to meet with sympathy at all adequate to what we are suffering. It will be a great thing if it be suitable, even though it is imperfect. It is a very desolate thing to have leaned on sympathy, and found that it would not bear our weight, with such a burden of sorrow upon our backs. It is very difficult to erect ourselves again. The heart sinks upon itself in dismay. It has used its last remaining strength to reach the place where it would rest itself, and now what is left for it but a faintness which opens all the wounds afresh, and a dismal conviction that the grief is less tolerable than it was before? It is best, therefore, to keep our sorrows as secret as we can. Unfitting sympathy irritates us, and makes us sin. Inadequate sympathy excites almost a querulous despair. God knows every thing. There is light for every darkness out of that simple truth. Our hearts are full of angels when they are full of sorrows. Let us make them our company, and go on our road, smiling all the day, scattering such sweetness round us as mourners only are allowed to scatter, and God will understand us when we go to Him. Who can comfort like those who also mourn?
We must expect also that it will be in some measure with us as it was with Mary; our sorrows will be fed by even our joys. God sends us joys before sorrows, to prepare our hearts; but the joys themselves contain prophecies of the coming sorrows. And what are those sacred fears, those strange presentiments, those vague expectations of approaching evil, by which joys are so often accompanied, but the shadows which they bring about with them? It is out of the brightness of life that its darkness mostly comes. In all manner of strange ways joys turn to sorrows, sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually. Sometimes what was expected as joy comes in the shape of sorrow. Sometimes the very enjoyment of the joy turns it into sadness, as if an enchanter's wand had been waved over it. Sometimes it is gladness to the last, but when it goes it leaves grief behind, a grief it was all the while concealing under its cloak, and we never suspected it. So again when a sorrow has become calm, and the freshness of its sting seems worn off by time, by endurance, or by the distraction of our duties, a joy comes to us, makes us smile as it enters our souls, but, when there, goes at once to the fountain of sorrow, wakes up the slumbering waters, digs the source deeper, and shakes the earth around to make the spring flow more abundantly. There are few who have not experienced this kindling and enlivening of grief by the advent of gladness. But, in truth, in a world where we can sin, in a strife where we so often lose sight of God, in a dwelling which is rather an exile than a home, all joys are akin to sorrows, nay, are almost sorrows in holiday attire. Joy is life looking like what it is not. Sorrow is life with an honest face. It is life looking like what it is. Nevertheless, there is the truest, the heavenliness of all joys in sorrow, because it detaches us from the world, and draws us with such quite, persuasive, irresistible authority to God. The sunrise of grace within the soul is full of cloud, and doubt, and uncertain presages, even admit the flashings of beautiful light which are painting the troubled sky everywhere. But when the orb has mounted to the top of its noonday tower, all clouds will have melted away into the blue, no one knows how. For to to joy into sorrows is the true work of heaven, and of that height of grace which is heaven on earth already. (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title of The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 101-104.)
The Flight into Egypt
And after they departed, behold an angel of the Lord appeared in sleep to Joseph, saying: 'Arise, and take the child and his mother, and fly into Egypt: and be there until I shall tell thee. For it will come to pass that Herod will seek the child to destroy him.' Who arose, and took the child and his mother by night, and retired into Egypt: and he was there until the death of Herod: That it might be fulfilled which the Lord spoke by the prophet saying: Out of Egypt I have called my son. (Mt. 2: 13-15)
To avoid the clutches of the evil King Herod, Saint Joseph fled with his most chaste spouse, Our Lady, and his foster-Child, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and lived as refugees in Egypt. Our Lord, Who was born in poverty, stripped of all of the royal prerogatives due His kingly dignity, lived as an exile. There was no room in the inn in Bethlehem for the Holy Family. Room was found for them in Egypt, which is where the Hebrew people had suffered for 440 years in cruel slavery as the slaves to the Egyptians before being led out by a prefiguring of Him, Moses, through the parted waters of the Red Sea to their forty years' desert journey prior to entering into the Promised Land of Canaan. Our Lady was thus forced to make a temporary home for her Child and her husband as they fled for their lives.
The sorrow of not being able to return to Nazareth in light of the evil designs King Herod had on her Divine Son was excruciating for Our Lady.
Do we force Our Lady into exile in our lives by forgetting our consecration to her, by forgetting to pray the family Rosary with care each and every day?
Do we forget to meditate on the silent, selfless sacrifices made by Saint Joseph as he responded immediately to Saint Gabriel's warnings and abandoned his own place of business in order to do that which he had to do as the head of his household to protect and safeguard his chaste spouse and his foster-Child?
Are we willing to take our own flight into a figurative Egypt for the sake of the Faith, especially by means of seeking out the Immemorial Mass of Tradition so as to protect ourselves and our family members from the harmful novelty that is the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service and from anything and everything that is tainted by conciliarism and the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism?
Are we willing to be so completely detached from our desires that we can flee at a moment's notice from our own homes when called to do so, especially to have access to the fullness of Faith? Are we, in other words, willing to do what the Holy Family did?
Do we truly understand that we have no permanent home here in this life and that we must seek out first the Kingdom of Heaven, of which Holy Mass is a foretaste?
From Father Faber's The Foot of the Cross:
Even to us, down in the deep valleys where the merciful inquisitiveness of grace has found us out, there is something inexpressibly mournful in the way in which God is excluded from His own creation. We are considering now the mystery of the Creator's flight from His creatures. Is there not also something quite as dreadful in the flight of the creatures from their Creator, which we see going on all day? When faith has opened our eyes, what a scene the world presents! Everywhere God, with His omnipresent love, is pursuing His creature, His guilty creatures; but it it is to save them, not to punish them. There is not a recess of the world, not a retirement of poverty, not a haunt of sin, not an unlikely or unbeseeming place for so vast a Majesty., where He is not following His creatures and trying almost to force His great gifts upon them. Swifter than the lightning, stronger than the ocean, more universal than the air, is His glorious, many-sided compassion poured out over the world which He has made. Everywhere are men flying from this generous, this merciful, this tender pursuit. It seems as if the grand object of their lives was to avoid God, as if time were a respite from the necessity of God's presence in eternity, which it is unfair of Him to interfere with, as if space were a convenience expressly provided for creatures to get out of the way of their Creator. Little boys even are flying from Him with all their might and main, as if they understood the matter just as well as grown-up me, and had made their minds as determinedly about it. God speaks, entreats, pleads, cries aloud; but still they run. He doubles His sunbeams upon them, to win their hearts by the excess of His fatherly indulgence; but they run. He throws shadows and darkness over them, to make them sober and wise; but they run. He will have them. Great graces go forth to their souls, like swift stones from a sling, and they fall. But they are up again in a moment, and continue their flight. Or it He gets up with them, because they are too much hurt to rise on the instant, they only let Him wipe the blood and earth from their wound and kiss them sweetly on the forehead and they are off again. He will not be baffled. He will hide Himself in the water of a sacrament, and make loving prey of infants before they have reached the use of reason. It is well; but then He must slay them also if He will keep them; for almost before they can walk they will run away from Him. And what is this picture compared to the vision which was always before Our Blessed Mother's eyes?
But let us make the world stand still, and see how it looks. If our common love for God, which is so poor, is irritated by the sight, what must Mary have suffered? For what is irritation to our weakness to her would be the most deep and transcending sorrow. God comes to His creation. It does not stir. It cannot. It lies in the hollow beneath Him, and has no escape. He comes in the beauty of a mercy, which is almost incredible, because it is so beautiful. But seemingly it does not attract the world. He draws nigh. Creation must do something now. It freezes itself up before His eye. He may have other worlds, more fertile, more accessible to Him, than this. In the spiritual tropics, where the angels dwell, He may perhaps be welcome. But not here. This is the North Pole of His universe. He shed His life's blood upon it, and it would not thaw. It is unmanageable, unnavigable, uninhabitable for Him. He can do nothing at all with it, but let His sun make resplendent colored lights in the icebergs, or bid the moon shine with a wanner loveliness than elsewhere, or fill the long-night sky with the streamers of the Aurora, which even the Esquimaux, burrowing in his hut, will not go out to see. The only difference is that the material pole understands its business. which is to make ice in all imaginable shapes; whereas we men are so used to our own coldness, that we do not know how cold we are, and imagine ourselves to be the temperate zone of God's creation.
If God gets into His world, matters are not much mended. It is dismal to think--would that it were also incredible!--how much of the world is tied up from Him, so as to render almost a miracle necessary in order to insinuate grace into the soul. Look at whole regions of fair beginnings, of good wishes, holy desires, struggling earnestness, positive yearnings, and see how tyrannically the provisions of life deal with all these interests of God. Here are souls tied up from God by family arrangements. They have to live away from the means of grace, or they are thrown among bad examples, or they are forced into uncongenial dissipation, or they are put into the alternative of either judging their parents or blunting their perceptions of God, or they are entangled in unsuitable marriages, or they are forced into the ambitious temptations of worldly possessions, or their religious vocations are rough-ridden. God is not have His own way with them, and will not have it. He on His side will not work miracles, and souls are lost. How much again is tied up by money arrangements? The religion of orphans is endangered by executors who have not the faith. Fortunes are left under conditions which, without heroic grace, preclude conversion. Place of abode is dictated by straitened circumstances, and it so happens that spiritual disabilities come along with it. Questions of education are unfavourably decided on pecuniary grounds, as also are the choices of profession. Want of money is a bar to the liberty of many souls, who, as far as we can judge. would use that liberty for God. Even local arrangements tie up souls from God. There is sort of a necessity of living for part of the year where regular sacraments are not to be had, or where men must mix very much with people of another creed, or must lay themselves out for political influence, or where young people must break off habits of works of mercy only imperfectly formed in the great city, which after all is a truer sanctuary of God than the green, innocent country. How many also, without fault of their own, or fault of any one, are tied up from God by the temporal consequences of some misfortune? Homes are broken up. Souls are imprisoned in unsuitable occupations, and in unfavourable places; and a host of religious inconveniences follow from which there is literally no escape. It may be said that, after all, the excellence of religion is interior. But to how many is the interior spirit given? Surely it is not one of God's ordinary graces. And how few really interior persons are there, who are not visibly deteriorated when their public supplies of grace are impoverished! Others again are tied up from god by some irretrievable steps which they themselves have taken, culpably or inculpably. It is as if an eternal fixity had insinuated itself into some temporal decision. And now souls are helpless. They cannot be all for God, if they would, unless He communicates to them some of the extraordinary graces of the mystical saints. We have often need here to remember for our comfort, that, if steps are irretrievable, nothing in the spiritual life is irremediable. Who could believe the opposite doctrine, and then live? It is fearful the power which men have to tie their fellow-men up from God. What an exercise it is for a hot temper, with a keen sense of injustice, and an honest heartiness of love for God and souls, to have to work for souls under the pressure of the great public systems, organizations, and institutions of a country which has not the faith! To watch a soul perilously balancing on the brink of the grand eternal question, and to see plainly that the most ordinary fairness or the cheapest kindness would save it, and not be able to command either,--it is a work of knives in one's flesh, smarting unbearably. We have no right to demand the fairness; indeed, the fairness is perhaps only visible from our own point of view. We are more likely to get justice if we ask for it under the title of privilege and by the name of kindness. For the sake of Christ's poor, let us insist upon God's multiplying and prolonging our patience! thus, all the world over, in all classes, especially in the upper classes, creation is tied up as it were from God, and His goodness has not fair play with it, unless He will break His own laws, and throw Himself simply on His omnipotence. There is a tyranny of circumstances, which does not seem far short of a necessity of sin. It needs a definition of the faith to assure us that such a necessity is happily an impossibility. We feel all this. It cuts to the quick. Now it depresses, not it provokes, accordingly as it acts on the inequalities of our little grace. Multiply it till the sum is beyond figures, magnify it till is bulk fills spaces and hangs out beyond, ad then we have our Lady's sensitiveness about the honor of God's majesty. (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, pp. 137-140.)
The Loss of the Child Jesus in the Temple
And when he was twelve years old, they going into Jerusalem, according to the custom of the feast. And having fulfilled the days, when they returned, the child Jesus remained in Jerusalem; and his parents knew it not. And thinking that he was in the company, they came a day's journey, and sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance.
And not finding him, they returned into Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass that, after three days, they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his wisdom and his answers. And seeing him, they wondered. And his mother said to him: "Son, why hast thou done so to us? behold thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing."
And he said to them: "How is it that you sought me? did you not know, that I must be about my father's business?" And they understood not the word that he spoke unto them. And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them. And his mother kept all these words in her heart." (Lk. 2: 42-51)
Our Lady and Saint Joseph believed that Our Lord was with their relatives in the caravan returning to Nazareth. They thought that He was visiting and playing with His cousins and friends. The realization that this was not the case caused Our Lady's Immaculate Heart to be burdened with sorrow. Had He been kidnapped? Had He had an accident? What relief Our Lady and Saint Joseph felt when they found Our Lord answering questions put to Him by the doctors in the Temple. (Just an aside: Our Lord was not "teaching" in the Temple. Our Lord did presumed to do that which was inappropriate for a Jewish boy of his age. A Jewish boy of twelve years of age did not presume the office of teaching. He was responding to questions that had been put to Him by the rabbinical doctors.)
Do we grieve when we lose possession of Our Lord by means losing the state of Sanctifying Grace if, God forbid, we commit a Mortal Sin?
Do we have sorrow in our hearts knowing that our indifference and our ingratitude have caused us to lose sight frequently of the fact that we are called at all times to live in such a way as to be prepared for a holy death as members of Christ's true Church, outside of which there is no salvation?
Do we forget to spend time regularly before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer?
Do we forget to adorn our homes with crucifixes and images of the Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph and other saints and of the angels?
Do we forget the importance of naming our children after saints to help them to learn to grow in sanctity in imitation of the saint whose name they bear?
Do we grieve for our relatives who have left the Faith or who are nominal Catholics who don't want to "take things too far" and/or who are hostile to the fullness of the Faith found in the Immemorial Mass of Tradition?
Do we make efforts to recover them for Christ and His true Church in the catacombs where no concessions are made to conciliarism or to its false shepherds?
There are many ways we continue to cause Our Lady to suffer by means of our forgetfulness of her Divine Son and the supernatural helps He has given us through Holy Mother Church.
From Father Faber's The Foot of the Cross:
Thus it was that our dearest Mother had her Passion at the end of the Infancy; and her Compassion, together with His Passion, at the end of the Ministry. The darkness of this third dolor was the Gethsemane; the loss of Jesus was the crucifixion of her soul; her complaint was her cry upon the Cross, just when the torment of the Cross was ending. It was with her now as it was to be with Him hereafter.
There is yet another thing which strikes us as unlike our Lady in this third dolor. It is her venturing to question our Blessed Lord as to the reasons of His conduct. In the midst of her love of Jesus, the thought always uppermost in her mind, the memory that never went to sleep, the faith which was her life, the fact which was her worship was His Divinity. Indeed, the greatness of her love arose from this very thing. It seems more probably that our Lord had actually shown her His Divine Nature. But at all events she saw it always by faith. It was the prominent thing which she saw in Him incessantly. Hence it would seem impossible for her to question Him. Her humility and her intelligence would alike forbid it. She had asked a question for one moment, just before consenting to the Incarnation. But it was of an angel, not of God; and moreover, those days were passed. How is it then that she seems to call upon Him, and in public also, to explain and justify Himself for what He had done? In all the Gospels her word are without any parallel. They stand out by themselves, inviting notice, and yet full of mystery. Her spirit was not troubled by the interior darkness of her soul. It have never been troubled by it. Trouble is not the word. Besides, the darkness had gone at the first sight of Jesus. It was not in the flush of joy, which at that instant was crowding in at all the inlets of her soul, that she spoke, not knowing what she said, like Peter upon Tabor when he talked of building three tabernacles. Neither joy nor sorrow ever made the balance of her tranquility to quiver. There was never any conflict in her. Struggle would have desecrated her Immaculate Heart. It was not exactly what she wanted to know. Her science was so vast, that it was absolutely without desire of increase, so far at least as it was merely science, and not the beatifying accompaniment of an ever-augmenting love. Her science was such as was befitting her attitude as the Mother of God. She knew, not only all that was due to her, not only all that was convenient for her, but all which could perfect her perfections within the limits of a creature. Every thing in her had its limits. Every thing was vast but it was also limited. Her beauty was in her limitations. She remained a creature. Hence her science was perfect, having nothing imperfect about it but the inevitable imperfection of whatsoever is created. God only is illimitable, God only omniscient, God only perfect with absolute independent, intrinsical perfection. Why then did she question Jesus about this? We must reverently venture upon a conjecture. It was by an impulse of the Holy Spirit, by an attraction from Jesus Himself, by a will of His which she read in His Sacred Heart. She had just been raised to a fresh height of sanctity. She had drawn closer to God. The time of boldness follows great graces, just as the time of great graces follows great trials. Heavenliness of mind takes the form of an adoring familiarity, when it is in actual contact with God. We see this in the saints. But what will the corresponding phenomenon be in the sanctity of Mary? Jesus invited her to claim Him, to assert her rights over Him, to exercise her authority upon Him. And all this publicly before the doctors. Thus would He make solemn proclamation of her being His Mother, and do her honor before all, while they who heard little knew the import of that royal proclamation. Just as it required vast grace in St. Joseph to enable His humility to govern and command His God, so now did it require immense grace in Mary thus to assert her rights over Jesus. But she did it in the same calm simplicity with which she had consent to the Incarnation; and that moment she stood once more on another mountain, higher than that which a moment since had been the pedestal of her wonderful grace. The glory of obedience, the triumph of humility, the magnificence of worship, all of these were in the bold question of the Blessed Mother. (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 179-181.)
Although this dolor for the most part keeps up among the high hills, which do not belong to us, it is nevertheless so full of lessons for ourselves, that it is difficult to select from them. It teaches us, first of all, that the loss of Jesus, however brief, is the greatest of all evils. It was this which was almost unbearable even to our Lady, and Jesus is not more needful to us than to her, because to all creatures He is absolutely needful; only to us He is a more pressing necessity, because of our weakness and our sin. The greatness of Mary's sorrow is to us a visible measure of the magnitude of the evil. Yet alas! how little we feel it! How happy can men be, who yet have lost Jesus, often unconscious almost of their loss, more often indifferent to it when they know it! We should have thought the loss of Jesus was in itself so fearful an evil, that nothing could have aggravated it; and yet our want of perception of the greatness of our loss is a token of still deeper misery. It is sad indeed when the voice of the world is more musical in our ears than the voice of our Lord. It is just the very wretchedness, the very hatefulness of the world, that it has no Jesus. He does not belong to it. He refused to pray for it. He pronounced its friendship to be on our part a simple declaration of war upon Himself. It makes our hearts sink to look out upon the world, and to know that it has no part in Him. It is like gazing upon a cheerless and disconsolate view of barren moors or dreary swamp. No sunshine can gild it. It is dismal on the brightest day. Nay, it is ugliest when the sun shines upon it. So it is with the world, because it has no Jesus. So does it become with us in proportion as we are friends with the world, or even at peace in the world. He and it are incompatible. Are we not afraid? Pleasure, gayery, fashion, expense,--dare we, even in our thoughts, put these things into the Heart of Jesus? Would He smile when worldly things were said? Would He wish to please people round Him, who are taking no pains whatever to please His Father? Would He seek to be popular in society, to stand will with those who have not at heart the only one interest which He has at His, to keep out of sight His principles, not simply through silence and reserve, but lest they should ruffle others and, interfere with that smoothness of social intercourse which takes the place of charity?
Alas! sin is bad; excess of pleasure is bad; giving God the second place is ad; worshipping the rich is bad; hardening our Christian feeling to become accustomed to worldly frivolities and very slightly uncharitable conversation is bad. But these at least are evils which wear no masks. We know what we are about. We give up Jesus with the full understanding of the sacrifice we are making. We are taking our side, choosing our lot, and we know it. But wishing to please!--this is the danger to a spiritual person. Total separation from Christ is already implied in the very idea. What is it we wish to please? The world, which is the enemy of Jesus. Whom do we wish to please? Those whoa re not caring to please God, and in whom Jesus takes no pleasure. Wherein do we wish to please? In things, conversations, and pursuits, which have no reference to God, no savor of Christ, no tendency toward religion. When do we wish to please? At times when we are doing least for Christ, when prayer and faith and hope and love and abiding sorrow for sin would be the most unseasonable. Where do we wish to please? In haunts where there is less evidence of God than elsewhere, where every circumstance, every appurtenance, flashes the world's image back upon us from a lustre. Yet we see no evil. We want smoothness, polish, inoffensiveness, discreet keeping back of God. He said that He and Mammon would not dwell together. But to some extent we will force Him so to dwell. He shall at least keep the peace with the world, and learn to revolve alongside of it in His own sphere, without encroaching, without jarring. Dreadful! Is there not hell already in the mere attempt? Yet how little men suspect it! It is like something noxious getting into the air, and not at first affecting the lungs. But the lights burn dim, then one by one they go out, and we are left in the darkness, unable to escape, because lethargy and suffocation have already begun within ourselves. In other words, high principles gently lower themselves, or are kept for state occasions, such as Lent, or a priest's company. Then we begin to be keenly alive to the annoyance which comes to us from the conversation of uncompromising Christians, and we pronounce them indiscreet, and by that ceremony they are disposed of to our great comfort, and we praise them more than ever, because by that reserve we have got rid of what fidgeted us in them, and we lull to rest the remaining uneasiness of conscience by this great promptitude of a praise which we have first made valueless by counterweighting it. Then it dawns upon us that it is a duty to keep will with the world even for God's sake. Then keeping well edges on to being friends with the world. Then there begin to be symptoms of two distinct lives going to be lived by us; but we do not see these symptoms ourselves. Then uncomfortable feelings rise in us, taking away our relish for certain persons, certain thins, certain books, certain conversations. We rouse ourselves, and take a view, an intellectual view of the rightness of being smooth, and not offending, and getting on well with the world. The view comforts us, and we are all right again. Then God's blessings, His spiritual blessings, very gradually and almost imperceptibly, begin to evaporate from us, from ourselves, our children, our homes, our hearts, and every thing around us. But the sun of prosperity shines so clearly that we do not see the mist of the evaporation rising up from the earth and withdrawing itself into heaven. Perhaps we shall never awake to the truth again. Trying to please is a slumberous thing. So we drift on, never suspecting how far the current is carrying us away from God. We may die without knowing it. We shall know it after that, the instant afterward.
Thus we may lose Jesus in three ways. We may abruptly break from Him by sin. We may quietly and gracefully withdraw from Him, confessing the attractions of the world to be greater than His. We may retire from Him slowly and by imperceptible degrees, always with our face toward Him, as we withdraw from royalty, and all because He is not a fixed principle with us, and the desire to please is so. But if we have lost Him in any one of these three ways,--sin, worldliness, and the love of pleasing--and He rouses us by His grace, what are we to do? This third dolor teaches us. It must be a dolor to us. We must search for Him whom we have lost. He may not allow us to find Him all at once. He will probably not. But we must put off every thing else, in order to prosecute our search. Other things must be subordinate to it. They must wait, or they must give way. But we must not be precipitate in our search. We must not run; we must walk. We shall miss Him if we run. We must not do violent things, not even to ourselves, although we richly deserve them. It is not a time for taking up new penances. The loss of Jesus is penance enough, now that we have found it out. We must be gentle, and sorrow will give us gentleness. Hence, our search must be also a sorrowful one, as Mary's was. We must seek Jesus with tears, with tears, but not with cries,--with a broken heart, but a quiet heart also. We must seek Him, also, in the right place,--in Jerusalem, in the temple; that is, in the Church, and in sacraments and in prayer. He is never among our kinsfolk. He never hides in the blameless softness of a kind home. This is a hard saying; ut this dolor says it. All these are the conditions of a successful search. It was so Mary sought Him; it was so she found Him. We must be of good cheer. Every thing has its remedy. Even worldliness is curable, and it is by far the nearest to incurable of any diseases. If our whole life has been but a desire to please, if every thought, word, action, look and omission has got that poison at the bottom of it, we must not be cast down. To change the habit is too difficult. We will change the object. It shall be Jesus instead of the world. Who ever knew people more thoroughly all for God than some who were once notably all for the world? nay, it would seem the more notably for the world, the more thoroughly for Him. (Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross, published originally in England in 1857 under the title The Dolors of Mary, republished by TAN Books and Publishers, pp. 188-192.)
The Meeting of Jesus and Mary on the Via Dolorosa
The Via Dolorosa. The Way of Sorrows. Each of us walks on a figurative Via Dolorosa as we march forward in the direction of our daily crosses, our daily Calvaries, if you will. Life is full of difficulties. With the exception of the handful of genuine mystics, such as Saint Bridget of Sweden and the Venerable Mary of Agreda, none of us can possibly imagine the incomprehensible sorrow Our Lady suffered when she saw the fruit of her virginal and immaculate womb carrying His Cross on the Way of Sorrows. Mel Gibson did a pretty good job of showing us the encounter in his The Passion of the Christ. Even that filmed representation, however, cannot begin to plumb the depths of sorrow Our Lady felt.
Our Lady had given her Divine Son the Flesh with which He would pay back the sin of Adam on the wood of the Holy Cross. She had given Him the Blood that would be shed for the forgiveness of sins. The Sacred Heart of Jesus that was loaded down with our sins had been formed of her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Our Lady had beheld the radiance of her newborn Son in the stable in the cave in Bethlehem. She beheld Him on the Way of Sorrows as One Who had been defiled and disfigured almost beyond recognition as a result of our sins, our ingratitude, our indifference, our lack of willingness to even to aspire to scale up to the heights of personal sanctity. She loved Him with a perfect love. She suffered a sorrow beyond all telling when gazing upon His wounded countenance. She grieves for us, her adopted children, because we do not appreciate the horror of our sins and what it cost her as she cast her gaze upon our loving Redeemer.
We must, therefore, resolve to walk our daily Via Dolorosa by taking Our Lady with us so that we will see the face of the suffering Christ in everyone we encounter, so that we will at all times keep in mind our First Cause and our Last End, understanding that everything we say and do has an eternal dimension to it. Everything we say and do either helps us to get to Heaven or heaps more Purgatory time on us if are given the grace to die in a state of sanctifying grace. Those things we say and do that are hurtful to Our Lady and thus to our salvation might wind up sending us to Hell for all eternity if we let the weeds of spiritual sloth and abject neglect of the interior life cast out from within us the very inner life of the Blessed Trinity. We must stand watch with Our Lady as her trusting, docile, submissive children as we encounter her Son in the persons we meet in all walks of our daily life, treating them as we would treat Him, showing them the compassion and love that Our Lady showed Him and that she wants to bestow so generously upon each one of us if we merely invoke her maternal intercession and consecrate ourselves totally to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.
From Father Faber's The Foot of the Cross:
Everywhere the streets are thronged with multitudes setting in one tide to Calvary. Heralds at the corners of the streets blow their harsh trumpets, and proclaim the sentence to the people. Mary draws her veil around her. John and the Magdalen lean their broken hearts on hers, for they are faint and sick. What a journey for a Mother! She hardly takes note of the streets, but with their shadows they fling into her soul dim memories of the Pasch twenty-one years ago, and the three bitter days that followed it. She has taken her place, silent and still. She does not even tremble. Some tears flow as if spontaneously form her eyes. But her cheeks are red? Yes,--her tears were blood. The procession comes in sight; the tall horse of the centurion shows first, and leads the way. The trumpet sounds with a wailing clangor. The women look from the lattices above. She sees the thieves, the crosses every thing,--and yet only one thing, Himself. As He draws nigh, the peace of her heart grows deeper. It could not help it; god was approaching, and peace went before Him. Never had maternal love sat on such a throne as that one in Mary's heart. The anguish was unutterable. God, who knows the number of the sands of the sea, knows it. Now Jesus had come up to her. He halts for a moment. He lifts the one hand that is free, and clears the blood from His eyes. Is it to see her? Rather, that she may see Him, His look of sadness, His look of love. She approaches to embrace Him. The soldiers thrust her rudely back. Oh, misery! and she is His Mother too! For a moment she reeled with the push, and then again was still, her eyes fixed on His, His eyes fixed on hers; such a link, such an embrace, such an outpouring of love, such an overflow of sorrow! Has has less strength than she? See! He staggers, is overweighed by the burden of the ponderous Cross, and falls with a dull dead sound upon the street, like the clank of falling wood. S