Sorrow upon sorrow

Today, we remember the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady who had to witness the Crucifixion and Death of her beloved son, and Our beloved Lord.

Praying Lauds this morning, I held in my heart all those who are suffering loss at the moment and I rather feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of sorrow that this world contains.

Grief is a terrible thing because it has its roots in the most precious love and yet, when the object of our love is hurt, damaged, or ripped from us, the pain is so unbearable that we feel we daren't love again because there is nothing left of us that we can afford. Like Our Lady, we are faced with a bleakness of a world without love, without joy, and without worth. Our purpose has gone and, often, we blame ourselves for its loss with a text book all of whose sentences begin, "If only I'd..."

There are the famous stages of grief but, to the one suffering, such psychobabble is not helpful - it's just words.

And it is appalling to watch your friends go through their grief: you end up with a grief of your own born of frustration and guilt that you can't reach out and help them, because the wounds lie within the most intimate part of their being: places to which only a very few have access, and maybe only the Divine touch. The fear for the friend is that any attempt to comfort will stab like a red-hot dagger into the cause of grief and cause more hurt at a time when healing is supposed to be occurring.

It might appear that Our Lady has it easy because at least her son rose on the third day. How can she possibly know the sorrows that we go through now - the ones that won't get solved by a miraculous resurrection as was hers?

Of course she can sympathise and empathise. It is all a question of time.

What we go through today in our grief, she went through. If we feel that we  have no hope, then so did she. If we feel that our world is dark and without joy, then so did she as she witness the darkness over the Earth as if it were the end of Time itself. Every day of our grief, we stand with Our Lady at the foot of the cross. Every day of our grief takes us to good Friday when we see Life dead and mangled upon the cross. We participate in that Good Friday always in our sorrow and we will do so for the rest of our lives on Earth. Unlike Our Lady, we do have the benefit of hindsight. We know that the Resurrection is a fact, a fact that leads us to the resurrection of the dead at the end of Time's meaning. She has to live in the hope that her son's word's of His resurrection are true.

Our Lady's sorrows are but a few days, but she carries them into Eternity because Our Lord carries His wounds into Eternity with Him. These days of her sorrow are given to Eternity so that all who sorrow may sorrow with her and in her, even if this hurt and pain may last for the rest of our earthly lives. We may not feel it, but we have been deemed by the Divine Will of the Crucified God Himself to be worthy of His concern in our grief through those of His mother. As we offer our own sorrows in participation with hers, we also hope to participate in the joy of seeing her son, beholding His face and weeping tears of true happiness.