'The Last Four Sorrows' of Our Lady' - Charles Journet

 

'The Last Four Sorrows of Our Lady'

Charles Journet

 

                      Fourth Sorrow

 

This was Mary’s sufferings while Jesus was making the way of the cross.  Pilate had delivered Jesus to the Jews.  The Roman soldiers had taken Him to crucify Him.  The custom was to make the condemned man carry his own cross.  No exception was made for Jesus: “And they took Jesus and led him forth.  And bearing his own cross, he went forth to that place which is called the place of the skull, in Hebrew, ‘Golgotha’ ” (John xix.16-17).  But they soon saw that Jesus was too weak and that he might die under the load. When, according to the Synoptic gospels, they were outside the town, “they laid hold of one Simon of Cyrene, coming from the country, and they laid the cross on him to carry after Jesus” (Luke xxiii.26). After that Jesus did not carry His cross.  He walked before the others on the road to Calvary. And, says St Luke, “there followed him a great multitude of people and of women, who bewailed and lamented him.  But Jesus turning to them said: Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me; but weep for yourselves and for your children” (Luke xxiii.  27-28). Let us pause at the fourth sorrow.

     Beyond the rabble of men and women, there to mock at Jesus, drawn to where He was by hatred and evil instinct,  there were a handful of women, some of whom doubtless had known and loved Him, their hearts filled with pity.  Among them was the Virgin.  She made no effort, as once at Capharnaum, to draw near her Son to protect Him.  Her natural love was by now utterly broken and offered up.  It was not for her to approach Jesus with consolation.  She of all people must respect the lonely dereliction in which the world’s salvation must be wrought.  She wept, then, hidden among the women.  And when Jesus stopped to speak, she knew from the beginning that for her He would have no word.  It was to the women of Jerusalem that He spoke.  He did not wish that they should weep for Him.  He wished for no natural consolation. Let them weep for themselves and their children.  But the Virgin, who wept in the midst of them – for her Child she had no need to weep.  She must weep for other women’s children, for the children of those who were bringing her Son to His death. She had accepted fully, totally. But she must be broken anew, her nature more utterly crushed.

     At that moment her task took on a new sublimity.  She wept for the sins of men, she suffered not for herself but for the world’s salvation. Her suffering bound close to His, was a co-redemptive suffering. She learnt what new regions of suffering love must seek out for itself if men were to be snatched from the terrible rigours of suffering that lay in wait for them.  What these rigours were Jesus lets us glimpse in one lightning flash of revelation.  To reveal the significance of the Passion, He draws aside for an instant the veils of the present and, in a phrase which is a supreme admonition of His love, lays bare before us the measureless demands of divine Justice.  “For behold the days shall come, wherein they will say: Blessed are the barren and the wombs that have not borne and the paps that have not given suck.  Then shall they begin to say to the mountains:  Fall upon us.  And to the hills: cover us.  For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry” (Luke xxiii.  29-31). If divine justice requires such suffering of the innocent, what does it hold in store for the guilty?  If to make its fire it will take the green wood, how shall it spare the dry?

     At that time the Virgin Mary knew the mysterious immensity of the Redemption.  On the one hand she saw all the extent of the world’s sins, and on the other the intensity and the infinite value of the sorrow at whose cost they were atoned.  In the steps of her Son, she descended still further, with all her being, into the depths of the redemptive suffering.

 

                        Fifth Sorrow

 

     Death was to break the last of the natural links still remaining mysteriously to bind the Virgin and her Son. “And when they were come to the place which is called Calvary, they crucified him there” (Luke xxiii. 33). “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus, his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene” (John xix.25)

Mary was at the foot of the cross whereon her Son was crucified.  This was the fifth of her sorrows.

     Mary stood at the foot of the cross. She showed no weakening. She was not upheld by the holy women.  On the contrary, in that moment she was upholding the whole Church by the irresistible upward movement of her love, strong as death. Standing erect she heard the Seven Last Words that came down from the height of the cross into the desolation of her heart.  Stabat Mater Dolorosa.

      Mary was close to the cross, but she made no move to embrace it.  She remained a little away. In that last hour above all she must remain, in spite of her love, separated from her Son. When He cried out “I thirst”, it was not she, but the soldiers who, putting a sponge full of vinegar about hyssop, put it to His mouth (John xix. 28-9).

     It might seem that she had now given all, that there was no more to be stripped from her.  But Jesus required of her one last separation more agonizing than all.  To lose her Son, she must not wait till He was dead.  Whilst He still lived He must break once for all the last bond of that purest of natural love that He felt rising toward Him from the foot of the cross.  It was His will to die poor, without even a mother.  From now she must accept that another should be the object of her maternal tenderness. “When Jesus therefore had seen his mother and the disciple standing whom he loved, he said to his mother: ‘Woman, behold thy son’” (John xix. 26)

     For John the words were a joy unspeakable.  But to Mary they were shattering.  Of course she loved the disciple Jesus loved. But what an exchange.  “For Jesus,” cried St. Bernard, “she was given John: for the Lord, the servant;  for the Master, the disciple; for the Son of God, the son of Zebedee; for the true God, a mere man.” In the same sermon St Bernard tells us that “It was sharper than a sword, it pierced her very soul, unto the division of soul and spirit … Be not amazed, my brethren, if it be said that Mary knew martyrdom in her heart.”

     Yet she remained erect at the foot of the cross. She was still there, when the soldiers, having broken the legs of the two thieves, came to Jesus: “When they saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.  But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side: and immediately there came out blood and water” (John xix. 33-34). At that moment the suffering of the Saviour was at an end, the world’s Redemption was accomplished. But the co-redemptive suffering was not ended; it must go on till the day when, under the pressure of a love that grew without ceasing, body and soul came to the separation of death. In the deepest depths of her soul, Mary felt the thrust of the lance. It was the crowning agony of the fifth sorrow.

 

                          Sixth Sorrow

“And when it was evening, there came a certain rich man of Arimathea, named Joseph, who also himself was a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.  Then Pilate commanded that the body of Jesus should be delivered” (Matt. xxvi. 57-8). St. Luke (xxiii. 53) and St. John (xix. 38) give us the detail that Joseph of Arimathea himself took down the body of Jesus from the cross.  There is no doubt that the holy women helped him in this, nor that Mary received her Son’s body at the foot of the cross. Thus the Liturgy tells further that when the body of Jesus was brought down from the cross, His Mother received Him in her arms and held Him close to her; and it compared her with the Sunamitess (4 Kings iv. 20) who when the child miraculously announced to her by the prophet was dead, had held it upon her knees.  Thus soberly, in three or four words, the Liturgy calls up the image of the Pieta which has so powerfully moved the souls of Christian people.

     At last the Mother could embrace her Son. All the lovely memories of His childhood were in the embrace, but alas only to sharpen the pain. She could hold Him to her because He was beyond the reach of consolation. All alone, without aid from any human creature, He had drunk the chalice of His Passion and Death.  In her arms she held with measureless reverence that sacred body which, though separated from His soul, yet remained immediately united to the very Person of the Word.  She saw the wounds, but it was too late to heal them. “From the sole of the foot unto the top of the head, there is no soundness therein: wounds and bruises and swelling sores” (Isa. i. 6). And even this poor contact was only for a short space.

 

                      Seventh Sorrow

 

     Yet there was no movement of rebellion in her, no violence of outcry against those who came to take her Son’s body and place it in the tomb.

     Joseph of Arimathea had brought fine linen to wrap His body (Mark xv. 46), Nicodemus was with him.  “They took therefore the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths, with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.  Now there was in the place where He was crucified, a garden:  and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein no man yet had been laid. There, therefore, because of the Parasceve of the Jews, they laid Jesus because the sepulchre was nigh at hand” (John xix. 40-2). It was a new sorrow for the Virgin to have to leave her Son.  But there was no weakening in her.

     From now a new life began for her.  Her role henceforth was to be at the heart of the Church Militant, sustaining it by the silence of her contemplation and her love.  Action was for others. The gospel speaks of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary who, after Joseph of Arimathea had gone, remained seated near the sepulchre (Matt. xxvii. 60-61), while the other women went off to prepare spices and ointments (Luke xxiii. 56), for the embalming of Jesus could not be long delayed.  We hear of them again on the morning of Easter Sunday, and we hear of John to whom the Virgin had been given as Mother, and of others beside. But of the Virgin herself, no word. All her life was within. Long ago she had heard the first words of Jesus and had kept them in her heart.  And now she had heard His last words, the Seven Last Words, the least of which would have given her matter for meditation for all the time still remaining to her upon earth.

     She knew that the work of Christ in Himself was consummated, and that the work of Christ in the totality of His members, the Church, had begun. She had not preached;  she had contemplated, loved, suffered during the public life of Jesus.  And now that He had founded the church in His blood, her part was still not to preach, but to contemplate, love, suffer.  Scripture mentioned her once more --- before Pentecost—but only to show her prayer mingled with that of the apostles, the brethren of Jesus and the Christian community: “All these were persevering with one mind in prayer, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren” (Acts i. 14).  On the evening of His burial, when Joseph of Arimathea had gone and the lights of the Sabbath had begun to shine in Jerusalem, she knew of her own knowledge that from now on she had no-one here below upon whom she could lean, she knew what a weight of suffering Jesus had laid upon her in making her our Mother. It was the seventh of her sorrows.

     O all you who come into this world to suffer, “behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”  And you, my brother, for whom she has wept, over whom she had wept, “do not forget, in the depth of your heart, the weeping of your Mother, that the propitiation and benediction of those days may be accomplished in you.”

     “Thy own soul a sword shall pierce.”  From the first sorrow to the seventh, the sword of Simeon’s prediction had cut steadily deeper into her heart, bringing her the realised knowledge of ever-new suffering.  Now at the end she was more desolate even than the Jerusalem of the prophet’s lamentation: “To what shall I compare thee, or to what shall I liken thee, O daughter of Jerusalem?  To what shall I equal thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Sion?  For great as the sea is thy destruction” (Lam. ii. 13). But she remained strong in sorrow. Neither her soul nor her frail body knew an instants wavering. If in the strict sense she did not actually undergo martyrdom, her love and courage immeasurably surpassed the love and courage of the martyrs.  And her suffering likewise exceeded theirs; she bore more than they of the terrible burden of the world’s sin.  She was a martyr eminently, as the philosophers say, if not formally. She surpasses all virgins in purity and all martyrs in fortitude; so that the Liturgy can hail her in the last responsory of Matins as first rose of martyrs, lily among virgins:

     Ave princeps Generosa,

     Martyrumque prima rosa,

     Virginumque lilium.

 

And at the Communion of the Mass of the Seven Dolours: “Happy the senses of the Blessed Virgin Mary who without dying, earned the palm of martyrdom beneath the cross of Our Lord.”

     Who then, so well as the Virgin of Compassion, can reveal to us the depths of the mystery of the Passion?  If only we too before death might have some small fragment of her knowledge of that mystery. At least we can long for it and pray with the church: “O God, at whose Passion, as Simeon foretold, the most sweet soul of Mary thy glorious Virgin Mother, was pierced by a sword of sorrow, mercifully grant that we who reverently meditate upon her sorrows may reap the happy fruit of thy Passion.”

 

     St John of the Cross speaks, in The Living Flame of Love, of the transfixion of the heart as a marvellous grace,  granted to the small number of souls which have been faithful to love to the end and above all to those whose love and whose spirit are to be carried forward through the ages in a succession of sons;  for, says the Mystical Doctor,  God deposits in the founders a richness of spiritual power capable of vivifying all the long line of their followers.  It is as though their hearts must be pierced in order that the flood of grace may pour out for the enrichment of the rest.

     The transfixion of the Virgin’s heart is a mystery of love and suffering still higher and more radiant than the prodigious transfixion granted to St Francis and St Teresa. Erect at the foot of the cross, the Virgin received, in that heart which was opening to the whole world, a spiritual love so strong and flaming, and tender and universal, that it could reach out to embrace every single one of those whom her Son had given to be her sons to the end of the earth and the end of time.  Thus the transfixion of the Virgin’s heart approached nearer than any other the transfixion of the Heart of Jesus, the sole source of the world’s redemption.

  Ack. 'The Last Four Sorrows'  -  Charles Journet. Published in 'The Mary Book' - Sheed and Ward, 1950.

 

    

'The Trial of Separation' - Charles Journet

 

                 'The Trial of Separation'

                     - Charles Journet

 

When death comes to take away a child there is heartbreak. But when the mother can have pride in her son, when she hears that he died in a desperate attack or for a noble cause, she finds consolation in the praises that wreathe his memory.  Her sorrow is not an unmixed grieving.

     But if with her own eyes she sees her son mocked, beaten, spit upon, what is there that can lighten her suffering? In such a moment she will ask one favour only, to be allowed to be near her son to protect him with her tenderness.  This favour Our Lady was not granted. And it was her Son who refused it.

     The episode is in the third chapter of St Mark’s gospel.  Jesus had not chosen His Apostles.  He had driven out demons and had begun to preach the Kingdom of God.  Crowds thronged about Him. He entered a house.  The crowds gathered there likewise, so that they could not even take their food.  “And when His friends had heard of it, they went out to lay hold on Him.  For it was said:  He is become mad.  And the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said: ‘He hath Beelzebub and by the prince of devils he casteth out devils’.

     Thus the scribes looked upon Jesus as one possessed; but many thought He was merely mad.  “They said,” or “It was said: He is become mad.” Who said this? Not His relations, presumably. Certainly not His Mother. But His relations and still more His Mother were anxious.  They knew that He was alone, exposed to the ill-will of the people and the hatred of the scribes.  For that cause they came.

     Poor Mother!  She knew the bite of a new sort of suffering.  Up till now it had not occurred to her that the salvation of the world required that her Son, who was Wisdom Incarnate, should be treated like a madman, and that He in whom the word of God dwelt ineffably should be accused of being possessed by Beelzebub. These insults, these blasphemies were a new note in her heart’s agony.  She knew that her Son felt them likewise and that His heart was bleeding under them. For she knew that within the house, where the scribes had come, He sought to justify Himself before them: “How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.”  He was alone against them all.

     She longed to enter, to take Him away with her, to show Him that her heart at least was faithful, to strain Him to her breast if He would allow her.  “His Mother and His brethren came.  And standing without, sent unto Him, calling Him.  And the multitude sat about Him.  And they say to Him:  behold thy mother and thy brethren without, seek for thee.”

     It was a moving moment, but Jesus was not moved.  He had been bearing the harshness of His enemies: yet the moment He meets tenderness, the moment He becomes for His Mother an object of compassion, in that moment He seems to grow harsh Himself. It almost seemed that He scarcely deigned to notice that poor maternal love that was offered to Him, that frail refuge that she would have made for him. “And answering them He said:  Who is my mother and my brethren?”  In that place these words seem hard, even cruel. What is the mystery contained in them?

     What that mystery is, He proceeds to show: “and looking round about on them who sat about Him, He saith, Behold my mother and my brethren.  For whosoever shall do the will of God, he is my brother and my sister and my mother.”  Beyond the bonds of  natural relationship appear the bonds of a new relationship, spiritual and outshining the first as the sun outshines the light of tapers. Natural relationship is not denied.  The bonds that bind husband and wife, parent and children, master and servant, still remain. Indeed, they are immeasurably ennobled (Eph. V. 21-vi. 9). But above them are the bonds that bind the children of the Kingdom in a mysterious, more intimate kinship; and these are more precious and more profoundly interior to us, are beyond the power of time and relate us to each other by what is closest in us to God.  Because this is so, the bonds of natural relationship become illicit and must be trampled underfoot whenever they so act upon us as to weaken the spiritual relationship: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke xiv.26). The saints are under no delusion as to what Our Lord means, as we shall see.

       Can it then have been that Our Lord’s kinsfolk had come to Capharnaum to dissuade Him from preaching - that, under the impulse of too earthly an affection, they were trying to deflect Him from the mission entrusted Him by His Father in heaven, of founding the Kingdom

     Yet how magnificent these privileges become once we grasp that they are the efficacious sign, the instrument, of the highest graces.  Our Lady’s motherhood according to the flesh, with all the agony and renunciation it demanded, becomes immeasurably more splendid when we know it as the cause of the purest love ever granted to a creature. Completed by Jesus’ answer, the words of the great-hearted woman of Galilee begin to reveal the fullness of their meaning. Thus, the Church can repeat them.  In the Mass ‘Salve sancta Parens’  (of which the gospel is taken from this same passage of St Luke), she joins them to those of Our Lord.  She repeats them at the Communion, when Christ enters into us to communicate to us sacramentally a little of that love which on the day of the Incarnation he communicated to the Virgin in such abundance: “Blessed is the womb of the Virgin Mary which bore the son of the eternal Father!”  By setting down here, in a more perfect light, the acclamation of the unknown woman, the Church continued to fulfil through the ages the Virgin’s prophecy: “Behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke i. 48).

     A sword shall pierce her soul, and all generations should call her blessed – blessed because in the likeness of her son, she bore suffering and desolation in their fullness.

     Is the interpretation we have given of the passages of scripture concerning the Blessed Virgin necessarily the true one?  Is it certain that Jesus, under the external semblance of repulsing His Mother’s tenderness, was actually binding her to Him still closer by an interior love and associating her with Himself in the work of redemption?  An episode which took place at the beginning of His public life but which we have held in reserve till now, seems to put the matter beyond question.  It is the episode at Cana (John ii. 1-11).

                          MARRIAGE FEAST AT CANA  -  Gerard David 1456

There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.  And the wine failing, those who were giving the feast were ashamed. Jesus’ mother saw this and said to her Son: “They have no wine.” Verbally, this was a mere statement of fact. Actually, she was asking for a miracle.  Then came Our Lord’s mysterious answer:  “Woman, what is it to me and to thee? My hour is not yet come.” The literal translation is as we have given it – What is it to me and to thee? The bearing of this phrase, used to this day by the Arabs in Palestine, is roughly expressed by the words “Leave it to me”. The whole meaning depends upon the tone in which the phrase is uttered – it might signify impatience or rebuke or indifference.  In the present instance, all three of these possible implications are negatived by the event.  But they can also bear within them great tenderness, signifying: “Do not be disturbed, I have seen all, all is well, leave it to me.”  And it was thus that Jesus spoke to His Mother.

     He called her Woman, as at the hour when He was nailed to the cross (John xix. 26) – a word of reverence, for He was speaking to her as God in regard to a solemn matter, one that went beyond the framework of family relations, for it touched upon the destiny of the Kingdom of God.

     It reads as though Jesus was quite clearly refusing the implied but unspoken request of His Mother.  He did it with great gentleness and He gave her His reason – that the hour for the inauguration of His public life of preaching and miracles was not yet come. The meaning seems perfectly clear:  Mary must trust in Him without reserve, must leave the whole matter entirely in His hands: and so, indeed, she had done from the beginning.

     But here what seemed so clear is suddenly cast into darker mystery. Jesus had just told His Mother that His hour was not yet come, and she acted as if He had said the reverse.  She seemed to take the miracle for granted.  “His mother said to the waiters: Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye.”

     Here is the key to the mystery. If there had not been the prayer of Mary, the hour fixed from all eternity for the inauguration of Jesus’ public ministry would have come later, and Jesus, who was to accredit the message He bore to men by signs and wonders, would have awaited some other occasion to manifest Himself – would have made a paralytic walk, or given sight to a blind man, or cleansed a leper.  This is what Jesus Himself was affirming when He told His Mother that in this sense His hour was not yet come. But at the same moment, by a secret illumination with which He filled her heart, He willed her to know that from all eternity the hour of His public ministry had been advanced because of the humble prayer she had just uttered.  There is profound tenderness, an infinite delicacy of love half-hidden under the mystery, restraint and even, as some readers feel, coldness of the words recorded by St John.  Marvellous, too, the power of the Virgin’s prayer. A thought of her heart, a word uttered by her with the desire to relieve the mildest of human embarrassments – the thought and the word were foreknown from all eternity, and from all eternity the hour was set forward at which Jesus should begin the public preaching of the Kingdom of God. Nothing so great has ever been said, or ever will be said, upon the might of her intercession as the gospel story of the miracle of Cana. It was the hour of Mary’s power.

     The Virgin had all power over the heart of her Son. She had done His will too utterly for Him to refuse to do hers – Voluntatem timentium se faciet (Ps. cxliv. 19) – the Lord will do the will of them that fear Him with the loving fear of a child for its father. And in fact Jesus speaks: “Fill the water pots with water."

And they filled them to the brim.  And He said to them:  "Draw out now and carry to the chief steward of the feast ----- This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested his glory.  And his disciples believed in him.”  It was to the intervention of the Virgin that they owed their belief in Him thus early.

     Mary was close to her Son in the bond of love. But at the same time, the suffering of separation, which had lain in her heart from the day the Child had slipped away from her in Jerusalem, began to grow and did not cease its growing from the moment when His public life opened.  That suffering held supreme tests in store for her.

  Ack. 'The Mary Book', published Sheed and Ward, 1950

    

    

The First Three Sorrows of Our Lady - C.C. Martindale S.J.

 

The First Three Sorrows      -    C.C. Martindale  S.J.

“The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me.”   Genesis  iv.  10.

 

Eve, so named because she was “Mother of all living” (Gen. iii. 20), became for that very reason, Mother too of all who should die.  When – the first Mater Dolorosa – she held upon her knees the murdered body of her son Abel, she stood at the head of a long history of Death, which, so far as human bodies go, is not even yet completed.  Indeed, Abel was seeming to her just then her only son; for though Cain was alive, he had fled; she could not see him: she knew nothing save that he was “in the land of wandering”.  As for Cain, he foresaw well enough that he had originated a tale of vengeance – “whosoever findeth me, shall kill me!”

            But even for him, in the hour of his despair, God provided at least this consolation – he and his race should not be exterminated: nay, on anyone who should kill him, vengeance should be wreaked “seven-fold”. Yet also, even this became the occasion for a sneer and for new bloodthirstiness in that tainted race.  His descendant Lamech made a song:

 

‘As for me, I will slay a man for merely wounding me!                                 Yes, a young man for so much as bruising me!                                                  If Cain shall be avenged seven-fold,                                                          Then Lamech, seven and seventy- fold! '

 

And ever since there has been in our wretched world a race of the violent and the outcasts – of Cains, and Ishmaels, and Esau’s.                

But to Eve a better consolation was appointed.  She bore another son, and called him Seth, exclaiming: “God has given (or assigned) me another seed instead of Abel”, for Seth is assonant to the word sath, “assigned”.  So once more Eve became Mother of the Living.

            Life, Death, and Life may be said to be the history of Mary, too, albeit there was no sin in her. 

            You may say that Our Lady’s self-sacrificial life began when she made (as we cannot but believe that she did) her decision to remain virgin. This certainly involved, for her, the renunciation of any hope that she should be Mother of the Messias.  The prophecy of Isais did not create or perhaps even witness to a general tradition that the Messias should be born of a virgin. The humble child experienced the inspiration thus to dedicate herself wholly to God, and, obedient as ever, as ever His handmaiden “whose eyes are upon the hands of her mistress”,  she listened to the heavenly prompting and was content to wait, to hope and to pray, and would have given the most unselfish homage to the Messias’s Mother, should she have been allowed, someday, to meet her. She was happy in her self-sacrifice:   but it was a “whole burnt offering” of herself and her future that she made.  No more extreme instance of so losing one’s life that one finds it!

            The episode of the Visitation must have been one of pure ecstasy: but, had it not been that Mary   “waited”   thus “upon the Lord”, and interposed no conditions of her own upon the sequence of events, the period of St Joseph’s bewilderment must have been agony, and even Bethlehem a very shadowed joy, seeing that she can hardly but have felt that He had   “come to His own , and His own received Him not”.

                                               

     First Sorrow.  

  But, with that alternation of pain and consolation which, we saw, was God’s method from the outset, the Presentation in the Temple made up for that, at least for a moment.   Ample, indeed manifestly miraculous, was Simeon’s recognition and acceptance of the Child he took up into his arms: how, amid all that throng, could he have singled out the working man and his young wife and her Baby, save by divine illumination?  And magnificent indeed was the prophecy of his Psalm!  But at once the shadow fell again. Turning to Mary herself, he said:

            “This Child is set to bring about the fall, as well as the uprising, of many in Israel – to be a Sign, but a Sign that shall be contradicted - that so the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed – yes! - and thine own soul a sword shall pierce!”

            We have placed Simeon’s parenthesis after the words that follow it in St Luke, for clearness’ sake.  Simeon had most clearly foretold the Messiah-hood of Mary’s Son – that He should be a light for the Gentiles no less than a Glory for the Jews.  But His victory was to be no more than partial. Not all would receive that Light nor walk in it.  While some should rise and stand upright because of Him, others should fall because of Him, and thus should be revealed that most mysterious thing -  the innermost “set” of the soul, obscure till some shock or challenge brings it to light:  St Luke’s word dialogismio  means more than ‘thoughts’; it means the whole mental movement; the putting this against that and the assessing of the result:  the Child could not but become a sign: something set up high and inevitably noticed: but some would say this about it; some that.  In a thousand ways Mary’s heart should be pierced as by a sword: her love for her people, which was God’s people: her anguish when she should watch them rejecting their Saviour:  her love for her Son and her desire to see Him universally triumphant; and her resignation to God’s Will, which did not intend to coerce human wills so as to ensure that universal triumph: her longing that her little Child should be happy, and, her perception, ever growing, that He was marked for  Martyrdom: yes, and that she, inseparable from Him, would have to share in that which we now know to have been Calvary.

                                                          

'Mother and Child'   -  Montagna

 Second Sorrow

            The months went by (perhaps a year or more) a breathing–space. Then came the strange joy of the Magi’s visit, followed forthwith by the news that in direct consequence of that visit Herod was seeking the Child’s life.  The Holy Family fled:  true, Egypt was not far: its northern part was full of Jews who even had a sort of model temple there.  Mary and Joseph would have found their own talk, customs, and compatriots.  And they were safe.  But apart from the tormenting anxiety of the actual flight, and the heartbreak due to the murder of the Innocents of which echoes may easily have reached her, it must have seemed bewildering to Mary that already the “Sign” was being spoken against – humanly speaking, everything seemed to be going wrong.  Even when Herod died, and they felt safe in returning to Bethlehem (where I think Joseph had meant to go on living), they were too frightened to stay there once they heard that Herod Archelaus had inherited Judea. He was a worse monster even than his father. So they returned to Nazareth.

            Even there, life was no suave idyll.  When Jesus was about ten years old, the turbulent north-country Galileans made a raid on an armoury of Herod Antipas at Sepphoris, visible from the hillcrest over Nazareth.  The Romans, to make an example, crucified two thousand men of that townlet and the neighbourhood.  Jesus and Mary must have been accustomed throughout their lives to the sight of men dying upon crosses.

 

   Third Sorrow

            But a true turning-point was imminent.  Jesus seems to dissociate Himself from these two souls who loved Him so dearly. The Holy Family went yearly to Jerusalem for the Pasch.  Jesus was now twelve years old – on the eve of coming “of age”.  When the caravan returned, He was not to be found.  The first stage of such a pilgrimage is said to have been short:  next morning, therefore, they were back in Jerusalem, hunting in anguish for Him.  Not till the next day did they find Him under the Temple colonnades where Rabbis held classes and taught the scriptures to children.  And there was Jesus, “listening and asking questions”. When they on their side catechised Him, “they were all of them out of themselves” at the intelligence shown by His answers.  But when His parents saw Him, they were “thunderstruck”, and Mary said: “Son, why have you done so to us? Your father and I have sought you in anguish!” But He said:  “How was it that you sought  Me? Did you not know that I must be–it was My duty to be–in My Father’s House?”  X   “Thy father and I?”–No: God was His Father.  The house at Nazareth? -No: His native home was God’s House – the Temple.

X   The Douay version has “about My Father’s business”.  The Greek phrase might mean either.           

            Ack. 'The Mary Book' published Sheed and Ward 1950.                                                                       

'I Know that my Redeemer Liveth' - Job.

 

In the traditional liturgy of the Catholic Church it is customary at this time of the liturgical year for the readings at Sunday Mass and at Sunday Office to be taken from the Book of Ecclesiasticus or Job. Commenting on this, St. Gregory says:  "There are men all athirst for passing joys who are ignorant or indifferent where eternal blessings are concerned.  Poor wretches!  They congratulate themselves on possessing the good things of this life without regretting those of above, which they have lost..  Fashioned for light and truth, they never lift up the eyes of the soul;  never betray the smallest desire or longing for the contemplation of their eternal home.  Giving themselves over to the pleasures among which they are thrown, they bestow their affection upon a dreary place of exile as if it were their fatherland; and surrounded by darkness, they are full of rejoicing as if they were illumined by a brilliant light.  On the other hand the elect, in whose eyes fleeting goods are of no value, seek after those for which their souls were made.  Kept in this world by the bonds of the flesh, each, none the less, is carried in spirit beyond it while making the wholesome resolve to despise the passing things of time, and to desire the things which endure for eternity."

    As for Job, he is set before us in Holy Scripture as the very type of a man detached from the goods of this world.  "If," said he, "we have received good things at the hands of God, why should we not receive evil?... The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away... Blessed be the name of the Lord."  The lessons from the Book of Job, deal with the experience of this pious and wealthy personage of the land of Hus, endowed at first with every blessing, but suddenly overwhelmed with the most frightful calamities which mortal man can endure.

    To summarise the Scripture narrative, Satan presented himself one day before God, and said:  "I have gone round about the earth, and walked through it, and have seen how Thou hast protected Job and his house, and all that he possesses.  But stretch forth Thy hand a little, and touch all that he hath:  and see if he will not curse Thee  to Thy face. Then the Lord said to Satan, "Behold all that he hath is in thy hand;  only spare his life."  And very soon Job had lost his flocks, his goods and his family, while he himself was stricken by Satan with " a very grievous" ulcer, from the "sole of the foot even to the top of his head".

    Bearing in mind Satan's malice, the Church makes us ask that we may be defended "against all the attacks of the evil one".  His is the kingdom of death, and if almighty God allowed him his way, he would rob all beings of the life they possess.  St Paul speaks of an infliction from which he suffered as "an angel of Satan sent to buffet me".  And as we read in Holy Scripture, it was the devil who reduced Job to such a state that the holy man could cry: "Hell is my house: and I have made my bed in darkness.  I have said to rottenness - 'thou art my father; to worms - my mother and sister.'  My flesh is consumed like a worm-eaten garment, and my bones cleave to my skin.."

    Further, the Church applies to the dead the pressing appeal which Job made on this occasion to his friends.  "Have pity upon me, you at least my friends, for the hand of the Lord hath stricken me." But his call met with no response and Job turns towards God and cries with a firm hope:  "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth.  And I shall be clothed again with my skin: and in my flesh shall I see God.  Whom I myself shall see and my eyes shall behold and not another.  This my hope, is laid up in my bosom."

    Job also describes the joy with which he will one day hear the voice of God calling him to a new life:  "Thou shalt call me and I will answer Thee; to the work of Thy hands Thou wilt reach out Thy right hand." And the Lord accepted the face of Job ...  And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before ... And the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning.   (Ack.'St.Andrew's Daily Missal. imp.1952)

    The experience of Job is one which is shared in some way and to some degree by all of us, for the very nature of our lives involves both suffering and joy, resignation and hope. However the essential factor for Job was that he recognised his sufferings as ordained by God, and in spite of apparently losing everything, he remained a loyal and faithful servant of God, openly proclaiming God's Majesty and divine Kingship over his life, and always filled with divine hope and trust in God's will. We know that God was well pleased, and rewarded Job for his loyalty and trust. Unfortunately so many in today's world have no love nor even belief in Almighty God, and the idea of bearing a cross willingly in this life for His honour and glory, never occurs to them. Thus we have a world largely without God, ignorant and devoid of divine hope, and in which God's love for humanity is unrecognised and unreciprocated. Job's humility and acceptance of all that God willed for him, is a lesson for us all. We desperately seek peace, love and happiness, in our lives, during the course of which we will inevitably experience our own crosses of pain and suffering. We should not complain or criticise God, but instead  reciprocate Job's words:-  "If we have received good things at the hands of God, why should we not receive evil?... The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away... Blessed be the name of the Lord."  

The Sixth Station: 'Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus' by Caryll Houselander

 

This post is a further extract from Caryll Houselander's book 'The Stations of the Cross'

The Sixth Station:  Veronica wipes the Face of Jesus

Now, while Simon labours under the Cross with Jesus, while Mary, his Mother follows behind him in the crowd, someone – a woman-- forces her way through the rabble, even through the guard of Roman soldiers surrounding him, and comes face to face with Christ.  She is driven by compassion.

The face that the Lord turns to her is terrible to look on; it is difficult to believe that it is the face of the Son of God.  It is difficult even for those who have once seen his face shining with the brilliance of a fire of snow upon Tabor, to believe in him now. Two of them have fled from him, just as those others have done, though they have seen him command the wind and the waves and raise the dead.

Now that face of infinite majesty and compelling beauty is unrecognisable. The eyes which could see into the secret places of men’s souls are blinded, swollen from the long sleepless nights of trials and judgement, and filled with sweat and blood.  The cheeks are bruised and dirty; the mouth swollen; the hair “like ripe corn” is tangled by the crown of thorns and matted with blood.

Certainly, there is no sign now of the beauty that could win a man’s heart by a single glance, or of the power that can rule the tempests and give life to the dead.

On the contrary, here is a man who is the very personification of humiliation, who is ugly with wounds and suffering, who is in the hands of other men who have bound him and are leading him out to die, and who is not even able to carry his own Cross alone.

It is all this, from which his close friends have fled, which drives this woman to him.  It is the ugliness and the helplessness which frightened those whom he called his “own” away, that draws her to him; it is her compassion that gives her the courage to come close to him.

She comes with a veil in her hands, a cloth on which to wipe the poor, disfigured face.

She kneels, as we kneel to wipe the tears from the faces of little children.  Gratefully, the head bowing over her sinks into the clean linen cloth, and for a moment is covered by it.

Then he raises his head, and she, kneeling there, her own face lifted, sees the face of Christ looking down at her, and behind it the great beam of the Cross. The two are together within the shadow of the Cross on the street, Veronica, and Christ.

She sees the majesty that was hidden, for now she has wiped away what she can of the blood and sweat and tears; she sees that they hid a face that is serene in its suffering, calm, majestic, infinitely tender.  The swollen mouth smiles, the exhausted eyes are full of gentleness; the expression, after all, is not one of defeat and despair, but of triumph and joy.

The power of Christ is able to control fiercer storms than those of the wind and sea.  It is able to still the torrents of evil of the whole world in the stillness of his own heart.  It is the power which enables him to command the floods of all the sorrow in the world and hold them within his peace.  It is the power which can not only give life back to the dead but can change death itself to life. It is the power of divine love.

So, for a moment, a vision more wonderful than that of Tabor is granted to the woman whose compassion drove her to discover Christ in a suffering man. Then Christ passes on, on the way of sorrows, leaving her with the veil in her hands and on it the imprint of that face of suffering that hid the beauty of God.

In Christ burying his face in that woman’s veil on the Via Crucis, we are looking at the many children of today whom war has twisted and tortured out of the pattern of childhood, who are already seared and vitiated by fear, persecution, homelessness and hunger.

We see grown-up people who have been maimed or disfigured, those whom chronic illness or infirmity has embittered.  We see, too, those most tragic ones among old people, those who are not loved and are not wanted by their own, those in whom the ugliness, not the beauty, of old age is visible.  We see the tragic ones who are cut off from all but the very few, the Veronicas of the world, by mental illness.  We see, too, many who are dying, who with Christ are coming to the end of their Via Crucis, yet sometimes without realising that Christ is suffering for and in them.

Suffering is not something to sentimentalise.  It can obliterate even the beauty of childhood. It can ennoble but it can also degrade; it can enlarge a man’s heart, but it can also contract and shrink it.  To the sufferer who does not know that he is indwelt by Christ, his pain of mind and body, his humiliation and loneliness, are baffling.  He can see no purpose in it; he is embittered by it, and his bitterness sets up a barrier between himself and others, imprisoning him in his own loneliness.  Outwardly, he shows only the ugliness of the world’s sorrow, suffering and all the effects of sin.

It is the Veronicas of today who wipe away his ugliness from the face of Christ living on in man.  The Veronicas of today are all those in whom compassion overcomes fear and repulsion, all those who seek and find the lost and the forsaken, the downtrodden and the lonely.  Those who seek the maladjusted, broken children of our wars and our slums, who go on their knees to wipe the tears from their eyes.

They are the nurses who comfort the dying in hospitals, who wipe the sweat of death from their faces. They are the Sisters of Mercy who go into the homes of the sick and poor to serve them.  They are all those who befriend the friendless in our mental hospitals.  They are those who, in their own families, tend and comfort the old and infirm in their last days.

They are, too, those priests who minister to the dying, and who go into the prisons to absolve the prisoners and restore Christ in their souls; those priests who follow men to the scaffold, cleansing them with the spiritual waters of absolution.

It is not only the physical wounds that the Veronicas of today tend and cleanse; it is, by that same act of tender compassion, the mental and spiritual wounds, the emotional wounds that corrode and fester in the spirit, almost obliterating the image and likeness of Christ. It is not only the sweat that blinds the eyes of the dying that they wipe away, but that which blinds the soul.  Ignorance of Christ, ignorance of their own supreme destiny of being “other Christs”, misunderstanding of suffering and its ugliness, that ugliness so resented by those who cannot see beneath it.

Until someone comes to reveal the secret of Christ indwelling the sufferer’s soul to him, he cannot see any purpose in his pain. There is only one way to reveal Christ living on in the human heart to those who are ignorant concerning it.  That is Veronica’s way, through showing Christ’s love.  When one comes, maybe a stranger, maybe one close at home but whose compassion was not guessed before, and reveals Christ’s own pity in themselves, the hard crust that has contracted the sufferer’s heart melts away and, looking into the gentle face of this Veronica of today, the sufferer looks, as it were, into a mirror in which he sees the beauty of Christ reflected at last from his own soul.

Until Veronica came to him on his way to Calvary, Christ was blinded by blood and sweat and tears. The merciful hands of Veronica wiped the blindness from his eyes; looking into her face, he saw his own beauty reflected in it.  He saw his own eyes looking back at him from hers.  She had done this thing in the power in which alone she could do it, the power of Christ’s own love.

In the compassion on her lifted face, Christ saw, in the hour of his extreme dereliction, the triumph of his own love for men.  He saw his love, radiant, triumphant in her, and in all the Veronicas to come through all time – in them and in those sufferers in whom his own divine beauty would be restored by their compassion.

 

Prayer

 

Saviour of the World,

take my heart

which shrinks

from the stark realism

and ugliness of suffering,

and expand it with your love.

Open it wide

with the fire of your love,

as a rose is opened

by the heat of the sun.

 

Drive me by the strength

of your tenderness

to come close to human pain.

Give me hands

that are hardened

by pity,

that will dip into any water

and bathe any wound

in mercy.

 

Give me your hands,

hands that heal the blind

by their touch,

hands that raise the dead

and are nailed to the Cross;

Give me your hands

to tend the wounds of the body

and the wounds of the mind.

 

Give me your eyes

to discern the beauty of your face

hidden under the world’s sorrow.

Give me the grace

to be a Veronica,

to wipe away

the ugliness of sin

from the human face,

and to see

your smile on the mouth of pain,

your majesty on the face of dereliction,

and, in the bound and helpless,

the power of your infinite love.

 

Lord, take my heart

and give me yours.

'The First Station - Jesus is Condemned to Death' - Caryll Houselander

 

We are now in Holy Week, and this post is taken from Caryll Houselander's book 'The Stations of the Cross', published in 1955 by Sheed and Ward. The author goes into considerable depth into the circumstances of Christ's Passion, as portrayed in the traditional Catholic liturgical prayers of the fourteen 'Stations of the Cross' represented on the inside walls of most Catholic churches world-wide, by paintings, wall carvings, prints and symbols etc.

Caryll Houselander was an English Roman Catholic writer and artist, very well known in the mid 20th century, as a writer and illustrator of children's books, religious books, and poetry, the latter in an idiosyncratic style which I like very much. Her religious poetry is practical and down to earth, and reflects her strongly held faith and belief that God's presence exists in all men and women, although not necessarily recognised and respected.  

This post considers the First Station, Jesus is condemned to death.

                                      *****************

The First Station: Jesus is Condemned to Death

 

“Behold the Man!”

                He is a man of sorrows.  He is covered in bruises and stripes. He is made a laughing stock. He is crowned with a crown of thorns.  A reed is put into his hands for a sceptre, a tattered soldier’s cloak is thrown over his naked shoulders. His eyes are blindfolded.  His face covered with spittings. He is bound like a dangerous criminal. His own people have chosen a murderer before him. His friends have forsaken him. The kiss of treason burns on his cheek.

“He has no comeliness whereby we shall desire him.”

                “He is a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people.”

            And he is condemned to death.

“Away with him! --- Away with him! --- Crucify him!”

            “Behold the man!”

            Behold the Son of God!

            Behold the man abiding in mankind!

            He has put on our humanity. He has put you on --- and me. He has covered himself with our shame, blindfolded his eyes with our blindness, bound himself with our slavery to self. He is bruised by our falls. He bleeds from our wounds. He sheds our tears. He has made himself weak with our weakness. Faint with our faint-heartedness. He is going to die our death.

            All men are condemned to die, but he is condemned to die not only his own death, but yours and mine, and that of every man whom he will indwell through all the ages to come.

            “Behold the Son of God!”

            “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased!”

            He alone of all men born need not have died; but because things are as they are, because we have to pay the price of our sins, and our life on this earth must inevitably be a journey through suffering to death, Christ has chosen to give himself to every man who will receive him, so that each man who wills can tread that road with the feet of Christ, and at the end of it he can, if he wills, die, not his own death but Christ’s.

            That is why death is the choice of Divine Love.

            “Dost thou doubt that if I call on my Father, even now, he will send more than twelve legions of angels to my side? But how, were it so, should the Scriptures be fulfilled, which have prophesied that all should be as it is?” (Matt.26 v. 53-4).

            His bound hands hold back the legion of angels.

            He has chosen our impotence in order to give us the power of his love, our weakness to give us his strength, our fear to give us his courage, our ignominy to give us his majesty, our pain to give us his peace, our wounds to give us his power to heal, our dying to give us his life; our interdependence that we may give him to one another.

            “Behold the man.”

In him behold mankind!

            Already in this mysterious moment of time, at the beginning of the Via Crucis, Christ has given himself to all those whom he will indwell through all the centuries to come; already he has taken them to himself, made them one with himself. All manner of men, and women, and children, the rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous, saints and sinners, all who will be redeemed by his Passion are in Christ, and his Heavenly Father sees them all as Christ, his Son, in whom he is well pleased.

            There, in the Prince of Peace, stripped and wearing a soldier’s coat that has been put on him, are all the conscripts compelled to go to war. There in the young man in the flower of his manhood, going out willingly to be sacrificed, are all those young men who go willingly to die in battle for their fellow men.

            “This is the greatest love a man can show, that he should lay down his life for his friends” (John 15v.13)

            There, in the prisoner, bound, publicly shamed, condemned to the death of criminals, thieves and murderers, are all the criminals who will repent, and accept death on the scaffold as their due.

            There, in “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”, are the kings of this world.

            “Art thou a king then?”

“It is thy own lips that have called me king.”

“My kingdom is not of this world.”

            There, crowned with thorns, and bearing a reed for a sceptre, are the kings of our days, whose crowns are thorn indeed and whose sceptres are reeds shaken by the wind.

            There, in the blameless Lord, made subject to men, illimitably patient, silent when he is mocked, silent before Herod, silent when Peter denies him, are all those innocent children who are so commonly patient and inarticulate in suffering, and whose suffering and death baffles and scandalizes us.

            “ --- you will all be scandalized in me!”

            There, in him, are the martyrs of all times; those of our own time with every detail of their martyrdom, including those which their persecutors try to hide, shown to the whole world.

            The trickery---the utter injustice---the faked evidence---the verdict decided before the trial---and the things that have been done in secret to prepare the victim, if possible to break him: the mental torture, a veritable crowning with thorns; the long nights without sleep. Cruellest of all, the attempt to make him a stumbling block to his own people.

            It is significant that everything contributing to that condemnation is parallel with everything that contributes to the passion of the martyrs of our own times.

            The intrigues and the fears of politicians, the hatred of fanatics, mass hysteria. The unstable crowd swayed by paid agitators, the popular craving for sensation--- and those many Pilates of our day, who wash their hands of the responsibility of knowing “What is truth?”, who shut their eyes to Christ in man, and try to escape from their own uneasiness by evasions.

            “I am innocent of the blood of this just man --- look you to it!”

            “In any case, there is nothing that I could do about it!”

            Neither is it by chance that those who will carry out the sentence will be the young and ignorant soldiers of an army of occupation, lads brought up like the soldiers of the Red Army, deprived of the knowledge of the one God, obeying their orders without question, because they are conditioned to obey orders without questioning or thinking.

            “Father, forgive them; they do not know what it is they are doing.”

            “Behold the man!”

            Yes, and behold in him yourself.  Each one of us can recognise himself, a sinner, in the disfiguring, the bruising, the ugliness, hiding the beauty of the fairest of the sons of men. And there can be few who do not recognise themselves too, in the utter loneliness of this man in the midst of the crowd that lately spread their garments to be trodden by the little ass he rode on, and now clamour for his blood.

            “Behold we have seen him disfigured and without beauty; his aspect is gone from him; he has borne our sins and suffers for us; and he was wounded for our iniquities, and by his stripes we are healed.”

                                          

                                                                   PRAYER

           “Lord that I may see!”

            Give me light to see you in my even-Christian,

            And to see my even-Christian in you.

            Give me faith to recognise you

            in those under my own roof.

            In those who are with me, day after day,

            on the way of the Cross.

            Let me recognise you

            not only in saints and martyrs,

            in the innocence of children,

            in the patience of old people

            waiting quietly for death.

            In the splendour of those

            who die for their fellow men;

            But let me also discern your beauty

            through the ugliness of suffering for sin

            that you have taken upon yourself.

            Let me know you in the outcast,

            the humiliated, the ridiculed, the shamed.

            In the sinner who weeps for his sins.

            Give me even the courage

            to look at your Holy Face,

            almost obliterated,

            bruised and lacerated

            by my own guilt,

            and to see myself!

            Look back at me, Lord,

            through your tears,

            with my own eyes,

            and let me see you,

               Jesus, condemned to death,

            in myself,

            and in all men

            who are condemned to die.

                                                       Caryll Houselander