Our Lady of Sorrows

Today is the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, and I've been wanting to sit down and map some thoughts out for myself that connect here. It's been a hairy day, so I'm not coming to this from some great place of recollection. I'm going to dive in and swim through it.

Yesterday I wrote about the Triumph of the Cross and all those anniversarial thoughts. Today's feast has an obvious connection to yesterday's. Mary is the model of the Church -- whatever we see in her is what God intends, generally, for the Church. Of course her personal role is unique, because no one else carried the Son of God in her womb. But we are all called to bring Christ into the world. And we do it through participation in grace, just as she did, although in the way specific to us, and general to the Church. 

And Mary at the foot of the cross is of course unique. And yet she means something for all of us there. 

She means something for me there.

The homily I heard this morning made me aware that not everyone pulls out exact the thing from this feast that I cannot help but pull out. I feel like, for whatever reason, the Lord has formed me in a certain way where this is concerned. The homily focused on how Mary is with us to comfort us in our sorrow. In a way I guess she was there to comfort Jesus -- I mean, where else would she have been right then?

But that's not what stays with me here. Somewhere in this blog I have probably written about a dream I had when I lived in Japan that stayed with me in a way only a few dreams have in my life. It stayed in a deeply instructive way that I've returned to again and again. Ah yes, here it is. It was just this April when I wrote about this. It didn't completely register with me that this dream is specifically about Our Lady of Sorrows. There has definitely been an invitation for me in this for decades: this call that she seemed to extend to me was to enter into this mysterious work, specifically of Our Lady of Sorrows. And it is about calling people to the deeper conversion of life specifically through no longer ignoring the reality of their own pain (shades of yesterday's post). The vice we tend to go for when we want to ignore the reality of our own pain in something akin to intemperance: gluttony, lust, excess. Addictions come in to play here, and numbing. All the various ways we voluntarily or involuntarily reach for the off switch for our pain.

Now, about a year before I began even thinking about the spiritual direction formation program I have just finished, I had an encounter with Our Lady of Sorrows and the seven sorrows rosary. I wrote about that here, which links to several other pieces of the story as well. The kicker there was that as I started praying the seven sorrows rosary, I got the distinct impression that the Blessed Mother was teaching me that the sorrows of life are not a place to camp out; they are a place to move through, towards the glory, Granted, life is full of sorrows. We are never free from sorrow while we are on this earth. That's a true, general principle. But the particular principle, the personal lesson, seemed to be a nudge from her that I had set my camp -- my mind -- in sorrow, and that it was time for an identity shift. 

Now the absolute kicker of all kickers dawned on me the other day. Two years ago this evening, I was winding up the last piece of my very first in person Intensive of the SDFP. I encountered a line in a meditation that knocked me on my butt so hard that it also became a benchmark moment for me. And I just realized that, although it was Sunday and not observed that year, it was the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows when this happened. I suppose I wrote about it several times, but this is the first time the story appears. On this blog, at least. And I realized then that Jesus was calling to me to follow Him. That if I had thought I knew before what it was to follow Him, I was about to have quite a different experience. 

And I was to get extricated from an identity rooted in sorrow.

And I was to learn authenticity in following Christ. Christ is Aslan, not a lapdog. He is Lord and King, not my accessory.

And I hear and feel the searing heat coming through those words. 

There has been a work going on. I've had to just look at a lot of very painful realities in my history. Some of these I tried to look away from for years. Some had to tear through feelings older than words in me, and it felt like my psyche itself was rending apart. And just look has also turned into just act, and I'm still working on that. So much reality to contend with. 

So I came here to look at how Our Lady of Sorrows weaves through this. One of the things that was impressed on me that day that I was praying the seven sorrows rosary and walking through the park was that now, Mary lives in glory. Yes, she accompanies us in our sorrow, but she herself lives in glory. I can go way, way back to my days when I was on my way into the Catholic Church and recall another day that I was walking and praying and struggling with the issues of conversion. The Lord gave me a lot of graced helps in those days. I didn't actually have any human beings present in my life at the time who were helping me on my conversion road (only friends I wrote to -- back in the days before computers!). So the Lord came to help me very generously. And that day as I walked, He impressed on me these words: I want the glorious to become commonplace in your life. I don't know that I'm there yet, or that I've ever been close. Oh, wait of course it is true. It simply rarely feels like it in the moment. But that's a poor measure of reality. For one, I've been going to daily Mass (with a few chunks of exception) since 1992. That's glorious. But when I think of that, I think of my interior experience. I would love to feel glorious. Maybe that's not how this works. But I know that camping out in sorrow (and the anxiety and etc that goes with it) does not help matters. Again, it's the personal call. I've been experiencing God re-rooting my identity to align with Him, to align with reality. 

I don't know exactly where we go next, but it is fascinating to put all these things together and ponder them. 

The cross of Christ is the most horrible and horrifying, absurd event in human history. It is also the catalyst that changes everything, conquers death, unleashes divine mercy, and ushers human kind into eternal life. That's some awesome, glorious thing to be standing near.