SECTION
V HOW OUR LADY COULD REJOICE IN HER DOLORS
Having thus considered the characteristics of our Lady's dolors, we
must now pass to a peculiarity of them which it is necessary always to
bear in mind, namely, their union with the intensest joy. That her
dolors were accompanied throughout with floods of heavenly joy, she
herself revealed to St. Bridget. But indeed it could not be otherwise.
Can we suppose it possible that a sinless, rational creature can ever
be otherwise than bathed in joy? Beatitude is the life of God, and it
is out of that life that torrents of gladness inundate His whole
creation. It is sin only that brings sorrow, and if the sins of others
can make the sinless grieve, they can never interfere with that abiding
gladness deep down, which union with God must of necessity produce.
Moreover, there is no merit where there is no love. If our Lady's
dolors had not risen out of her love and been animated by it, they
would not have been meritorious. But in truth love was the very cause
of them. Out of the excess of love came the excess of sorrow. Now, it
is undeniable that love cannot exist without delectation. Love is of
itself essentially a joy; and in proportion to the eminence of our
Mother's love must also be the eminence of her celestial joy. To sorrow
and rejoice at once is possible even for us, whose inward life sin has
distracted, and made irregular and uncompact. We have all of us done
so, even though our sensitive nature is a battlefield where the
struggles are quickly over, and one or other of the contending passions
is left master of the field. But it is in Jesus and Mary that this
perfect union of the uttermost of joy and sorrow has taken place, and
been an abiding, lifelong, normal state. It is one of the most
remarkable phenomena of the Incarnation, and has seemed, in our Lord's
lower Nature, to be a sort of adumbration of His union of Two Natures
in one Person. It is also one of His characteristics in which He has
given His Mother largely to participate. In His Passion He restrained
His Divinity, and would not let it sensibly penetrate His Human Nature
with its light and glory. Nay, He even laid His hand upon that Beatific
Vision, which was due to His Sacred Humanity, and which was uncloudedly
before His Soul from the first moment of His Incarnation, and would not
allow it to include within its sphere of gladness His sensitive nature,
lest it should blunt His suffering and quench the fire of His great
agony. So, in her measure, our Blessed Lady in the depths of her soul
was filled with gladness because of her intimate union with God, and
yet the gladness had a sphere of its own, and was not allowed to break
out with its vast world of light, so at least as to banish all sorrow
from the heart. As was said before, her joy, so far from alleviating
her sufferings, probably made her suffer more. But once again we must
remember it was not with her as with the Martyrs. They sang among the
fires and exulted among the panthers, because their soul was all whole
and joyous, while their flesh was torn and their bones broken. But with
her the soul was the chief sufferer; and joy and sorrow divided it
against itself. This was nearer to a mystery. Indeed, it was a true
participation in the characteristics of Jesus, a cleaving asunder of
the soul without disturbing its simplicity, a division without
sedition, a wound which was a new life, a battle while all was harmony
and peace. O Mother! we cannot tell how it was, only that so it was!
Thou wert all joy, and, being so near God, how couldst thou help but be
so? Thou wert all sorrow, and what else couldst thou be in those dark
abysses of the Passion? And thy sorrow had no power over thy joy; but
thy joy had power over thy sorrow, and gave it a brisker acid, a more
volatile and pervasive bitterness! Glad creature! sorrow crushed thee,
and then a joy, like that of Heaven, sat upon thy burden, and made it
ten-fold more hard to bear!
Yet we are hardly doing justice to her sorrows, when we say that they
had no influence upon her joys. Doubtless they increased them, and were
to her the fountains of new joys which she had never had before, or of
new degrees of old accustomed joys. It is not as if her joy and sorrow
were two oceans in her soul, which had no mutual inlets, and did not
commingle with each other, or ebb and flow, in sympathy. So far from
that, there is a sense in which we might say that her sorrow and her
joy were almost identical; for her joys were sorrows, and her sorrows
joys. They might be the one or the other, according to the double life
that was in them. Truly in her sorrows were many reasons for joy such
as the grandest and happiest Archangel of Heaven has not in himself. If
we look long at the darkness of Calvary, a beautiful light breaks out
of its gloomiest centre. What is it all but a magnificent reparation of
the Divine Honor? Not Michael, when flushed with triumphant sanctity he
drove usurping Lucifer out of Heaven, so rejoiced in the honor of God,
as Mary did. She, who had been allowed to fathom sin so deeply, and who
in the spirit of Gethsemane had tasted somewhat of the Father's anger,
could exult in the satisfaction of His justice as neither Angel nor
Saint could do. She, who had lived thirty- three years with Jesus and
had caught from Him His passionate yearning for His Father's honor,
could find depths of blissful congratulation in the restoring of that
honor, which not all creatures together could discover. Sometimes there
has been a minutest drop of that joy in our hearts, and we know what it
was like, but could not tell even if we would. Oh for that land where
it will be an uncheckered, eternal habit!
There was joy too through all the immense wisdom with which God had
endowed her, because of the Divine wisdom which was apparent to her in
the whole scheme of our redemption. There was not a cavern of shame,
but it was illuminated by several of the Divine perfections, shedding
over it a perfect blaze of beautiful splendor. There was not a physical
horror in the Passion, from which an unloving faith shrinks back in
vulgar fastidiousness, but was clothed with a strange loveliness out of
the treasures of the Divine mind and will. The science of the
Incarnation never came out, even to her, in such amazing. fascinating
clearness as it did in her Compassion, with all its reasons,
possibilities, adaptations, and conveniences. The sight she saw would
have been enough to feed the worship of the nine choirs of Angels
forever. There was joy also in her foresight of the exaltation of
Jesus, She saw Him already at the Right Hand of the Father, His Sacred
Humanity enthroned there as an object of highest worship forever. To
her eyes the bright clouds of Ascension Day were strangely interlaced
with the darkness of the dun eclipse on Calvary. She saw the feet that
were dropping blood, as if they were rising up in the sunny air, each
with its glorified stigma gleaming like a roseate sun. She almost saw
the Angels in their glistening white, moving about amid the horses of
those ruthless foreign centurions. The darkness of the depth set off
the brightness of the exaltation, as if it were a background of storm
throwing forward the bright things in front of it with vivid, lifelike
light. There was joy also in her participation at the time in the
interior joy of Jesus. For that failing Heart upon the Cross had a very
ocean of gladness within itself, a gladness none on earth but His
Mother knew, a gladness none else could share, because none else could
understand it. If her share of it were parted among the numberless
elect, we should each have more than we could bear. It was a joy also,
of a peculiar kind, to see Him paying then and there for the glorious
prerogatives He had given her. When the blood moistened her hand and
stained its whiteness, she recognized and worshipped it as the price of
her Immaculate Conception. Could she see that, and then not love Him
ten thousand times more than she had loved Him hitherto? And with the
rush of love must needs come a rush of joy as well.
It is impossible also not to rejoice in the operations of grace within
our souls. Each augmentation of grace is a mission of a Divine Person,
a contact with God, a more intimate and exquisite union with Him. If we
were slower, graver, less occupied, and less precipitate in our
spiritual life, we should feel this more than we do. How greatly then
must she have rejoiced in the magnificent supernatural acts which her
sorrows were causing her to elicit all the while! Such faith, such
hope, such love, such fortitude, such conformity, such love of
suffering, such spirit of sacrifice, such intelligent worship, such
incomparable union! Millions of Saints could have been made out of each
of these royal magnificences, and yet have left a marvellous amount to
spare. There was joy too, who can disbelieve it? In her thought that
her Compassion should be so rich a boon to us, that it should win us so
many graces, give us so many examples, excite so much devotion, lead us
so much nearer Jesus, and fill us with a wiser spirit of more profound
adoration. Here are seven joys, which came out of her very sorrows.
They might be multiplied indefinitely; but these are enough for love,
and more than enough for our comprehension in their fullness.
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