The Sorrowful Mother

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Blessed Mother, faith, grace, Hurricane Harvey, Mary, mother, mourning, Our Lady of Sorrows, pain, Syrian refugees, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, trust

Today our Church remembers Mary under the title of “Our Lady of Sorrows.” There are many feasts in our Church calendar honoring Mary but, this year especially, I find this one particularly poignant as images arise of present-day mothers. I see Syrian refugee mothers cradling their hungry and frightened toddlers, then a mother reaching out of a helicopter to fetch her child from the basket that has saved her little one as it saved her from the swirling waters of Hurricane Harvey, then a young mother at the side of her ten-year old child’s hospital bed, then a would-be mother mourning her miscarriage…

It is no wonder that mothers the world over (like my own) are known to have deep devotion to the Blessed Mother, herself unwed and a frightened teenager at the start, but one who trusted God’s grace to sustain her. In her faith she became strong enough to weather all the storms of motherhood, even to seeing her son executed in a horrible death. So many women can look to Mary to understand the pain of the various circumstances of their motherly lives.

Today I will pray for mothers young and old, happy and sad, fulfilled and unfulfilled, struggling or joyous (or both!) and ask God’s blessing on all who take on this role that they may find solace in the company of women and encouragement in the timeless witness of Mary, mother to all.

Sorrowful Mother

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childbirth, children, dolors, Jesus, motherhood, mothers, Our Lady of Sorrows, Peace, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Thomas Merton

Although I have never birthed a child I have, in my years of teaching and then ministering in a parish, come to understand the joys and sorrows of motherhood. I have watched mothers love their children through celebratory days in church and school and family life. I have listened to mothers lament behaviors that they did not understand in the lives and loves of their adult children and on occasion I have suffered with them because I loved their children too. Love has a way of breaking us open both in joy and sorrow, taking us out of ourselves to a greater capacity than we could ever imagine in ourselves.

Today is the feast of Our Lady or Sorrows, formerly called by the Church “the Seven Sorrows (or Dolors) of the Blessed Mother.” No wonder so many mothers have devotion to Mary. Just think of what she went through with Jesus! I don’t often think of the everyday life of Mary: the immediate connection that she had when she first held Jesus in her arms, how she felt when he said his first word or took his first step, the pride she must have had as he grew and when she heard him preach…We only have what the gospels and Tradition have recorded for us and know few of her moments of fear for him or her intense grieving at his crucifixion. Can you even imagine her joy and the tenderness between them in their meetings after the Resurrection? There is a lot to imagine and we are able to do so because of our own experiences of such love as she had for her son.

So again today I find myself praying for mothers, in all their moments of light and dark, of peace and pressure to “give in,” in all their woe and willingness. I pray that they may know a certainty that I read this morning in a short prayer verse of Thomas Merton: O God of holiness, grant us to seek peace where it is truly found! In your will, O God, is our peace!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sorrowful Mother

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crucifixion, Jesus, John, Luke, Mary Magdalene, Our Lady of Sorrows, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

This morning is the second in a pair of days when the readings lead us to reflection on the suffering surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus – but today the focus is on his mother, Mary of Nazareth. This feast of “Our Lady of Sorrows” reminds us that the incarnation did not simply affect the lives of those who became followers of Jesus. Jesus was part of a human family whose parents had to deal with a great deal of mystery in their lives, much of which we can only conjecture since the Scriptures tell us very little. If memory serves me, there are only 13 texts in the gospels that even mention Mary – many of them very brief. Sometimes I like to think of different moments in her life and how she must’ve dealt with what was unfolding as her son’s mission – which was also in a real sense hers. We can intuit her acceptance of God’s choice of her as we read the early chapters of Luke’s gospel. From the time she learned that she was pregnant to the visit to her kinswoman Elizabeth, she had grown from a small-town teenager to a woman who had come to realize that her life would not be simple or of her own choosing. This morning we read that “standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (JN 19:25).This was, of course, the most tragic moment of her life, watching her innocent son tortured to death.

Mothers throughout history have suffered for their children in many situations and places. This morning my mind goes immediately to three mothers – two American and one British – whose innocent sons have recently been murdered in the worst type of violence imaginable. These mothers – and other, similarly grief-stricken women – will be the focus of my sorrow and my prayer today that such violence may soon be overcome and that the world’s nations will come to value peace over power and love over domination.