Feeling What Mary Has Felt, Our Lady of Sorrows, September 15, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame, Manhattan
Our Lady of Sorrows
September 15, 2023
Heb 5:7-9, Ps 31, Jn 19:25-27

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, which is a day to focus on the Lord’s victory. Unlike on Good Friday when we ponder his sufferings upon the Cross, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross not only celebrates the rediscovery of the Cross after it was stolen in the early Church but the rediscovery, in a sense, of the meaning of Jesus’ triumph on the Cross as something in which we should glory rather than be sad or ashamed.
• Today, the day after celebrating Jesus’ victory on the Cross, however, we ponder his mother weeping and sorrowful. It’s a bit of a jarring juxtaposition, one that ought to get us to ask why we would contemplate her in this way. [Starting from 1423 in Germany, there was a commemoration of Mary’s sufferings and sorrows on the Friday after the third Sunday of Easter. In 1600, the feast became popular in France and was set to be celebrated the Friday of Passiontide before Palm Sunday. Pope Benedict XIII extended it to the universal Church in 1727. In 1668, however, a separate feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary was established, at the request of the Servites for the Third Sunday of September. In 1814, Pope Pius VII extended it to the universal Church and in 1913, Pope St. Pius X fixed it on September 15, the day after the Exaltation of the Cross.] The fundamental reason why we ponder Mary’s sorrows the day after the Exaltation is because her tears are not over her Son’s victory but over the sins of all of us that led to his sufferings and how many of us who have not yet entered into his victory. It’s not over what her Divine offspring accomplished on Calvary, but how many of us allow his gifts to go in vain, how many of us fail to make up in our flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the Church (Col 1:24).
• The Church has long pondered the suffering and joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary as she accompanied her Son and shared in his redeeming work. There has for centuries been devotion to her “Seven Sorrows”: The prophecy of Simeon, when he announced not only that Jesus would be a sign of contradiction pointing to the ruin and resurrection of many but that her own heart would be pierced with a sword; the flight into Egypt after Herod’s henchmen were trying to assassinate her and God’s little boy; the loss of Jesus for three days at the age of 12; meeting Jesus on the Way to Calvary; seeing Jesus suffer and die on the Cross; receiving Jesus’ body into her arms at the foot of the Cross; and placing Jesus’ body in the tomb.
• Today is a day on which we ponder what it must have felt like to have her heart and soul pierced in these ways. We acknowledge Mary’s role as a co-redeemer through her echoing her son’s prayers, supplications, loud cries, tears, reverence and obedience, which the Letter to the Hebrews highlights. As we prayed in the Stabat Mater Sequence before the Gospel, “Is there one who would not weep, ‘whelmed in miseries so deep, Christ’s dear Mother to behold?” But our meditation is not supposed to stop there. By God’s grace it’s meant to lead us to compassion, to suffering with Mary. We pray in that Sequence words we should take seriously: “O sweet Mother! font of love, touch my spirit from above, make my heart with yours accord. Make me feel as you have felt; make my soul to glow and melt with the love of Christ, my Lord. Holy Mother, pierce me through, in my heart each wound renew of my Savior crucified. Let me share with you his pain, who for all our sins was slain, who for me in torments died. Let me mingle tears with thee, mourning him who mourned for me, all the days that I may live. By the cross with you to stay, there with you to weep and pray, is all I ask of you to give. Virgin of all virgins blest! Listen to my fond request: let me share your grief divine. Let me to my latest breath, in my body bear the death of that dying Son of yours.” Today we ask her for the grace to share her grief divine, to join our tears to hers, to bear in our body the death of Jesus so that we might in turn share his life.
• But Mary’s heart is pierced not only by the sufferings of her divine Son Jesus, but also all her spiritual sons and daughters given to her in the third Annunciation carried out by her Son hanging upon the Cross, when he, seeing Mary and his beloved disciple, St. John, at the foot of the Cross said, respectively, “Woman, behold your son” and “Behold your mother.” And like any Mother, this “Holy Mother” mourns and weeps and suffers whenever she sees any of her children suffer. A couple of weeks ago the Church pondered the example of St. Monica who wept for 32 years for the conversion of her husband, mother-in-law and son, St. Augustine. If St. Monica wept that much, how much more will the sinless Virgin Mary weep for the conversion of all God’s prodigal sons and daughters? How much will she weep for us when we choose against her Son? How much will she weep for those who don’t know him and his love or wander far from him, lost in life? She weeps for all of us who send up to her our “sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”
• Here at this Church of Notre Dame, every day we gaze on this replica of the Grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes, where Our Lady appeared in 1858 to St. Bernadette, and asked her repeatedly to pray and do penance for sinners, because she herself never ceases to pray for them with her heart, words and tear ducts. Twelve years earlier, in the French alps on the eastern side of France, Our Lady appeared to two young children in the French alps in 1846 in LaSalette, a feast the Church will mark next Tuesday, September 19. As the two shepherd children Melanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud were grazing their sheep, they found Mary sobbing. We all need to ponder that image of Mary bawling her eyes out with her face in her hands. It’s tempting to think of the Blessed Mother exclusively in the beautiful images of Murillo, crowned with stars, stomping on the serpent, with the moon under her feet. But it’s key to grasp her tears, because without them, we won’t grasp her love, and we may not be opening ourselves fully to receive that love. Her tears initially frightened the 14-year-old girl and 11-year-old boy, but she told them not to be afraid, to come close, because she wanted to announce to them great news. That was the great news of conversion. They had built a little shrine called “Paradise” and that’s where Mary first appeared, to show them that not everyone was on the way to Paradise. She lamented four practices that are still very common today: blaspheming the name of God; missing Sunday Mass; failing to pray, and not even taking the conversion of Lent seriously. She was calling them, and through them all of us, to do the opposite: to use our thoughts and speech to praise God; to prioritize the great gift of her Son in the Eucharist; to become people who pray; and to repent and believe in the Gospel and live a repentant life. She wore a radiant crucifix that had two symbols on it, one a hammer and another a pair of pincers, which was a sign of the freedom that everyone has, the freedom to refuse God and hammer Jesus to the Cross by sin, or the freedom to love God and take the pincers to remove the nails. That is the choice that faces every Christian. She weeps when we choose the hammer, not just because of what that means for Jesus her Son but what that means for each of us with the hammer in our hand. She also wants us to share her grief divine, to learn how to mourn for others and their sins so that we may like her be blessed and consoled, as her Son promised in the Beatitudes.
• But as we ponder Mary’s “grief divine,” we recognize that, as St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, we Christians grieve differently than the rest because we grieve with hope. And no one has more hope that the one we call Mater Spei. Her tears are those of sorrow but also of joy, having seen so many conversions of her sons and daughters. Her sorrows are joined in hope to a perpetual Magnificat in which she praises the Lord who has mercy from generation to generation, who is mindful of that mercy that he showed to Abraham and all our fathers in the faith.
• Today Mary gathers us all here around the altar, around the body and blood of her Son offered on Calvary, praying that we may receive more and more and live by the fruits of this sacrifice. She wants to make our heart burn like hers. Her tears have irrigated the soil of our soils precisely to receive this gift and she’d like to intercede for us to have a similar gift of tears as we approach a situation in the world in which so many of her spiritual sons and daughters treat each other as Cain did Abel, and then be motivated as she to intervene with love. As we pray on her feast day, we ask her to intercede for us to obtain the grace that we may console her today and console her Son by living the unity and love he seeks to bring about by what we won for us from the Cross and what he left us in this everlasting sacrifice. Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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