CHAPTER I ++++++++The Martyrdom of Mary++++++++ SECTION III THE FOUNTAINS OF OUR LADY'S DOLORS We may now proceed to our third inquiry: What were the fountains of our Lady's dolors? By fountains we do not exactly mean causes, but rather the peculiar sources of feeling in her heart, which gave to her sorrows their distinguishing bitterness. When a mother loses her only son, the loss is of itself bitterness enough; but a character and intensity are given to it by circumstances which awaken particular feelings within her breast. Either he was so beautiful that the loss seems all the more intolerable, or he was so full of moral or intellectual promise, or he was taken so young, or there was something which, humanly speaking, might have been so easily prevented in the actual cause of his death, or there was a special combination of family circumstances which just at that time made his death a greater blow than at any other date it would have been; these, and similar things which might be indefinitely multiplied, are centres of peculiar bitterness round which sorrow gathers, deepening, broadening, magnifying, embittering it, far beyond the measure of the real affliction. Yet all these things are to the mourner the most stern realities, and by no means imaginary or merely sentimental aggravations. In the case of our Blessed Lady nothing could go beyond the real affliction, because of Him whose sufferings were the cause of hers. On the contrary, human sorrow, even Mary's sorrow, could not equal the real cause of grief. Nevertheless, there were centres also in her heart round which her sorrows gathered more thickly, and ached more cruelly, and throbbed more vehemently than elsewhere. It is these centres which we must now consider, these special fountains of perennial bitterness, premising that of course the perfections of Mary's heart are so far beyond our understanding, that there were doubtless many sources of keen suffering to her which we cannot appreciate, perhaps not even imagine, and that while we traverse the ground which is known to us we must not forget all the regions which lie beyond it still undiscovered, the exploring of which may perhaps be one of the many delightful occupations left for Heaven. The first of these fountains was in the thought that she could not die with Jesus. There is hardly any mother who would not under such circumstances have longed to die. Death is better than life to a broken heart; and where death is not a separation, but an unbroken companionship, only a companionship transferred from the desolate earth to the bosom of our Heavenly Father, to what stricken mother would it not have been a boon beyond all worlds? How incomparably such to Mary! Never was son so much to earthly mother as Jesus was to her; never was any son so good and beautiful and dear a son, never any so much a son. The rights of both father and mother centred in the one heart of the Virgin Mother; so that He was twice her Son, double her Son. Who can tell the attractions of His Sacred Humanity, or how the love of Him took root in that deep maternal heart? Then He was God beside, and for three-and-thirty years had been living in obedience to her, in a union of love so transporting that it would have taken her life a thousand times if He had not hindered it, and that, not by tempering the sweet vehemence of love, but by strengthening her heart with His omnipotence. He was going. His sun was sinking in a red sea of blood, among the wildest clouds of shame. She could never forget. Calvary would be in her heart to the last. It would be one of those remembrances which time could never soften, one of those horrors which grow more horrible in the distance, when we can take them in and not be confused by the presence of their excess. But even if it were not so, Jesus would be gone, and why should she live? What was there to live for? The sunshine was put out. It was more of an end than the end of the world could be. It was a darkness inconceivable, nay, it might appear a downright impossibility: for how was the world to go on without Jesus? With the closing of His eyes, it might appear as if all benediction were withdrawn from the earth, and a cold freezing shade come over all its brightness. When His sweet accents were heard no more, surely all nature would keep an unbroken silence, unless those awful cries of the maddened people were to go on multiplying and reverberating through all space forever. The earth was to have Peter; Mary was to have John. One was to be the apostle of the world, the other the apostle of the Mother. But Jesus was to go. But it is not only why should she live, but how could she live? Was there a possibility of living without Jesus? None, dearest Mother, except by the help of His omnipotence! Oh, how wonderful must have been her love to accept His will on Calvary, His will that they should part, His will that she should linger on through fifteen mortal years of unimaginable Martyrdom! She asked once for water to be turned into wine, and He said His time was not yet come; nevertheless at her will the miracle was wrought, without her asking twice. She could hardly have forgotten that on Calvary. These fifteen years were His will, but what if she for a moment shows her will that it should not be so? will the Mother have to plead long with the dying Son? A word, a look, were possibly enough. How is it that she is still? Is it that she loves Him better now than at Cana of Galilee? And it is a higher love to stay and do His will, than to go with Him and enjoy His beauty. Is she holier now than she was then? For holiness, as it rises, loses more and more its individual will in the will of God. Both are doubtless true, and both facts are in no slight measure owing to her dolors. But is it not rather perhaps that she, like her Son, has gone down into the depths of suffering, and has become as it were enchanted with it, and as He thirsts for more suffering, in divinest discontent even with the excesses of Calvary, so she too thirsts to suffer more, and He gives to her, what His Father grants not to Himself, another passion of a hundred and eighty waxing and waning moons? It must be remembered also that there was a peculiar grief to our Lady in not dying with Jesus, which we cannot appreciate, but only contemplate far off. Union with Jesus was so habitual to her, and union of so close and vital a nature, that it had become her life; and now, in the most important act of all, she was not to be united with Him. She was to differ when she most longed to resemble Him. Nay, it was a want of union which was to involve actual separation. Who can estimate what this absence of union was to her? Yet her love had this prerogative, to suffer longer than our Lord, and to outlive Him by well-nigh half His life in suffering. Deep down in very deep sanctity indeed we find, that never scarcely was she more intimately united with Him than when she let Him go without her. Another fountain, which yielded additional bitterness to Mary's sorrows, was the knowledge that her dolors increased the sufferings of Jesus, nay, that they were actually among the worst agonies He had to endure. There was not one pain which she would not have given worlds to alleviate. There was not one fresh indignity offered to Him, which did not pierce her soul, and make her bleed inwardly. As blows and blasphemies, insults, derision, and rude handlings were multiplied, it seemed at each new violence as if she could bear no more, as if the sea of sorrow needed but another drop to break in upon the fountains of her life and wash them away in one terrific inundation. And yet she had to feel that the sight of her broken heart, ever before Him, was more dreadful to our Blessed Lord than the scourging, the crowning, the spitting, or the buffeting. She was made as it were executioner in chief of her own beloved Son. The more tenderly she loved Him, the more fondly she clung to Him, the more willingly she bore her griefs, so much the deeper the iron of them entered into the Soul of Jesus. She knew all this; and yet her grief was not beneath her own control. Her very holiness increased it a thousandfold. It was in vain she strove to repress it. The very effort was anguish, and no calmness of face, no firmness of attitude, no tearlessness of eye, could have hidden from Jesus the secret abysses of her immaculate heart. Who shall tell the torture of all this to her unselfish devotion? Oh, the seeming cruelty of that exceeding great love which had actually insisted on her being an integral and prominent part of His bitter Passion! How well He knew the plenitude of grace that was in her! How thoroughly He trusted the immensity of her holiness! Life had not been without joys to Him, not even without earthly joys. His Mother had been a whole world of sweetness to the Man of sorrows; and now, in His love of God, in His love of her, in His love of us, He turns all those sweet waters to an ocean of saltiest bitterness for Himself, and keeps slaking His thirst from it incessantly all through the various mysteries of His tremendous Passion. He knew her love so well, and calculated its fortitude so truly, that He hesitated not to lay upon her a cross so nearly the weight of His own. But what all this was, in spite of the eager conformity of her willing heart, what intensity of misery, what unparalleled kind of woe it brought along with it, it is beyond our power to say. It is very deep sea close to shore, where Mary's dolors are concerned. But is she then to be simply passive? If it is His will that she should be part of His Passion, may she not think that the fondness of her love will really be some alleviation of His pains? She has been too near the Incarnate Word not to comprehend that strange union of intensest pain with intensest joy, which was the normal state of His blessed Soul on earth; and deep down, deeper than the fountains of grief, might not her love be a wellspring of gladness in His heart? The heroic devotedness of the Mother must surely be a most pathetic contentment to the Son. Yet we venture to suppose that it was not so. The analogies of the Passion seem all to point the other way. He shut off from His lower nature the sensible beatitude of the unbroken Vision of God. He stripped Himself by an amazing detachment of all that could have consoled Him. The dereliction of His Father was an abyss into which He purposed to descend. He can hardly have allowed His Mother's love to have been a consolation and support to Him. He can hardly have kept to shine upon Him in His darkness the greatest earthly joy His Sacred Humanity had ever known. It would be out of keeping with the Passion, with that completeness of bleak desolation which He spread around Himself, the vastest, direst wilderness of soul that ever man had known, worse round Him, the sinless Saviour, than was the homeless earth that lay outstretched, with all its haunting shapes and shadows of terror, before the blood-stained, impenitently remorseful Cain! No! Mary might not think that in that hour her love could soothe His Sacred Heart. But were there no maternal offices which she might fill toward Him? Alas! only such office as the mother of the Maccabees had filled of old. Slowly and incommodiously the blood from the thorns was trickling into His eyes; but she could not reach to wipe away the blood from Him, whose special office it is to wipe away tears from all eyes forever. His lips are parched with thirst, white, bloodless, cracking; but she may not damp them for one moment with her moistened veil, though His blood shall henceforth daily damp the fires of purgatory for a thousand souls. His poor unpillowed head, that beautiful head, to her the most beautiful of created things,---if He leans back the thorns are driven in, if He leans forward His whole body drags from the nails,---may she not hold it in her Motherly hands, and let Him rest so for a little while until He dies? No! neither for Him nor for her is there to be any alleviation. O Mother! rob Him not of one jewel of His perfect Passion; for see how generously He is enlarging for thee every hour the bounds of thy great sea of sorrow! But this is a third fountain of her grief, that she cannot alleviate the Passion of her Son. It was another fountain of peculiar sorrow to her that she was an eyewitness of the Passion. We learn from the revelations of holy persons that, though she was absent in body, she was present in spirit at the sufferings of Gethsemane, and even followed in her soul with mysterious and supernatural sympathy the various phases of our Saviour's agony. She was present bodily at the scourging, at the Ecce Homo, along the way of the Cross, and for the whole time on Calvary. It appears most probable that she was not in the houses of Annas and Caiaphas, but that she was at the doors, and heard not only the insults, but even the blows, which were given to Jesus, and that she suffered an especial torture in the separation from, Him at those moments. Yet it was a fearful thing for a mother, particularly one of such exquisite sensibilities and profound love as Mary, to have to follow her only child through every step of that bloody drama. It would have been a terrific Martyrdom, if she had spent those hours retired in the women's apartments of an Oriental house, hearing the distant cries of the raging multitude, or listening to the mournful intelligence which would be brought her from time to time. Still, she could better have collected herself there to suffer in quietness and peace. Others at least could have spent the time all the more undistractedly in prayer. But it was not so with her. Her Son was God. It was better to be nigh Him. The nigher God the better, always, for all of us; but for God's Mother most of all. Unbroken as was her union with the invisible God at all times and in all places, she would pray better when she saw Jesus. Besides, she had not the helpful distraction which Christian women have in their afflictions. She was not divided between the dear Child who was being taken from her, and the all-holy God who was inflicting this blow upon her. Her grief and her religion did not fall two different ways. The suffering Child and the all-holy God were one and the same. This was the overpowering unity of her dolors. She must go forth therefore, and follow the footsteps of Jesus, and wet her feet in the blood He has left behind Him. She must listen to the fierce singing of the scourges as they cleave the air, and count the stripes, and take into her heart the variety of deadly sickening sounds they made as they lit on this or that part of His Sacred Body. She must see the mock king of Jews and Gentiles, as Pilate, half in worthless pity, and half in merciless derision, exposed Him to the crowd, and she alone adored His royal majesty almost out of the very annihilation of herself by the violence of grief. She must hear the dull hammering of the nails on Calvary, whose sounds, muffled by the soft flesh of His Hands and Feet, pierced her soul through and through. She must listen to the seven beautiful words upon the Cross, as if He Himself were singing his own dirge, with such melancholy sweetness as was enough to have drawn her living soul out of her weak, worn, and aching body. All this was terrible. Yet she was a true mother. Not for one instant would she have consented to have it otherwise. It was a portion of the royalty of her heart. Nevertheless, it was an unspeakable aggravation of her suffering. It was true that the whole of it had lain before her in clearest prevision, at least since the hour of Simeon's prophecy. But sense is something more than prevision, something different from it. The senses "betray the succors which reason gives." They interrupt that interior tranquility in which the darkest visions may possess the soul, without disturbing it. Sight interferes with that self-collection, which is our attitude of strength in the endurance of interior pains. It throws the soul off its guard, or elicits from it a painful strain of inward fortitude in order to preserve its guard. Moreover, the senses have special things of their own in sights and sounds and touches of grief; and they pierce the flesh, causing it to tremble with chilly pains, torturing the nerves, freezing and firing the blood by turns, stabbing the brain like daggers, and nipping the convulsed heart as if it were within an iron vice. It was this eye witnessing of the Passion, which made Mary's Martyrdom to be in her body as well as in her soul, and which was something more than the aching physical exhaustion in which excess of mental effort leaves the frame, because it laid each limb upon the rack, and made every pulse a beating instrument of pain. Another fountain of sorrow is to be found in her clear view and appreciation of sin. We cannot doubt that, independent of her own sinlessness and of the magnificence of her reason, our Blessed Lord allowed her to participate in some degree in that supernatural perception of sin, of its exceeding malice and of God's adorable hatred of it, which distinguished Himself, and actually gave its character to the suffering of the Passion. It was the view of sin which crucified His soul in the garden of Gethsemane. It was the weight of sin which pressed Him down to the ground. It was the chalice of His Father's anger, which He so plaintively desired might pass from Him. We read of St. Catherine of Genoa fainting away, when it pleased God to show her in vision the real horror even of a venial sin. There could be no fainting with Mary. She was too strong, too perfect, too complete, for weaknesses like those. Her use of reason, which had begun at the moment of her Immaculate Conception, and had never been interrupted for one instant since, could not decorously be suspended by any trance or fainting-fit. But we must necessarily suppose that, whatever supernatural gift of insight into sin was granted to St. Catherine of Genoa or any other Saints, our Lady's gift of that sort must have unspeakably transcended theirs. Indeed, when we consider on the one hand the part which His deep view of sin played in our Blessed Saviour's Passion, and on the other the "communication of attributes," so to call it, which passed between His Passion and her Compassion, we cannot but suppose that our dear Lady was gifted with no inconsiderable portion of His amazing and overwhelming insight into sin. None estimated as she did the spotless innocence of the victim. None so truly appreciated the beauty and sublimity of His goodness. None so fathomed the ingratitude of those whom He had taught, and fed, and healed, and comforted, with such unselfish patience and such considerate affection. None felt more acutely the barbarous excesses of those cruel hours of Thursday night and Friday morning. When all these thoughts rushed into one, what a view it was which broke upon her of the amount, variety, intensity, malignity, of sin which there was in the Passion! But she saw more than that. She saw, hideous, appalling, mountainous vision! the sins of the whole world on the stooping shoulders of Her blessed Son. But yet more: she saw up to the heights of His Divinity; she saw that it was truly God whom all this sin reached, assailed, defiled, and murdered; and then such a light, as from another universe of diviner things, broke in upon the sin of the Passion that none but Jesus and herself could have confronted and endured. Oh that we could better tell what this pain of sharp light was like! But it is far from us. Could we live if God showed us our real selves? We have need to be immortal before our hour of judgment comes. But the sins of the whole world, the concentrated sin of the Passion,---Mary saw it all, and died a thousand inward deaths in the agony it made her bear. It is not easy to say what was the highest point, or what made the deepest wound, in the Passion. The instruments of the Passion were not material only. There were invisible lances, and nails, and hammers, and thorns, and stripes. They were intellectual and moral, as well as physical. And in all these three departments the implements of torture were both numerous and diversified. Each of them went to the quick. None of them deserve to be considered subordinate or inferior. Each had its pre-eminence in its own way. All ran up higher than our eye can follow them. But it is not easy to say which of them, if any of them, reached higher heights in Him than others did. The Passion was an excess of excesses. Every thing belonging to it was in excess. It is this in great measure which hinders it from being lowered into a mere epic of human suffering, even independently of the consideration of His Divinity. But there are some things which we can conceive of as being sharper than others, or wounding in more tender places. There is one of these, a participation in which will furnish us with a sixth fountain of Mary's sorrow. It is the foreseen ingratitude of the faithful for the Passion of our dearest Lord. The Mother of the Church, the Queen of the Apostles, sees it all in her heart. Such a scroll is unrolled before her eyes of carelessness about forgiven sin, of relapses into deadly sin, of astonishing prolific broods of venial sins, swarming in hordes all over the soul and laying waste that paradise of God, of cold-hearted negligences, of unbecoming imperfections, of immortified, consciously immortified lives, of distaste for spiritual things, of careless freedom with great sacraments that cost her Son so dear, of narrow, jealous, suspicious tempers, of the sickening lukewarm ways of conceited human prudence, and of all that dismal infinite of pusillanimity, out of which here and there a saint stands up but half distinguishably, like a palm in the sand-fog of the wilderness. Neither was it altogether a vision of the future: Where was Peter? Was he weeping in some grotto outside the walls in the luxury of his new-found grace? Where was Andrew, who was to be the model of all lovers of the Cross? Where was James, in whose diocese his Master was at that moment crucified? There was the passionate Magdalen, there was the beautiful heart of John, there was herself, to represent the world on Calvary. Alas! if from that day forth every Baptized soul was to be a saint as high as an apostle how fearful would the Passion have been, and how sadly unrequited tool But if this was not to be, surely those who love Jesus should love Him well. All the saved should be Saints, Saints before they reach Heaven, Saints that need not an exodus through the sea of fire beneath the earth, saints even while on earth. Half-hearted creatures hanging on to God by an occasional sacrament, clinging to the Church by a jubilee, balancing in silly indecision, like wayward, stupid animals, between the shepherd and the hireling, giving their love of love to the world, and now and then their love of fear to God when He thunders, enjoying life and time and earth uncommonly, and making a clutch at eternity and heaven upon their deathbeds,---is the Crucified to be the own Father of such as these? Oh, to the generous, heroic heart of Mary this was a sight that was equal to a whole Passion in itself! She saw how the dear Heart beneath that white blood-seamed side upon the Cross was sickening over that very vision, and her heart yearned over it also with indescribable faintness and repugnance. But what shall we say of the sight of those who should be lost? Think of the value of each drop of blood! But why talk of drops? She is slipping in it. It has trickled all over her hands as she clasped the Cross. It lies like a red line between the foot of the Cross and the pillar of the scourging. The gnarled roots of the olives on Gethsemane are ruddy with it in more spots than one. Look up at the countless stars, strewing like luminous dust the purple concave of midnight. One stripe would have redeemed them all, if all had fallen a thousand times. And if there were six thousand stripes! What a calculation of the infinities of redemption! And all that blood and all those stripes given for each soul, each soul to have unshared for its own self all those infinite salvations, and yet to be lost eternally! Christ to pay that price, and then to be defrauded of its value! If one soul, for whom all that Passion has been thinkingly and intentionally undergone, and then with such solemnities as creation never saw before, and with such inconceivable priesthood, offered by God to God,---if one soul should perish everlastingly, should triumph by its guilt over its Saviour's love, should dry up the oceans of His Blood by the fiery heats of Hell,---what an anguish to the Sacred Heart of Jesus! It might have wrung from Him a worse cry than leaped out of the passionate, broken heart of Jacob when Joseph's many-colored coat, with blood-stains on it, was held up before his eyes. But if not one soul only, but millions, and millions of millions, should be lost, what then? Nay, if it should have to be a doubt, of which we might not be sure even while we believed it, whether as many adult believers are saved as are lost, what then? Well! He did not repent of the Cross, as He hung upon it. That is all we can say. But He had another crucifixion, that was invisible, far worse than that one of wood, and iron, and red blood, and a mock title, which we see. It was the crucifixion of a Heart already crucified, because of the thought of the countless multitudes who would fall from Him and be lost and be no more members of Him, but turn from Him through the triumphant envy and rage of Satan with cruel sundering, with helpless, irremediable dismemberment. They "brake not His bones;" but the bones of His Soul were all broken by this cruel inward Passion. And in this dark agony, in this special chalice apart, Mary also had her share; and if in that moment she could distinguish between what this thought made her suffer because she so loved Jesus, and what it made her suffer because she so loved souls, then did she see two separate, most frightful abysses, into which, half suffocated with anguish, she must enter with shrinking yet unreluctant horror. These were the seven fountains of Mary's dolors, beneath which, and underlying all of them, was the grand parent source of all, the incomparable Divine beauty of our dearest Lord Himself. It was this which gave the vitality and keenness to every pain. It was this which aggravated every thing, but could exaggerate nothing, because it could magnify nothing to a greater size than itself. Even she did not know all that beauty. It was incomprehensible, absolutely in itself incomprehensible. But what she did know is incomprehensible to us, it is so far above us and beyond us. Yet we can speak great words of our Saviour's beauty, and think thoughts of it far greater than any words, and, when even thoughts fail, we can weep, weep tears of heavenly feeling. We can burn away with love, and die of His beauty; yet, though thus we shall reach Mary's home, we shall not attain to her comprehension of the exceeding loveliness of Jesus. There was an ocean of it in the lowest, most unfathomable caverns of her heart, which ever and anon broke upward in other seas that rolled above, and made them bitter beyond endurance. E-MAIL HOME-------BACK TO THE SORROWS OF MARY--------THE PASSION www.catholictradition.org/Passion/cross1-3.htm