THE THIRD DOLOR
THE THREE DAYS' LOSS
THE Mother without the Child! This is indeed a change to pass upon our
Lady's sorrows. Bethlehem had its sorrows, and Nazareth had still more,
and on Calvary the tide rose highest. But in all these places the
Mother was with her Child. There was light, therefore, even in the
darkness. In this third dolor, the Three Days' Loss, it was not so.
When we wish to depict our Blessed Mother with reference to her own
graces, such as the Immaculate Conception, we paint her without her
Child, looking heavenward, as if to show that she was a creature upon
whom heaven was falling in fast showers of grace from the Creator. When
we wish to see her as she stands to us, as the Mother through whose
hands the Son pleases to make His graces pass, we represent her also
without her Child, her eyes cast downward toward the earth, and her
hands dropping light and freshness on the world. But there are two
childless pictures of her in Scripture, which have nothing to do with
either of these. The one is her third dolor, when in sorrowful
amazement she is searching Jerusalem to discover Jesus; and the other
is her seventh dolor, when she is returning at nightfall from the
garden-tomb to the great city. leaving her buried Love behind in His
chamber of the rock. Thus are the likenesses of the Passion more and
more mingling with the Infancy. They mingle especially in this third
dolor, which, both on the side of Jesus and of Mary, is one of the
greatest mysteries of the Three-and-Thirty Years. We, however, are
merely concerned with it as it regards Mary's sorrow.
The quiet life of Nazareth was only interrupted by the duties of
religion, which brought back fresh blessings to the Holy House and
augmented its tranquility. According to the law, the Jews were obliged
to go up to Jerusalem to worship God, three times in a year, unless
they were legitimately hindered. The first time was at the Pasch, or
feast of unleavened bread, instituted in remembrance of the Exodus from
Egypt, and corresponding to our Easter. This was the greatest of them
all. The second time was the feast of weeks, which was Pentecost or our
Whitsun tide. The third was the feast of tabernacles, the feast of
lightheartedness and gratitude, to be observed when "they had gathered
in the fruits of the barn floor and the wine-press." To all these
feasts
Joseph went up yearly. The women were not bound by this law; and some
contemplatives have said that, while Joseph went up to Jerusalem three
times a year, Mary went up with Jesus once a year, at the Pasch, or
feast of unleavened bread. Five years had now passed since the return
from Egypt, and Jesus was twelve years old. In that year, as the Gospel
narrative tells us, He went up to Jerusalem at the Pasch, with Mary and
Joseph, and, according to the tradition, He went on foot. In the minds
of all three there could be but one thought. It is probable that St.
Joseph knew of the mysteries of the Passion, as well as our Blessed
Lady; and Jane Mary of the Cross tells us that it was revealed to her,
that, before he died, he was allowed to feel all the pains of the
Passion in such measure as was fitting, just as we read of other
Saints, some of whom have been permitted to participate in some one
mystery of it, and some of them to go through all. Thus, as His last
Pasch was always before our Lord, so: was it never forgotten either by
Mary or by Joseph. It would be especially and vividly before them as
they went up yearly to Jerusalem. As they journeyed upon their way,
over the hills or through the glens, upon the wide road that lay like a
thread over the green uplands, Calvary with its three Crosses rose ever
against the sky as the real goal to which they were tending. But all
things were not always clear to our Lady. As our Lord at seasons veiled
the operations of His Sacred Heart from her sight, so sometimes the
future was not present to her, nor the whole mystery of the present
understood. She hung upon Jesus for every thing; and it was her joy
that every thing was His, and nothing was her own. For what is the
creature but the emptiness which the Creator fills? So, according to
His will, our Blessed Mother little deemed that, while His Calvary was
still years off, hers was close at hand.
How her love for Jesus grew in that journey to Jerusalem! The thought
of His bitter Passion in her heart united itself with the sight of the
Boy of twelve before her outward eyes, and love rose in a flood. Each
moment He seemed to her so infinitely more precious than He had done
the moment before, that she thought she was only just beginning to love
Him rightly, and yet the next moment distanced that love also. She knew
well, she had known it all along, that she never could love Him as He
deserved to be loved. A thousand Marys, which seems to our minds like
something more than all possible creations, could not have loved Him
worthily. There was something also in the Creator being a Boy which was
more than the Creator being a child. The speechlessness, the
helplessness, of infancy, the visible palpable contradiction between
that state and His eternal perfections, stamped it more completely as a
mystery. The Human Nature was tranquil, was passive, and the Divine
Nature hidden under it. The actions which were seen were the mere
mechanical actions of human life. They were its spontaneous vegetation.
The operations of the perfect reason, perfect with all its ungrowing
and unutterable perfections from the first moment of Conception, were
invisible. It was plain it was a mystery, and somehow things are less
mysterious when they openly announce themselves as mysteries. But in
the Boyhood there was more of the human will apparent. There were
perhaps disclosures of a particular human character. The mind gave a
cognizable expression to the countenance. There was a gait in walking,
a way of using the hands, and many other things which make boyhood more
definite, more individual, than childhood. By a mother's heart none of
these things are either unnoticed or unvalued. They are the ailments of
maternal love, just when the incipient independence of boyhood in a
trial after the sweet dependences of infancy. But we must remember what
all these things were in Jesus, in order to estimate fairly what they
were to our Lady. Who can doubt that there was a spiritual beauty
shining in all He did, a celestial gracefulness breathing over every
thing, which would take captive every hour by new surprises the
Mother's heart? But, above all, these things brought out wonderfully
the Divine Nature. It seems a contradiction to say so; but, if we
reflect, we must see that the more the human will was manifested, the
more development, the more action, there was about the lower nature,
the more also by virtue of the Hypostatic Union must the glory of the
Divine Person have disclosed itself. When the mystery lay still, in the
hush of childhood, it was worshipped as in a sanctuary; but when it
moved, and spoke, and worked, and willed, in the countless daily acts
and movements of life, it came forth as it were from its sanctuary, and
exhibited itself to men. It flashed out of His eyes; it spoke from His
lips; its music escaped through His tone; it betrayed itself in His
walk; it made His fingers drop "with the choicest myrrh;" His whole
outward life was light and fragrance, as His childhood passed away, and
the day of His boyhood broke, and the shadowS! retired. All day long,
He was acting, and His actions had on them the stamp, or the scent, of
the human will of a Divine Person, and therefore they flowed "like the
fountain of gardens, the well of living waters, which run with a strong
stream' from Libanus." Would it be wonderful, then, if Mary reached the
gates of Jerusalem in that twelfth year, less able than ever to do
without Jesus, feeling that it was more and more impossible that her
heart should live away from His?
They reached Jerusalem before the beginning of the seven days of
unleavened bread; and during that time they made their devotions in the
temple, visited the poor and the sick, and performed the other
customary works of mercy. It would be impossible to reckon up the
supernatural wonders which arose before the throne of the Most Holy
Trinity from those earthly Three during the week of unleavened bread.
Who would venture to compare any Saint with St. Joseph? In what amazing
union with God, in what flames of heroic love, in what Mary-like depths
of self-abasement, did not that shadow of the Eternal Father dwell,
ever honoring by the shadow that he cast that stupendous majesty and
awful adorable Person whose representative he was! Generations of
Hebrew Saints had ascended those temple steps, and had made sweeter
offerings of prayer and praise than all the aromatical spices that for
centuries had been burned before Him. Yet what was their collective
worship to one of Mary's prayers, to one of her hymns of praise, to one
recital of her Magnificat? But when Mary and Joseph knelt together in
the temple, all created sanctity, such as had shone in Angels and
Saints, was left behind, outstripped, and gone out of sight. Many a
good old man in those times would think of David's days, and of the
tide of worship that flowed and never ebbed in his glorious Psalms, and
he would almost weep to think how degenerate were modern times com-
pared with those, and modem worshippers by the side of those grand
prophets and singers of ancient Israel. They little dreamed of the
incomparable glory of those hearts of Joseph and Mary. But how the
mystery deepens when between Joseph and Mary kneels down the
Everlasting God, He with the unspeakable Name, now just twelve years
old, human years counted by circling seasons and the filling and
emptying of moons! Would the songs go on in heaven when the Incarnate
Word prayed on earth?
Would not all the Angels fold their wings around them, timorously
hushed, while the prayer of the Coequal God rose up before the Throne,
casting far away into invisible shades the poor permissions of
creature's worship? And Mary and Joseph ceased to pray to the Throne in
Heaven, or to the presence behind the Veil, but in prostrate ecstasy
they adored the Eternal who was between them, and confessed in mute
thanksgiving the dread Divinity of the Boy whose words were almost
stealing their souls out of their earthly tabernacles. Was ever temple
consecrated with such a consecration? Was it not strange that earth
should go on rolling through space the same as ever, and the sun rise
and shine and say nothing, and the moon get up behind the hills, and
silver the whole landscape, and float down again to the opposite
horizon, without so much as a smile of consciousness? Was it not more
strange that Jerusalem went about its work, and did not instinctively
feel that something had happened to it more wonderful than David's
triumphs or the dazzling court of Solomon? A Son of David, "greater
than Solomon," older than the day of Abraham, was among the crowds, one
who could destroy the temple and build it up again in three days, a Boy
of twelve, fair to look upon, but to Jerusalem only as one of many boys
whom many mothers had brought to the feast within its ancient walls and
in its historic sanctuary.
But the week of unleavened bread came to a close. Multitudes, as usual,
had thronged the Holy City, like a modern Roman Easter. Every tribe had
sent its worshippers. They had come who dwelt in the southernmost
villages of Simeon, or in the lot of Reuben beyond the mountains of
Abarim, or from Manasses beyond the river, or from the shores of Aser,
or from where Lebanon looks down on Naphthali. According to custom,
the multitudes were told off in separate throngs, leaving Jerusalem at
different times, the men together and the women together. They left in
the afternoon, the men by one gate, the women by another, to reunite at
the halting-place of the first night. By this means confusion was
avoided. The city was emptied without scenes which would hardly be
appropriate to so solemn a season and would be especially undesirable
after the religious occupations of the past week. The roads, also,
would not be crowded all at once, but that huge multitude would thaw
quietly away in order and tranquility. Thus it was that Mary and Joseph
were separated during the first day's journey, which was in reality but
the journey of an afternoon. An opportunity was also thus presented to
our Blessed Lord to separate from them unperceived. So when the women
to whose caravan Mary belonged were mustered at their proper gate,
Jesus was not there. But children might go either with the father or
the mother. He was, therefore, doubtless with Joseph. Mary missed Him;
but it was sweet to think how He was all the while filling Joseph's
heart with tides of joy and love. She must learn to be unselfish with
Him be times; for the day would come when He would be taken from her.
Alas! it was come, another day that she had not suspected, and He was
gone. She ,vent upon her journey; and, as the revelations of the Saints
tell us, what, indeed, God's ordinary ways would lead us to expect, the
Holy Ghost flooded her soul with unusual sweetness, the common
preliminary to unusual trial. Her thoughts were gently diverted from
the absence of Jesus. She was absorbed in God, and trod the ground, and
kept the path, and answered questions only mechanically. Her soul was
being annealed again in the furnace of Divine love, to enable her to
pass through the ordeal that was coming.
The shades of evening had fallen on the earth before the two bands of
men and women met at the accustomed halting-place. Joseph was waiting
for Mary, but Jesus ,vas not with him. Mary's heart sank within her
before she spoke. Joseph knew nothing. His unworthiness would have felt
surprise if Jesus had accompanied Him rather than His Mother. He had
supposed He was with Mary, and had not been disquieted. The bustle of
the halt, the cries of the crowd, the preparations for the evening
meal, the unloading and watering of the beasts of burden, all died out
of their ears. They were suddenly alone, alone amidst the multitude,
more lonely than two hearts had ever been since the sun set on Adam
and Eve, flushing the mountains of paradise, which to them were as
cloisters they might cross no more. Joseph was crushed to the very
earth. The light went out in Mary's soul, and a more terrific spiritual
desolation followed than any of the saints have ever known. What could
it mean? Jesus was gone. It was a harder idea for her to realize than
the mystery of the Incarnation had been. If the rolling universe had
stopped, it would have been less of a surprise. If the trumpets of doom
had blown, her heart would not have quailed as now. They would ask
among their kinsfolk and acquaintance if He was with them; as many of
them loved the Boy exceedingly, with yearnings of heart which they who
felt them could not comprehend. They would ask, but Mary knew it would
be all in vain. She knew Him too well not to be certain that if He had
been in the company He would long since have joined her. No such
ordinary occurrence would have been allowed to break the union
between her heart and His. She felt that the depth of her misery was
not giving to be so shallow as this. An abyss had opened, and a cold
wind was rushing out of it which froze every sanctuary within her soul.
They made their search. It was only to receive one negative after
another, varied by the different amounts of sympathy which accompanied
each. Their inquiry ended, and deep night had come. The sun had set on
one side of the globe and had risen on the other, but the thousands of
leagues of darkness did not hide, nor the thousands of leagues of light
reveal, two hearts in such consummate misery as Joseph's and her own.
There were many sorrows on earth that night, but there were none like
hers. There have been many nights since then, with their beautiful
raven darkness braided with stars, and many incredible sorrows, with
nothing like a star set in their dismal blackness; but there have been
no sorrows like hers. The stars would not have shone if they had had
hearts within them. The darkness should have wept blood instead of dew
to be in keeping with the forlorn anguish of that memorable night. When
all Egypt rang suddenly at midnight with the terrible wail for the
first-born, and the troubled river hurried away from the intolerable
sickening sounds of human woe, the countless cries that wove themselves
into one amazing voice, as if the great earth itself had spoken in
pain, from the Cataracts to the Delta, were not freighted with such a
load of misery as lay that hour on Mary's single heart.
In the darkness---alone, silent---Mary and Joseph were treading the
road again to the Holy City. Their feet were sore and weary. What
matter? Their hearts were sorer and more weary. The darkness in Mary's
spirit was deeper than the darkness on the hills. Even if the paschal
moon were not shining they would see the white glimmer of the road; but
no road out of this sorrow glimmered in her heart. Had it all been, not
a dream certainly, but a transitory thing? Was she to see .Jesus no
more? Had He withdrawn His wonted illumination from her heart
forever,---forever veiled now that beautiful Heart of His, where, for
the last twelve years, the curtains had been looped up, and she had
seen all its mysteries, read all its secrets, lived almost perpetually
in its life? Was she unworthy of Him? She knew she was. Had He,
therefore, left her? It was not like Him. But she did not see things as
before, and it might be so. Had He gone back to His Father, leaving
unredeemed the world which did not want Him? No! that was impossible.
He had not paid the price of her Immaculate Conception yet. Tyrants
seldom slumber. Had Archelaus watched his opportunity, and seized Him?
Herod might have left his son that charge as a legacy of statecraft.
Had she perhaps mistaken the date of Calvary, and was it to come now?
Was the Boy hanging on a cross that moment, in the darkness, on some
mount outside the gates? Oh, the bewildering agony of this unusual
darkness! She has seen all the Passion before in her spirit. How did it
go? Was she not there? She cannot remember. She can recover nothing.
Within, there is nothing but darkness, covering every thing. Is He
actually dead without her, His Blood shed, and she not there? Agony!
Has He gone to death, purposely without telling her, out of kindness?
Oh, no! so cruel a kindness would have been contrary to the union of
their hearts. But this, this very separation, with- out a word, and
then this interior darkness, in which He has wrapped her soul, how do
these comport with that union of their hearts? Ah! then there is not
certainty to go upon, except the certainty that He is God. This very
sorrow shows her that she is not to argue from what has gone before.
The past, it seems, did not necessarily prophesy the future. Not to
understand it, that is such suffering. Sudden darkness after excessive
light is like a blow. Her soul wants to see. But it is hooded. A
baffling blindness has come on. She has nothing left her now, but that
which never was dislodged from the depths of her soul, the gift of
peace. Oh, how the waters of bitterness rose silently out of the
endless caverns of that peace---perhaps He had gone into the wilderness
to join that marvel---who does not know that has once felt it!---leaves
its taste for life!
Of eremitical sanctity, the boy John, the son of Zacharias, here after
to be called the Baptist, was making his novitiate of years, in that
tender age, among the wild beasts, lonely, hunger-smitten, the prey of
heat and cold, of wind and wet, preparing for his mission, which was to
forerun the preaching of Jesus. Has her Boy gone to join him, gone to
share in that novitiate? She would have known it was not so if she
could have seen as usual. But it was the misery of her inward darkness
that she no longer seemed to understand Jesus. It was the only light
she wanted. All the world beside might have been dark to her, and she
could have borne the burden lightly. But not to understand Jesus was a
variety of martyrdom she had never dreamed of. Yet do not most mothers
taste it somewhat as their children, now in new trials and unproved
spheres, and so needing most the old unity with the mother's heart,
outgrow their childlike confidence. and live down in their own hearts,
and have mysteries written on their brows? There are hearts to whom
this is sharp. But they are far off from the woe of Mary when the Boy
of Nazareth first began to look unlike the Babe of Bethlehem. Perhaps
He had gone to Bethlehem. Perhaps He had gone to Bethlehem on a visit
to His Own sanctuary. But could He have any work there, connected with
the redemption of the world? And if He had only gone because He loved
to go, was that like Him? Mary was perplexed. A while since she would
have answered, No! with the utmost confidence. Now she was not so sure;
and even her humility made her less sure than her darkness by itself
would have done. All this was so unlike Him! He might do any thing now.
Whatever He did would of course, be holy. But He might do any thing, so
far as her understanding Him went. But if He had gone only out of
devout pleasure, His pleasure would have been so much greater if they
had been with Him. Besides that, would He have gone for pleasure
without telling them, when He knew how awful the pain of missing Him
would be to them? Mary could not be sure He would not; for why did He
do what He had done? Why give this pain at all? Has He emancipated
Himself? But He is only twelve! Again: if He had done so, would He not
have spoken? She cannot tell. She can tell nothing. She knows nothing.
Only He is God. Her bruised heart must knee and bleed, and bleed and
kneel. She is crucified in the darkness as He will one day be. He has
abandoned her, as His Father will one day, abandon Him. Go on, weary,
forlorn, forsaken Mother the daybreak is catching the towers of Zion:
thither drag this inexplicable load of grief, thou wonderful daughter
of the Most High!
Meanwhile where is our Blessed Lord? In Jerusalem. Of what He has been
doing we know somewhat. Scripture tells us the strangest part; the
revelations of the Saints disclose what we might have divined as
likely. He prayed long prayers in the temple. He has gone to the
meetings of the doctors and elders and there He finds how they strive
to face the oracles of ancient prophecy, and make out a glorious,
warlike, triumphant statesman Messias, who shall effect a political.
deliverance for His oppressed people. Here He beholds the grand
obstacle to the reception of His doctrine and to the mystery of the
Incarnation. This must be removed. Those at least who have ears tI hear
must be allowed to hear the truth. It is His heavenly Father's work. So
He modestly puts Himself forward, as if to ask questions. His sweetness
wins all hearts. The gravest doctor hang upon His words. He puts His
objections gently, suggest wonderful meanings to deep prophecies, leads
them to see that their own view is not tenable, and elicits from them
the spiritual truth as if it was the lesson He Himself was receiving,
not a new wisdom He was Himself infusing into them. How many heart did
He thus prepare for Himself, of how many apostolic vocations may He not
have indirectly laid the foundations then! When Peter converted
thousands at a sermon, when he offered a thousand souls to each of the
Three Divine Persons, the first time he preached, how much of the work
may have been done already by the doctrine which had flowed from
questions of the Boy of Nazareth! During these three days, as we learn
from some of the Saints, our Lord had begged His bread from door to
door, so that He might practise even greater poverty than that which
straitened Him at Nazareth. Out of this He had given alms to the poor.
He had also visited the rich, performed menial offices for them, spoken
kind words to them, and drawn them to God. At night He had slept on the
bare ground under the walls of the houses. Earth at least could hardly
refuse Him a bed who had called it out of nothing. Thus the Creator of
all things, left for the time without His Mother's care, shifted for
Himself in His Own world as a beggar-boy at the age of twelve. Oh, upon
how many shades of
life did not our Blessed Master scatter the consecration of His Own
endurance!
We cannot doubt but that Mary and Joseph, when they entered Jerusalem
in the morning, went first to the temple to seek God's blessing on that
load of sorrow which weighed them to the ground. Nor were they without
hope of finding Jesus there. Throughout the day they threaded the
streets of Jerusalem wearily. Mary scanned the passers-by as she had
never done before; but Jesus was nowhere to be seen. Everywhere they
made inquiries. Some listened patiently but coldly; others peevishly
and as if it were a trouble; others again were kind and feeling, but
they had no consolation to give. One woman asked her to describe her
Boy, and how faithfully did Mary do it! But no! the woman had seen a
boy, but no such boy as that. She could never have forgotten such a
one, if she had ever had the good luck to see Him. Others too raised
hopes, which were as soon to sink again. On the top of Mary's sorrow
came now a world of good advice, which made the load no lighter. Why
did she not seek Him here? Why did she not seek Him there? Kind souls!
she had sought Him everywhere. She had sought Him as mothers will seek
missing children; and many spots are not overlooked in such a search as
that. Then some one had given an alms to a boy, who was not unlike the
description, and whose loveliness and manner had left an impression
behind. But she could say nothing further. However, it was a gleam of
light to Mary. There were clearly not two boys in the world who would
answer to her description. Then another woman, when she opened her
house in the morning, had seen a boy lying on the ground under the
eaves. She only saw Him for a moment, but He was fair-haired and
beautiful. Another had seen a boy, not unlike the description. breaking
a loaf between two beggars in the street; but he had not watched which
way He went. He had then been in Jerusalem yesterday, if He was not
there today. But another had seen Him that morning by the side of a
sick person. Here was more light. Mary could be shown where the sick
person lived. She saw her and spoke with her. She heard the poor
sufferer describe the winning ways of the boy-nurse, His voice, His
eyes, His holy words which had brought the tears into her eyes, and the
strange presence of God which He had left behind Him in her soul.
Mary's heart burned. She drank in every word. It was Jesus. It could be
none else. But where had He come from? whither was He gone? The invalid
could not say. She knew nothing. He had come and gone. While He was
with her, she was so engrossed with Him, she had not thought of asking
Him any questions. And the sun sloped westward and went down, and the
shades fell. and the quiet of night came upon busy Jerusalem; but Jesus
was not found. It had been a weary day. Neither Mary nor Joseph had
broken their fast all day. They were hunger-smitten for the Child. A
broken heart wants sleep and food less than others. The night outside
was dark, but the night of Mary's soul was darker.
Whether it was after three full days, during which Mary was left as it
were entombed in this hideous darkness. or whether it was on the third
morning, so it was that Mary and Joseph went up to the temple to lay
their sorrows again before the Lord. They went in by the eastern gate.
Now, close to this gate there was a spacious room, a sort of Academy,
in which the interpreters of the law sat, and answered questions. and
resolved doubts, and moderated in disputations. St. Paul speaks of this
place in his defence before Felix, when he says that he was not found
disputing in the temple. It was there also, at Gamaliel's feet, that
the great Apostle of the Gentiles learned the traditions of the law. By
the opening into this Academy Joseph and Mary had to pass. It was not a
likely place for them to enter. But the Mother's ear has caught a
sound, in which it was impossible that she should be mistaken. It is
the voice of Jesus. They enter. The doctors are looking on Him with a
mixture of awe and pleasure. There has never been such a doctor in that
Academy before. Joseph and Mary also wondered. She had never heard
quite that tone of voice before. She had never seen that light in His
eye before. Her soul worshipped in His presence. But she had rights
over that Boy, who was astonishing the wise elders of the nation. She
would fain have knelt before Him, but she knew that was not the place,
nor the time. But she came forward, and said to Him, Son, why hast Thou
done so to us? Behold Thy father and I have sought Thee, sorrowing. He
could see that, without her saying it. He could see the ravages which
grief had made in her countenance. He could hear it in her voice weak
and trembling. He could see it in the feebleness which was letting the
flush of joy almost overpower her. But He had no need so to see and
hear it. He had never been away from her. He had been lying in her
heart the whole while. He had been meting out to her just those
supplies both of physical strength and of heavenly grace, which were
needed to enable her to endure. His Own heart had been crucified with
hers. But the mystery was not over. He said to them, How is it that you
sought Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?
He has taken out Simeon's sword, and thrust in His Own. Why had Mary
sought Him? Oh, think of Bethlehem, the wilderness, Egypt, and
Nazareth! Why had she sought Him? Poor Mother! could she have done
otherwise than seek Him? How could she have lived without Him? There
were a thousand reasons why she should have sought Him. Does He deny
her rights? Is He about to take them from her, and just, too, in the
joy of finding Him? Rights! They were His Own gift. He could take them
back if He pleased. But His Flesh, His blood, His beating Heart, were
not these in some sense hers? No! rather hers were His. But the right
to love Him, can even the Creator take that away from the creature? No!
that right is inalienable. Creation must be uncreated before that right
can be forfeited. If He is going to part with her now at that very
eastern gate of the temple, which was a type of herself, nevertheless
she will love Him as before, and not only as before, but a thousand
times more. That look, that tone, when He was among the doctors,---they
have gone deep into her soul, To her, they were absolute revelations of
God.
Is the darkness gone? Far from it! For the moment He has thickened it
by His words, "They understood not the word that He had spoken unto
them." But He is not going to leave her. He has been about His heavenly
Father's business in Jerusalem. Now, the same business takes Him back
to Nazareth. And He, so much more lovely; and she, so much more holy;
and Joseph, nigher to God than ever, and more like the shadow of the
Eternal Father since the late eclipse, went back upon their way to
Nazareth, where, for eighteen unbroken years,---with the annual visits
to Jerusalem,---Mary shall enjoy His sanctifying presence; and by His
toil in the shop it shall appear that His heavenly Father's and His
earthly father's business were but one. Those broad eighteen years: to
Mary it was like seeing the beautiful, free ocean after climbing the
dark mountains. "And He went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and
was subject to them; and His Mother kept all these words in her heart."
In describing the mystery of this third dolor, much has been already
said of its peculiarities, Nevertheless, we must now dwell upon its
characteristics at greater length, In the first place, it was the
greatest of all her dolors, This arose partly from its involving a
separation from Jesus, and partly from a union of other circumstances
to be considered presently. We read in the life of the Blessed
Benvenuta of Bojano, a Dominicaness, that, while she was suffering from
the illness which for many years would not allow her to lie down, but
forced her to remain sitting in a chair, she began to contemplate the
grief of our Lady during the Three Days' Loss. She desired to
participate in that affliction, inasmuch as she had herself been
accustomed to sorrow all her life, and had sought for it, and desired
ill-health, and fled from every joy. She prayed earnestly, therefore,
both to our Lord and His Mother, to grant her the grace to feel in
herself our Lady's sorrow. And, behold! a holy and venerable Lady
appeared to her, with a beautiful and graceful Child, who began to walk
about the room, keeping close to His Mother. His aspect and
conversation inspired her with sublime happiness. But when she sought
to touch Him he withdrew from her, and both He and His Mother suddenly
disappeared. On this a vehement sorrow took possession of her soul,
which continually increased, and afflicted her so deeply that she found
no consolation in any thing, and it appeared as if her soul and body
would be torn asunder. She was compelled, therefore, to call on our
Lady to help her; for she could no longer endure it. At the end of
Three Days, our Lady appeared to her, with her Son in her arms, and
said, You asked for a taste of that sorrow which I suffered in the loss
of Jesus; and it is but a taste which you have had. But do not ask such
things again, because your weakness could not live under such an agony
of grief! [Marchese, Diario, Ottobre 30] The seventh dolor, the Burial
of Jesus, alone approaches to this third dolor in severity. But for
many reasons it was much less severe. Both of them involved separation
from Jesus; but in the case of the Burial she knew that He could suffer
no more. She understood the mystery. She triumphed in the
accomplishment of the great work of the world's redemption. She could
count the hours to the moment of the Resurrection. In this third dolor
she had lost Jesus, and she knew not why, nor where He was, nor what He
might be suffering. She was plunged into a dense spiritual darkness,
and God seemed altogether to have abandoned her. Hence, the torture of
her heart never rose to a more intolerable height than during these
Three Days, not even amidst the horrors of the Passion.
The loss of Jesus would have been, under any circumstances, a most
fearful sorrow; and one which it is impossible for us, with our little
grace and less love, to appreciate at all adequately. We must have
Mary's heart to feel Mary's grief. But the peculiar circumstance of the
Three Days' Loss, which rendered the loss
of Jesus so dreadful, was the darkness in which her soul was. cast as
into a pit. She, who heretofore had been all light, was now all
darkness. She did not know what God was doing with her. She had to act,
and could not understand the circumstances under which she was acting.
It was not only the contrast with the past which made the present so
hard to bear. The night that had come down upon her was in itself
intolerable anguish. She had ever leaned on Jesus. She never knew till
now how much she had leaned upon Him. And He had withdrawn Himself. She
did not see into the future; the past was all blurred together, and
gave no light; the present was full of perplexity, accompanied by
intense anguish of heart and bitterness of spirit. Sister Mary of
Agreda says that the very Angels withheld their colloquies from her,
lest they should give her light about the loss of Jesus. There can, of
course, be no doubt that this darkness of Mary was a Divine operation.
We must look for parallels to it in those indescribable interior trials
which some of the greatest Saints have passed through, always
remembering, that if they were sent to the saints as cleansings of the
spirit, to her Immaculate Heart this trial could only be, as it were,
another marvelous sanctification superadded to those which had gone
before. For in her spirit there was nothing to cleanse. The work, the
parallel to which in the saints took long years to do, might be
accomplished in our Lady's soul in three days, not only because of her
perfections which would enable grace to work more rapidly and without
the shadow of an obstacle, but also because the Divine operations in
the soul seem scarcely to need the lapse of time. Who does not know how
in dreams, in accidents, in moments of great suffering, time appears
almost miraculously compressed? Long years of previous life pass in
distinct, orderly, and cognizable array before the soul, which seems
intelligently to comment on each of them; and yet the whole process has
occupied only the space of a lightning-flash. In the same way, we have
apparitions of Souls from Purgatory, complaining of the long years in
which their friends have left them in the flames without Mass or
suffrage, when the sun of the day on which they died is not yet set. We
are taught to believe that the particular judgment, which awaits us at
the end of life, will occupy but a moment of time. Again: one action
will sometimes appear to do the work of years, even in respect of the
formation of habits. This is especially the case with heroic actions,
such as Abraham's sacrifice. The same thing may occur in the profession
of a religious. There may be something akin to it in the special grace
of the different Sacraments. Are there any of us who do not remember
experiencing some marvelously swift processes of grace, which seemed
hardly to require succession of time so instantaneous were they, and
yet a veritable procession and sequence of different steps? So in the
perfect soul of Mary, already elevated by grace and union to so sublime
a height, this divine darkness of three days may have wrought the most
astonishing effects, which we cannot describe, seeing that her height,
even before that, was far above out of our sight. This darkness is a
peculiarity of the third dolor in which no other of our Blessed Lady's
sufferings shares in the slightest degree.
It is not possible for us to say with any certainty when this darkness
ceased. But we should be inclined not to refer to it the fact that Mary
did not understand the words of Jesus in the academy of the temple.
This we should regard as rather a separate peculiarity of this third
dolor, referable to other causes, and an evidence of the hold which
this sorrow had taken upon her nature. The darkness may indeed have
passed off gradually, beginning with the first sight of Jesus. We would
venture, however, to conjecture that it passed away entirely the moment
she had found Him, while some of its consequences remained. It may be
also that the weakness and weariness which had been hardly felt,
because the darkness and the sorrow absorbed all feeling now told upon
her, and would even be brought out by this sudden revulsion from grief
to joy, just as we read of some of the Saints when long ecstasies have
passed away. Various reasons have been assigned by theologians for our
Lady's not understanding the words of Jesus. Rupert thinks she did
understand them, but out of humility acted and looked as if she did
not. But this is not satisfactory, from the difficulty of harmonizing
it with the direct words of the Gospel. Our own Stapleton attributes it
to the excess of her joy at finding Jesus, which so acted upon her mind
that she could not understand His words, just as from an opposite
cause, namely, the excess of sorrow, the Apostles later on could not
understand what our Lord said about His own death. But there is hardly
a parity between our Blessed Mother and the apostles; and it would be a
hard inference to receive, except upon authority, inasmuch as it would
represent our Lady's tranquility as shaken, and her self-possessed use
of reason for a while perturbed, and perturbed too when He was speaking
whose voice could lay the winds and calm the seas. Denys the Carthusian
limits her ignorance. He says she knew that Jesus spoke not of Joseph
but of His Eternal Father, that He alluded to the work for which He had
come into the world, and that, according to the human nature He had
assumed, He must ever be intent upon that one work, but that the
circumstances of time, place, and manner had not yet been revealed to
her. This supposition, while it is more honorable to our Blessed Lady
than that of Stapleton, proceeds upon the notion that the Thirty-Three
Years, and the Passion, dawned upon her gradually in successive
revelations. We have throughout assumed that she knew all, or almost
all, from the beginning, which last hypothesis is more consonant with
the visions and revelations of the contemplative Saints.
Suarez makes two suggestions. He holds that Mary understood. Jesus to
speak of His heavenly Father, but that she did not know exactly what
the particular things were, relating to the Divine science, on account
of which He had left Joseph and herself. Or again, she was not quite
sure whether our Lord meant to imply that He intended to hasten the
time of His manifestation to the world, which otherwise would not be
before His thirtieth year. So that, he adds, there was no "privative
ignorance" in her, but only the absence of knowledge of some
particulars not necessary to the perfection of her science. But, were
this the case, we should be more inclined to refer it to the
continuance of that Divine darkness, with which God had visited her.
St. Aelred, with others, insists upon the words being taken by the
figure synecdoche, and so applying only to St. Joseph, and not to our
Lady, just as the Evangelist says both the thieves blasphemed upon the
cross, whereas in reality, according to some commentators, only one did
so. Thus, according to St. Aelred, our Lady understood the words, and
laid them up in her heart that she might teach them to the Apostles
afterward. But it may be replied that it is not certain only one of the
thieves blasphemed. On the contrary, it is the more common opinion that
they both did. Moreover, St. Aelred's interpretation seems to be taking
a liberty with the words of the Gospel, which would hardly be
warrantable without much more authority from tradition. Others think
the words "they understood
not" apply to the audience in the academy, and not at all to our Lady
and St. Joseph. But this does not recommend itself. The sense of the
faithful has always found both difficulty and mystery in the passage,
which it would not have done if that interpretation had been obvious or
natural. Novatus thinks that, by a special permission of God, Mary did
not understand at once the words which Jesus had spoken, but that she
came to the understanding of them by pondering them in her heart. He
finds this interpretation most suitable to the words in the Gospel, and
he discovers a parallel to the process in her mind, in the way in which
the Saints, who have had the gift of prophecy, often foresaw the
future, not by direct prophetic light, but by comparing one light with
another, and so drawing fresh inferences from the comparison. Yet it
does not exactly appear what end is gained by this supposition. No one
would deny that our Lady had all the gifts which the saints have had;
but why should we gratuitously suppose that any of the imperfections,
which accompanied the exercise of these gifts in the Saints, should
have adhered to her, beyond those which belonged to her of necessity as
a creature?
Let us venture to add another to the number of conjectures which
theologians have made upon the subject. It may be supposed that every
increase of sanctity in our Blessed Lady was accompanied by a
proportionate increase in her science. In a perfect and unfallen nature
like hers it is not easy to conceive of the two processes being
separate. In the case of one who has sinned, hardness of heart may be
removed in degrees quite disproportioned with the removal of darkness
of mind. Light and love, though always correlatives, are not such in
sinners in the perfect way in which they are so to the innocent. Thus
we presume that the mystical darkness, which God sent as a spiritual
trial to overspread Mary's soul, gave rise to such heroic acts of love
and union, that it raised her to enormous heights of holiness above
those lofty mountain tops on which she had stood before. We presume
that
there was more difference of a supernatural kind between the Mary who
left the temple gate at the end of the week of unleavened bread and the
Mary who entered it the morning she found Jesus, than there ever was
between a Saint in his saintly youth and the same Saint in his far more
saintly old age. There could be no revolutions in Mary, because there
was nothing to destroy, nothing to overturn. All that could be done was
to superadd. But the superadditions might be so immense, or so swiftly
accumulated, or so instantaneously conferred, as to produce a change
which in any case but hers we should call a revolution. This is surely
what theologians mean, when they speak of her first sanctification, her
second sanctification, her third sanctification, and so on. They do not
mean to deny that she was always meriting and thus always growing in
grace; but that the Immaculate Conception, the Incarnation, the Descent
of the Holy Ghost, or her Death, were, so to speak, creative epochs in
her sanctification, which did not follow the laws of common growth. We
would regard the interior darkness of the Three Days' Loss as an epoch
of this description.
But how does this bear upon her not understanding the words of Jesus?
We must mount for a while to the highest regions of mystical theology.
There is a science so high that it confines upon ignorance. It is where
the human borders on the Divine. It is at an unspeakable height, only
not unapproachable because some few Saints, and the Seraphim, have
reached it. Our Lady perhaps reached a higher height. There are limits
to the possibilities of creatures. Our Lady reached the uttermost of
those limits, and looked out on the Divine Abyss which lay beyond.
There the darkness is excess of light, and the science ignorance, not
only because language, has no vessels to hold its definitions, thought
no moulds to contain its ideas, but also because the eyes of me soul
are closed and God is reached. What the spirit sees is, that it does
not know, that it cannot know, that it is submerged, that its light is
a marvelous indistinct distinctness, that knowledge has lost itself in
love, and love is living hiddenly in fruition. The same words will
convey different ideas to different minds. If we say the moon goes
round the earth, the countryman understands us, but the scientific man
understands it differently, because he understands it more dividely. An
angel might understand it differently still. So the words which our
Blessed Lord spake in the temple were not understood by the doctors,
because they did not know who His father was, or what His business, or
why His father should not seek Him because He had stayed away to do His
father's work. St. Joseph did not understand them, because, though he
doubtless knew that Jesus spoke of His Eternal Father, and of the
redemption of the world which was His Father's business, he did not
know what part of that work Jesus meant, nor why it was a reason He
should have left them without notice. Mary did not understand them,
because each word rose to her from some unimaginable abyss of Divine
Wisdom, carrying the work of the Incarnation far into the everlasting
counsels of the Divine Mind, immensely enlarging her range of view, yet
without giving her any distinct images, drawing her more closely within
the folds of the Divine Wisdom, till she almost touched what she saw,
and so ceased to see, and elevating her to that uttermost point of
knowledge where a Divine ignorance is the consummation of the
creature's science. It was the very words themselves which hindered her
understanding, because they carried her into a region where
understanding has died out into something better. in consequence of the
vicinity of God. It was the preceding darkness which had carried up the
life of her soul to the point where this divine ignorance was possible.
Such, with all submission. is the conjecture we would venture to make
in explanation of this difficulty. Our Blessed Mother knows how much
ignorance and foolishness it may contain; but she will not disdain a
guess, whose motive is love and whose end is her greater honor. There
is another peculiarity of this dolor, which is in perfect keeping with
the mysterious features of it already mentioned. The first dolor was
inflicted on her by Simeon, and the second by Joseph, this one by Jesus
Himself, without any intervention of creatures at all. It is very
important to remember this in meditating on the third dolor. From one
point of view this made it easier to bear, but from another point of
view it was harder. There was more to reconcile her to the endurance,
while there was also more to suffer in the pain itself. What God
condescends to do Himself is not only better done than the creature can
do it, but it is done very differently. It is not only more efficacious
in producing its results, but its results are of another kind, and bear
a different impress on them. Even His words, when He speaks them to the
soul Himself, are substantial, and creative, and effect what they
utter, and effect it by the simple utterance. Thus there
is something extremely awful in the immediate action of the Creator on
the creature's soul. It is a Divine touch, pressing on us without any
medium, not even sheathing itself in the very flesh belonging to the
soul it touches; it is a keen, spiritual operation, like no other.
Hence the direct action of God on the souls of the saints is ineffably
more sanctifying than the persecutions of creatures, or the pain of
austerities, or the pressure of God's own external providence. It has
also the same characteristic which belongs to the highest class of
miracles, in being instantaneous in its effects. When, therefore, the
intention of God's immediate action is to cause suffering, it must
attain its end in a manner which we tremble to think of. It is fearful
to contemplate a created thing which has been called out of nothingness
by omnipotence for no other end than to inflict torture. Such is the
fire of Hell, and the mysterious action of that fire on disembodied
souls both in Hell and Purgatory. Who can think of it without
shuddering? No beneficent office does it fill. There are no indirect
results into which its being wanders, and, as it were, rests. It was
created to torture. It is no element turned to another end. It has an
end. It keeps to it. Through eternity it will never flag. Multiply,
deepen, broaden, condense the mass it has to act upon, and it is ready
to work upon that mass, undiverted, unstretched, unweakened. It knows
what it has to do, and it does it with terrific truth, with unblamable
success. Yet this fire is but a secondary cause. What must the touch of
God Himself be, a touch too, which is lovingly bent on inflicting pain?
Oh, there were many martyrdoms in one in the Three Days' Loss! We are
not worthy to tell or to conceive them. Let creatures stand aside, or
rather let them lie prostrate near, while God does what He wills with
His Mother's soul. Yet creation has something to do with it; for the
natural Mother was crucified in her own heart by the Son whom she had
borne. Both His Natures had fastened on her to make her suffer. The
fairness of His Face, the light in His Eyes, the attractions of His
Human Heart, racked her with anguish as she thought upon her loss;
while, as God, He was visiting her with those appalling interior trials
which we have seen formed the chief part of the third dolor. It is
useless to talk of seas of suffering here; infinities would better
express our inability to speak of them at all.
When Mary grows into her right place in our minds, there are many
things which have a different meaning in her from what they would have
in one of the Saints. The idea of Mary which the Gospels, as
interpreted by catholic theology, convey to our minds, is not merely an
intellectual view. Although it is in one sense a theological
conclusion, yet it is something much more than that. It is a product of
faith and of love, worn in by habits of prayer. Thus, over and above
the knowledge of the Gospel mysteries, there is in the soul of the
pious believer an appreciation, an apprehension, an instinctive, almost
intuitive, realization of Jesus and Mary, which has its own
certainties, its own associations, its own perceptions, its own
analogies. It is true that the individual mind gives some color and
consistence to these things: yet when, in the popularity of various
writings, in the spirits of devotions, in the contemplations of the
saints, and in other ways, such ideas attain a kind of universality,
they become the sense of the faithful, and express the true catholic
idea. The cultivation of right instincts about our Blessed Lord and His
Mother is obviously a matter of great importance, because of its
necessary connection with sanctity, and of the influence which it
exercises over our worship of the Blessed Sacrament, over various other
devotions, and over the spirit in which we observe the great feasts of
the Church. Now, when we have a clear and consistent idea of Mary in
our minds, certain things we hear or read will startle us and strike us
as unlikely. If they do not rest upon the authority of the faith, but
are simply the view of some preacher, or the teaching of a book, or the
contemplation of some single Saint, we put them away as unsuitable,
because we have more confidence, and rightly, in that view of our Lady
which has become part of our spiritual life, than in the preacher, the
book, or the single saint. We do not condemn them, perhaps do not even
like to differ from them; we simply put them away. But if what startles
us comes to us on the authority of the Church, then either we must
reform the idea in our minds, or we must expect to find some deep and
unusual significance in that which surprises us. Now, there are one or
two such things in this third dolor; and these must be enumerated among
its peculiarities.
First of all, it strikes us as unlike our Blessed Lady that she should
have allowed her sorrow to wring from her any outward demonstrations of
grief. She not only showed her sorrow in her outward deportment, but
she told Jesus that Joseph and herself had sought Him sorrowing. She
told it Him almost reproachfully. Now the Saints have borne the
greatest sorrows in complete, heroic, and supernatural silence. It has
always been their characteristic to do so. They have wished none but
God to know their sorrows. Was our Lady inferior to any of the saints
in this gift of silence? On the contrary, her silence was one of the
most remarkable of her graces. Tradition says that the three hardly
ever spoke in the Holy House at Nazareth. The sweet, heavenly
colloquies which we should have pictured to ourselves as a main part of
the life of the Holy Family are in our own imagination. They did not
exist. A deeper silence than that of a Carmelite desert reigned there,
or a Carthusian house where the Alpine winds moan in the corridors and
shake the casements, and all else is silent as the tomb. The words of
Jesus were very few. That was the reason Mary laid them up in her
heart, because, like treasures, they were rare as well as precious.
When we reflect we shall see it could hardly be otherwise. God is very
silent. So far as Mary is concerned the Gospel narrative fully bears
out the tradition. It is amazing how few words of hers are recorded
there. Moving or still, she appears there like a beautiful statue,
whose beauty is its only language. So striking is this, that some
contemplatives have supposed that in her humility she commanded the
Evangelists to suppress every thing about her which was not absolutely
necessary to the doctrine about our Blessed Lord. St. John, who was
most with her, says next to nothing about her; and St. Mark does not
mention her but once, and then indirectly only. We can have no doubt
that no Saint ever practised silence as she did. Her silence to St.
Joseph is a wonderful proof of this. But how should she be otherwise
than silent? A creature, who had lived so long with the Creator, would
not speak much. Her heart would be full. Her soul would be hushed. She
had been with Him for twelve long years,---long years so far as the
formation of habits is concerned, though they had passed to her like a
saint's ecstasy, full of painful love. She had borne Him in her arms.
She had watched Him sleep. She had given Him food. She had looked into
His eyes. He had perpetually unveiled His Heart to her. Thus she had
learned His ways. All manner of Divine similitudes had been transferred
to her soul. We know how silent God is. Between the Creator and the
creature, in such relations as He and Mary were in to each other,
silence would be more of a language than words. What could words do?
What could they say? They could not carry the weight of the Mother's
thoughts, much less the Son's. It must have been an effort to speak, a
condescension, a coming down from the mountain, on her part as well as
His. And why come down? St. Joseph did not need it. He, too, dwelt high
up among those mountains of silence, too high for any voice to reach,
almost too high for earth's faintest echoes to sound there. He did not
need teaching as the multitude did, from the green mound, or on the
plain, or by the shore of the inland sea. Even in the days of His
Ministry, which was the "time to speak," as the Hidden Life was the
"time to keep silence," our Lord was very silent. How remarkably this
is hinted at the close of St. John's Gospel, the disciple of the Sacred
Heart! The text itself sounds as if it would be less of an exaggeration
if it spoke of words instead of works. "But there are also many other
things which Jesus did; which, if they were written everyone, the world
itself, I think, would not be able to contain the books that should be
written." Was he speaking of the Thirty-hree Years? or was he ending
his Gospel, as he had begun it, with the eternal doings of the Word?
But is it not then all the more surprising that our Lady should have
indulged in this outward, almost reproachful demonstration of her
grief? It is indeed most mysterious. We know, from the book of Job, in
what boldness of complaint, in what seeming petulance of familiarity
and love, God allows His creatures. He seems even to take a pleasure,
and to find a worship, in the truthful utterance which comes up from
the very depths of the nature He Himself has fashioned. This is the
mourner's consolation, when he thinks of God. But nothing of all this
will apply to Mary. Was it a heroic act of humility, by which she
expressed Joseph's sorrow, and coupled herself with him? It may have
been. It would be like her. But there is such an intense truthfulness
in the Gospel words that we do not like to relax the strictness of
their meaning by such interpretations as this, unless compelled by
obvious necessity. We have but few of her words. We would rather those
few should have meanings in them about herself. Was it meant to convey
to us the exquisite suffering of this dolor without implying any need
or satisfaction of her own in making the complaint? The Gospel
sometimes does so; and once, when our Lord prayed and a Voice came from
Heaven, He said to His disciples that it was for their sakes that He
had prayed His Father to glorify Him. But this interpretation labors
under the same difficulty as the last. There was indeed humility in our
Lady's words. But it was in coupling the great but far inferior sorrow
of Joseph with her own. The words do indeed reveal to us the severity
of her affliction, but it is by their own truthfulness, and in their
literal acceptation. It was the excess of her anguish which wrung from
her, not in the excitement of a sudden revulsion of feeling, but with
all tranquility and unbroken self-possession, those marvelous words.
Neither was there any imperfection in this. The idea of imperfection
only comes in with the idea of disproportion. We complain because of
our weakness. Our sorrow is out of proportion with our strength, and so
without shadow of blame we utter a complaint, and our complaint is a
faultless imperfection. The Saints suffer and do not complain, because
their inward strength is
proportioned to their sorrow, and their silence is a perfection. But
there is a step beyond this. Speech, in the creature's extremity, is
its necessary resort to the Creator. Complaint to creatures is
complaint; but complaint to God is adoration. The sorrows of the Saints
have never been coextensive with the possibilities of their natures. We
presume Mary's suffering in this dolor to have been so. It went not
only beyond the power, but beyond the right, of silence. It drove her
nature to its outermost limit of endurance, magnificent and worshipful
as that nature was. It. exacted of her that which was proportioned to
it, the ultimate resort of the creature, the perfect unbosoming of
itself to the Creator. Our Lord's perfection in His Human Nature
culminated in a word. His silence was indeed a most adorable
perfection; but it was a higher height, when He broke out into that
cry, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Then it was that His
Passion had reached to the whole breadth of His Humanity, and had
covered it. Thus it was that our dearest Mother had her Passion at the
end of the Infancy; and her Compassion, together with His Passion, at
the end of the Ministry. The darkness of this third dolor was the
Gethsemane; the loss of Jesus ,vas the crucifixion of her soul; her
complaint was her cry upon the Cross, just when the torment of the
Cross was ending. It was with her now as it was to be with Him
hereafter.
There is yet another thing which strikes us as unlike our Lady in this
third dolor. It is her
venturing to question our Blessed Lord as to the reasons of His
conduct. In the midst of her love of Jesus, the thought always
uppermost in her mind, the memory that never went to sleep, the faith
which was her life, the fact which was her worship, was His Divinity.
Indeed, the greatness of her love arose from this very thing. It seems
most probable that our Lord had actually shown her His Divine Nature.
But at all events she said it always by faith. It was the prominent
thing which she saw in Him incessantly. Hence it would seem impossible
for her to question Him. Her humility and her intelligence would alike
forbid it. She had asked a question for one moment, just before
consenting to the Incarnation. But it was of an Angel, not of God; and,
moreover, those days were passed. How is it then that she thus seems to
call upon Him, and in public also, to explain and justify Himself for
what He had done? In all the Gospels her words are without any
parallel. They stand out by themselves, inviting notice, and yet full
of mystery. Her spirit was not troubled by the interior darkness of her
soul. It never had been troubled by it. Trouble is not the word.
Besides, the darkness had gone at the first sight of Jesus. It was not
in the flush of joy, which at that instant ,vas crowding in at all the
inlets of her soul, that she spoke, not knowing what she said, like
Peter upon Tabor, when he talked of building three tabernacles. Neither
joy nor sorrow ever made the balance of her tranquility even to quiver.
There was never any conflict in her. Struggle would have desecrated her
Immaculate Heart. It was not exactly that she wanted to know. Her
science was so vast, that it was absolutely without desire of increase,
so far at least as it was merely science, and not the beatifying
accompaniment of an ever-augmenting love. Her science was such as was
befitting her altitude as the Mother of God. She knew, not only all
that was due to her, not only all that was convenient for her, but all
which could perfect her perfections within the limits of a creature.
Everything in her had its limits. Every thing was vast, but it was also
limited. Her beauty was in her limitations. She remained a creature.
Hence her science was perfect, having nothing imperfect about it but
the inevitable imperfection of whatsoever is created. God only is
illimitable, God only omniscient, God only perfect with absolute,
independent, intrinsical perfection. Why then did she question Jesus
thus? We must reverently venture upon a conjecture. It was by an
impulse of the Holy Spirit, by an attraction from Jesus Himself, by a
will of His which she read in His Sacred Heart. She had just been
raised to a fresh height of sanctity. She had been drawn closer to God.
The time of boldness follows great graces, just as the time of great
graces follows great trials. Heavenliness of mind takes the form of an
adoring familiarity, when it is in actual contact with God. We see this
in the Saints. But what will the corresponding phenomenon be in the
sanctity of Mary? Jesus invited her to claim Him, to assert her rights
over Him, to exercise her authority upon Him. And all this publicly
before the doctors. Thus would He make solemn proclamation of her being
His Mother, and do her honor before all, while they who heard little
knew the import of that royal proclamation. Just as it required vast
grace in St. Joseph to enable His humility to govern and command His
God, so now did it require immense grace in Mary thus to assert her
rights over Jesus. But she did it in the same calm simplicity with
which she had consented to the Incarnation; and that moment she stood
once more on another mountain, higher than that which a moment since
had been the pedestal of her wonderful grace. The glory of obedience,
the triumph of humility, the magnificence of worship, all these were in
the bold question of the Blessed Mother.
It should be mentioned also as a peculiarity of this dolor, that it was
one of the chief sufferings of our Blessed Lord. Perhaps more than the
chief. In the seventeenth century there was a nun of the order of the
Visitation at Turin, who lived in a state of the most unusual union
with our Blessed Lord. Her name was Jeanne-Bénigne Gojos. She
had a special devotion to the Sacred Humanity, and the peculiar form of
her spirituality was the offering up of all her actions to the Eternal
Father in union with Jesus. It had been revealed to her that this was
the particular devotion of Mary and Joseph on earth, an "amorous
invention," (so she called it,) by which they themselves had gained
enormous graces. In passing over in her mind the various mysteries of
our Lord's Thirty-Three Years, she felt herself supernaturally
attracted to unite her soul with Him in the mystery of the Three Days'
Loss. This became her interior occupation, until at last it pleased our
Lord to reveal to her some of the secrets of His Sacred Heart about it.
He told her that it had cost Him more suffering than all the other
pains of His life. For then in His Mother's grief, caused by the
separation, He beheld all that grief included, which was to be her
martyrdom on Calvary, and that as there her body and soul would have
been sundered by an agony of grief unless He had kept them together by
His omnipotence, so during the Three Days' Loss His almighty love had
kept both Mary and Joseph united to Him, and that the cruelty of the
pain was so great that without this secret assistance they could
neither of them have survived. He added moreover that their sorrow was
simply incomprehensible, and that none could understand it but Himself.
[Vie, p.455] Let us meditate on this, without daring to add to it.
The heights of mystical theology, into which this dolor has led us,
must not, however, make us omit some other considerations, which come
more nearly to our own level. There is no need to seek for a climax in
divine things. Little things are not dwarfed by the side of great ones,
when the presence of God is seen in both. We may therefore remark this
peculiarity of the Three Days' Loss. If we may say so, it enabled Mary
better to understand the wretchedness of those who are in sin. She was
to be the mother of mercy and the refuge of sinners. She was to love
them as never mother loved faultless child. She was to be a sanctuary
so fortified by love, that hardly omnipotence itself should tear from
it the victims due to justice. It was not then enough for her to have a
marvelous vision of sin. She must know how they felt who unhappily had
sinned. But how was this to be? What had sin to do with her? It had at
once to make her childless, and to give her multitudes of children. Its
shadow had fallen from the first upon the joy of her heart, the living
joy outside her that moved about the house of Nazareth, and the joy
within her which was her life. Otherwise, within her, sin had nothing
to do. It never passed there. The decree in which it was foreseen did
not concern her. She was decreed before. She can see the malice of sin
well enough, when she looks on Jesus, and knows that it will slay Him.
But how is she to divine the feelings of poor sinners, and still keep
her own soul inviolate? It is by means of this third dolor. Sin is the
loss of Jesus. She knows now the misery of that. Sin is the loss of
Jesus when we have once possessed Him. She knows that also; for there
was the sting. The uncertainty to which she was a prey, while the
supernatural darkness rested on her soul, and which made her doubt if
her own unworthiness had repelled Jesus from her, gave her an approach
at least to the dismay of one who has forfeited grace, and lost our
Lord by his own fault. At least it enabled her to know the kind of
pain. But to lose Jesus after having once possessed Him, and not to
feel the loss, nay, to be positively indifferent to it, to acknowledge
it, and yet not care for it,---this, after what she had felt, most
piteously disclosed to her the worst unhappiness, the direst need of
the luckless sinner! Henceforth, if she measures sin by Calvary, she
will measure her love of sinners by the dolor of the Three Days' Loss;
and have we not said already that it was the greatest of them all?
But there was still another peculiarity in this dolor. It did what
beforehand could never have been expected. It brought forth in Mary's
heart a new love of Jesus, the love of what we have lost and mourned,
and then got back again. Affection has no greater consecration than
this. It is a flower which grows very commonly on human sorrows, but it
is surpassingly beautiful in all its varieties. Mothers have bent over
the beds of their dying children, as though their hearts would burst.
They would not stay God's hand, even if they could. Their will is with
His. But their hearts! Oh, this very conformity of their will sends all
the Sorrow rushing to the heart. The flower withers. They see it
withering before their eyes hour by hour. Human skill has certified
now to the absence of hope. It should have said rather to the absence
of trust in itself. It is useless to speak of no hope to a mother. It
is a language she does not understand. The bitterness of death is in
her soul; but she hopes. She has made her sacrifice to God; but still
she hopes. Nobody else hopes, but she hopes. Hope holds her heart
together, but only just holds it. But a change comes over the face of
her child. It seems to be sinking. She would almost recall her
sacrifice; but she does not. She is God's daughter, as well as her
child's mother. She sees it sink back, and its eyes close, and its
little weight indents the pillow somewhat deeper. Is it death? In the
mother's heart it was; and hope went, and the world gave way under her
feet, and it was not the floor of earth that held her up, but the arm
of her heavenly Father. But to the child it is not death. It is sleep.
It is hope. A few days, and weak, silent, very white, the child is
lying in her lap, smiling feebly into her eyes; it could speak, but it
is not allowed. The silence of that smile is such music to the mother's
heart. But does she love her child as she did before? Oh, no! it is a
new love. She is twice its mother now, because her heavenly Father has
given it to her twice. Some of us have been children twice over to our
mothers, and Mary has now to be twice a mother to us, for the earthly
one is gone. Poor earthly mother! What art thou compared with Mary?
What is thy child compared with Jesus? We then have no experience by
which to reach the new love of that Blessed Mother for the Son, whom
the Eternal Father had now given twice unto her. We have put up our
little ladders, the comparisons of our sweetest loves, but we cannot
mount to the top. Truly, if Mary had many crosses in this dolor, she
also came out of it with many crowns, and a new way of loving Jesus was
the best of all.
Such were the peculiarities of the Three Days' Loss. May our dearest
Mother pardon our attempt to fathom the depths of that sorrow, which
our Lord Himself has pronounced to be unfathomable! She promised that
they who "elucidate her shall possess eternal life." The loving
endeavor will not therefore be altogether without reward. But we must
turn now from the peculiarities of the mystery to the dispositions in
which she suffered. The grand disposition, which lasted throughout the
dolor, was a mixture of yearning with detachment, which it is not
possible for us to understand. It could only happen once in creation,
and to one creature, the elected Mother of God. She yearned for Jesus,
because she was His Mother. She yearned for His sensible presence, for
His visible beauty. She yearned for them the more intensely, because
her thoughts were not habituated to separate the Eternal from the
Child. Why should she stay her devotion, or unsimplify her worship, by
disuniting in thought what God had united, arid united by such rivets
as those of the Hypostatic Union? But while she yearned with such
ardor, she did so with perfect conformity to the will of God. She
practised the hard virtue of detachment in the most heroic degree ever
known; and she was detached broken-heartedly, not coldly. But for God
Himself, for the Divine Nature of Jesus, she yearned without any
detachment whatever. Detachment is from creatures, and detachment from
the created gifts of God is a higher virtue still. But detachment from
God is a horror. belonging only to impenitence and Hell. Next to Mary
and Joseph, perhaps also we should name the Baptist, St. Peter probably
loved our Blessed Lord more than any other creature, even the burning
Seraphim, and next to him St. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. But
there was something in the love of the apostles, deep, ardent, glorious
as it was, which was not altogether perfect. Some dross of earth
adhered to it. It was "expedient that He should go away." It was
necessary for their complete sanctification that His dear sensible
presence should be subtracted from them. Now the operations of grace
cleanse away imperfections, not merely by expelling them from the
soul, but by filling up their room with some great gift or peculiar
presence of God. This gift which they leave, and by which they effect a
cleansing of the soul, is quite separable from the cleansing operation;
even though, as a matter of fact, they always go together in the
Saints. Our Lady had nothing to cleanse. She had no merely natural
tenderness for Jesus, which was not already absorbed in the
supernatural, and canonized by it. Nothing earthly, nothing unworthy,
clung to her love of Him. But the subtraction of His sensible presence
might give her the same gift it gave the Apostles, without the
cleansing virtue which she did not need; and it might give it to her in
an eminent degree above their gift because in proportion to her
eminence. Thus, as in the third dolor she had found a new love of
Jesus, the grace of it might be to raise her whole love of our Lord
immensely higher, more nearly equal to His worth, to which at best it
must remain infinitely unequal. But so it is with many of our Lady's
graces. They strike across the trackless desert of the infinite. They
can never reach the other side; for it: has none. Yet somehow they gain
a nearer vicinity to God.
We have already noticed another of her dispositions, namely, her
extreme humility in the temple. Indeed, every moment of the Three Days
was drawing forth from her the most astonishing acts of humility. Her
tranquility in the midst of that perturbing darkness which came down
like deep night upon her soul, and yet perturbed her not, was the
effect of her intense humility. The doubt as to whether Jesus had not
left her because of her unworthiness was also the offspring of that
lowliness which, by thinking exaggerated evil of itself, comes nigh to
Divine truthfulness. But above all was her humility tried and
triumphant in the public assertion of her rights over Jesus, whom she
was longing to fall down and worship as the Second Person of the Most
Holy Trinity, an act which Mary of Agreda tells us she did do as soon
as she had got outside the gates of Jerusalem and beyond the sight of
men. Her silence, also, when His answer came,--- which was in reality
no answer to her question, but sounded like reproof, the more strange
from the mouth of a Boy of twelve,--- was the continuance of the same
marvelous humility. All this is like our dearest Mother. All this is
what we expect and recognize. The picture grows familiar again. We
breathe more freely than when a while ago we were straining up those
high hills, which were not meant for such as we are. Mary still
astonishes us. There are sweet surprises in her commonest graces,
because their beauty is at once so heroic and so gentle. It is far
beyond us, but it does not look so. It tempts us on. It seems
attainable. At least it draws us toward itself, and it is the best road
for us to be on. How strange it is that finding God always humbles,
even while it ravishes, even while it elevates! Humility is the perfume
of God. It is the fragrance which He leaves behind, who cannot be
humble Himself, because He is God. It is the odor, the stain, the token
the Creator leaves upon the creature when He has pressed upon it for a
moment. It must be a law of the world of grace, because we find it in
Mary, in the Saints, and in the faintest, most nearly indistinguishable
way in ourselves. Perhaps it is something inseparable from God. We
trace the Most High, the Incommunicable, by it in the Old Testament. We
trace Jesus by it in the New. The glory of humility is in the Human
Nature of our Lord, on which the mysterious pressure of the Divine
Nature rested for ever more. It is this inevitable perfume that God
leaves behind Him which hinders His altogether hiding His traces from
us. It is "the myrrh, and stacte, and cassia from His ivory houses."
Mary has found Him now, and she has lain down to rest in the lowliest,
most flowery valley of humility, and the fragrance of God has perfumed
her garments, her "gilded clothing, surrounded with variety."
Another of our Blessed Lady's dispositions in this dolor was the
resignation by which she simplified, as it were, with one endurance
such multiform and manifold sorrows as were involved in it. Altogether,
there is no disposition of the soul, no gift, no grace, for bearing
misfortune, which is at all to be compared with simplicity. It brings
along with it singleness of heart and eye. It is not amazed. It is not
precipitate. It does not distract itself with many things. It has a
sort of unconscious discretion about it which is very serviceable in
times of grief. Self-oblivion is at once the hardest and the most
needful lesson which we have to learn in trouble, and simplicity is
half-way to it already. Moreover, it strengthens our faith, by keeping
our eye with a gentle, hardly constrained fixedness on God. It is in
its own nature too self-possessed to be taken unawares by those subtle
temptations which assail us in sorrow, and which, under the pretext of
prudence, or of greater good, lead us artfully away from God to rest on
creatures. Simplicity makes a ring of light round about it, even in
darkness, like the moon shining through a mist. If there be not enough
light to walk by, there is at least enough to guarantee us against
surprises. Such was our dear Mother's simplicity. It had a fearful
complication of sorrows to cope with. There was first of all the
intense suffering, which is itself a bewildering distraction. It seems
to divide our nature into many pieces, and to live and ache in each one
of them. Then there was added to this the bodily pain arising from
inward grief, and also from fatigue, hunger, and want of rest. To sit
down and die would have been easy, had it been right. But she had to
work, to think, to plan, to consider, to be stirring: and activity was
almost insupportable in such a conjuncture as this. But God chose that
very moment to overwhelm her supernaturally with interior trials. She
was in darkness. A sudden change seemed to have come over the life of
her soul. She was battling, not with one evil, but with many, not with
an evil which she knew where to find or how to confront, but with
uncertainties, surmises, suspicions, torturing suspense, unaccustomed
nescience, and a baffling darkness which met her thoughts whenever they
went forth, and turned them back again. All this was on her at one and
the same time. Yet, throughout, her will was calmer than a summer lake.
It lay in the lap of God's will as the lake lies in the bosom of its
green valley. It never stirred. Not a first movement, not an
indeliberate breath from self, rippled ever so indistinctly the silver
level of the waters. This came of her simplicity. It wrought many
wonders in her Three-and-Sixty Years. But, except at the moment of the
Incarnation, it never wrought a wonder like to the loving stillness of
her heart during the Three Days' Loss. It looked,---of course it could
be but a look,---as if the loss of the Son had made her sink down more
deeply in the Bosom of the Father.
Although this dolor for the most part keeps up among the high hills,
which do not belong to us, it is nevertheless so full of lessons for
ourselves, that it is difficult to select from them. It teaches us,
first of all, that the loss of Jesus, however brief, is the greatest of
all evils. It was this which was almost unbearable even to our Lady,
and Jesus is not more needful to us than to her, because to all
creatures He is absolutely needful; only to us He. is a more pressing
necessity, because of our weakness and our sin. The greatness of Mary's
sorrow is to us a visible measure of the magnitude of the evil. Yet
alas! how little we feel it! How happy can men be, who yet have lost
Jesus, often unconscious almost of their loss, more often indifferent
to it when they know it!  We should have
thought the loss of Jesus was
in itself so fearful an evil, that nothing could have aggravated it;
and yet our want of perception of the greatness of our loss is a token
of still deeper misery. It is sad indeed when the voice of the world is
more musical in our ears than the voice of our Lord. It is just the
very wretchedness, the very hatefulness of the world, that it has no
Jesus. He does not belong to it. He refused to pray for it. He
pronounced its friendship to be on our part a simple declaration of war
upon Himself. It makes our hearts sink to look out upon the world, and
to know that it has no part in Him. It is like gazing upon a cheerless
and disconsolate view of barren moors or dreary swamp. No sunshine can
gild it. It is dismal on the brightest day. Nay, it is ugliest when the
sun shines upon it. So it is with the world, because it has no Jesus.
So does it become with us in proportion as we are friends with the
world, or even at peace with the world. He and it are incompatible. Are
we not afraid? Pleasure, gayety, fashion, expense,---dare we, even in
Our thoughts, put these things into the Heart of Jesus? Would He smile
when worldly things were said? Would He wish to please people round
Him, who are taking no pains whatever to please His Father? Would He
seek to be popular in society, to stand well with those who have not at
heart the only one interest which He has at His, to keep out of sight
His principles, not simply through silence and reserve, but lest they
should ruffle others and interfere with that smoothness of social
intercourse which takes the place of charity? Alas! sin is bad; excess
of pleasure is Dad; giving God the second place is bad; worshipping the
rich is bad; hardening our Christian feelings to become accustomed to
worldly frivolities and very slightly uncharitable conversation is bad.
But these at least are evils which wear no masks. We know what we are
about. We give up Jesus with the full understanding of the sacrifice we
are making. We are taking our side, choosing our lot,. and we know it.
But wishing to please---this is the danger to a spiritual person. Total
separation from Christ is already implied in the very idea. What is it
we wish to please? The world, which is the enemy of Jesus. Whom do we
wish to please? Those who are not caring to please God, and in whom
Jesus takes no pleasure. Wherein do we wish to please? In things,
conversations, and pursuits, which have no reference to God, no savor
of Christ, no tendency toward religion. When do we wish to please? At
times when we are doing least for Christ, when prayer and faith and
hope and love and abiding sorrow for sin would be the most
unseasonable. Where do we wish to please? In haunts where there is less
evidence of God than elsewhere, where every circumstance, every
appurtenance, flashes the world's image back upon us as from a lustre.
Yet we see no evil. We want smoothness, polish, inoffensiveness,
discreet keeping back of God. He said that He and Mammon would not
dwell together. But to some extent we will force Him so to dwell. He
shall at least keep the peace with the world, and learn to revolve
alongside of it in His own sphere, without encroaching, without
jarring. Dreadful! Is there not hell already in the mere attempt? Yet
how little men suspect it! It is like something noxious getting into
the air, and not at first affecting the lungs. But the lights burn dim,
then one by one they go out, and we are left in the darkness, unable to
escape, because lethargy and suffocation have already begun within
ourselves. In other words, high principles gently lower themselves, or
are kept for state occasions, such as Lent, or a priest's company. Then
we begin to be keenly alive to the annoyance which comes to us from the
conversation of uncompromising Christians, and we pronounce them
indiscreet, and by that ceremony they are disposed of to our great
comfort, and we praise them more than ever, because by that reserve we
have got rid of what fidgeted us in them, and we lull to rest the
remaining uneasiness of conscience by this greater promptitude of a
praise which we have first made valueless by counterweighting it. Then
it dawns upon us that it is a duty to keep well with the world even for
God's sake. Then keeping well edges on to being friends with the world.
Then there begin to be symptoms of two distinct lives going to be lived
by us; but we do not see these symptoms ourselves. Then uncomfortable
feelings rise in us, taking away our relish for certain persons,
certain things, certain books; certain conversations. We rouse
ourselves, and take a view, an intellectual view of the rightness of
being smooth, and not offending, and getting on well with the world.
The view comforts us, and we are all right again. Then God's blessings,
His spiritual blessings, very gradually and almost imperceptibly, begin
to evaporate from us, from ourselves, our children, our homes, our
hearts, and every thing round us. But the sun of prosperity shines so
clearly that we do not see the mist of the evaporation rising up from
the earth and withdrawing itself into heaven. Perhaps we shall never
awake to the truth again. Trying to please is a slumberous thing. So we
drift on, never suspecting how far the current is carrying us away from
God. We may die without knowing it. We shall know it after that, the
instant afterward.
Thus we may lose Jesus in three ways. We may abruptly break from Him by
sin. We may quietly and gracefully withdraw from Him, confessing the
attractions of the world to be greater than His. We may retire from Him
slowly and by imperceptible degrees, always with our face toward Him,
as we withdraw from royalty, and all because He is not a fixed
principle with us, and the desire to please! is so. But if we have lost
Him in anyone of these three ways,---sin, worldliness, and the love of
pleasing,---and He rouses us by His grace, what are we to do? This
third dolor teaches us. It must be a dolor to us. We must search for
Him whom we have lost. He may not allow us to find Him all at once. He
probably will not. But we must put off everything else, in order to
prosecute our search. Other things must be subordinate to it. They must
wait, or they must give way. But we must not be precipitate in our
search. We must not run; we must walk. We shall miss Him if we run. We
must not do violent things, not even to ourselves, although we richly
deserve them. It is not a time for taking up new penances. The loss of
Jesus is penance enough, now that we have found it out. We must be
gentle, and sorrow will give us gentleness. Hence, our search must be
also a sorrowful one, as Mary's was. We must seek Jesus with
tears,---with tears, but not with cries,---with a broken heart, but a
quiet heart also. We must seek Him, also, in the right place,---in
Jerusalem, in the temple; that is, in the Church, and in sacraments,
and in prayer. He is never among our kinsfolk; He never hides in the
blameless softness of a kind home. This is a hard saying; but this
dolor says it. All these are the conditions of a successful search. It
was so Mary sought Him; it was so she found Him. We must be of good
cheer. Every thing has its remedy. Even worldliness is curable, and it
is by far the nearest to incurable of any of our diseases. If our whole
life has been but a desire to please, if every thought, word, action,
look, and omission has got that poison at the bottom of it, we must not
be cast down. To change the habit is too difficult. We will change the
object. It shall be Jesus instead of the world. Who ever knew people
more thoroughly all for God than some who were once notably all for the
world? nay, it would seem the more notably for the world, the more
thoroughly for Him.
We must, however,---so also this dolor teaches us,---be on our guard
against a temptation which is likely to assail us in our search. We
soon lose the feeling of guilt in the feeling of beginning to be good
again. It is part of the shallowness of our nature. We shall not have
gone far on our road in search of Jesus before we shall be drawn to
attribute the loss of Him, not so much to our own fault as to some
mysterious supernatural trial which God is sending us, and the coming
of which is itself an index of our goodness. We feel our hearts
sorrowfully burning after our Lord. They cannot surely be the same
hearts which thought but a while ago were living contentedly without
Him. The change of feeling has not been sudden or marked, therefore it
cannot be new. So we argue. Alas! the truth is, our own changeableness
is so great that it is incredible even to ourselves, except at the
moment of the turn, when we see it with our eyes. Let us not take any
grand views of supernatural chastisements. They are rare, and they are
not for such as we are. Simply we have sinned, and we are being
punished for it. It is our punishment to have to search for Him, who
once dwelt with us, and only left us reluctantly. Let us be sure that
every thing about us is very commonplace. We have lost Jesus, not in a
mystical darkness of soul, but in the weakness of a worldly heart; we
shall find Him, not in a vision or in any masterful interior operation
of grace, but in the resumption of our old prayers, in the
frequentation of the old sacraments. It is here the Evil One deludes
many. They look out for a more striking appearance of our Lord than
they had before. So they come up to Him, do not know Him, and go past
Him. It is not often men turn back upon a search. But if these souls do
not do so, cannot every one see that they have a wilderness before
them, in which they may die, but which they will assuredly never cross?
Mary might have thought her loss of Jesus a supernatural trial, and she
would have thought truly. But she thought it was her own fault, and so
she reached a far higher truthfulness.
It is true, there is a loss of Jesus which is not altogether our fault,
which is half trial, as well as half punishment. It is not so much a
loss of Him as a veiling of His Face. We only think "Ie have lost Him
because we do not see Him. This happens to us again and again in our
spiritual life; and, if we watch attentively, we shall be sure to
detect the. action of some law in these disappearances. We shall come
to know the circumstances under which they happen, which regulate their
duration, and which accompany His reappearance. For He does nothing,
except in order, weight, and measure,---more so, if it were possible,
in the world of souls than in the world of matter. God has His Own way
with each one of us, and it is of consequence we should know
His way with ourselves. But, with all, His way is a system. It has its
laws and its periods, and is just as regular in its deflections, and as
punctual in its catastrophes, as it is in its peace, its sequence, its
uniformity. There is, perhaps, no infallible way of knowing when this
disappearance of Jesus is our own fault. Perhaps it is always, in some
measure, our own fault. If it were only a trial, it would cease to be a
very efficacious one, were we sure it was but a trial, and no fault of
ours. Even then we must not be passive,---even then we must
sorrow,---even then we must search. We must not wait for Him to come
back to us; we must go and find out where He is. But, till we find Him,
do not let us seek for consolation either from our guides or from
ourselves,
least of all from the sympathy of creatures or the comforts of earth:
He is our only true consolation. It would be the saddest of
things if we were consoled by any thing but the finding of Him! All
this the third dolor teaches us; for it mirrors on its surface, without
being disturbed by the deep things under it, all the relations of the
soul with its Saviour and its Lord.
There is something almost selfish in the feelings which we turn away
from the deathbed when the grim work is over. There is a sense of calm
and of repose, which, for the moment, seems as if it were an enjoyment
of our own. But it is not so, or not more so than to our nature is
unavoidable. It was anguish to see one we loved suffer so terribly; to
watch him struggling with the dark enemy, and to be unable to assist
him except by prayers we were too distracted to pray, only that the
mourner's unselfish will is itself prayer with God. So much hung upon
the struggle; such interests were on the balance; we were sick to think
of them, but sicker still to see them,---now uppermost, and now
undermost,---in that tremendous hour. Now all is over; as far as we can
see, veil over, happily over, eternally right. His body is harmless;
his soul is accepted. There is nothing to annoy our love of him,
because there is nothing to afflict and harass him. It is a beautiful
change to him, a soothing change to us, Our hearts are full to
overflowing with that expansion which belongs to true repose. Such is
our feeling, as we watch Jesus and Mary, on the threshold o£ the
house of Nazareth, together again, the two hearts like one, on the
shore of that broad and tranquil sea of eighteen years, during
which they shall separate no more. Mary's heart is still broken.
It must be broken always. But it beats inside another Heart,
which will not leave her again for years and years; and there is a
quiet, pensive, evening brightness about her sorrow, most unlike the
darkness, and the wandering, and the weariness of the Three Days'
Loss. She has got Jesus back again. It is peace to us as well as to
her. Truly she is to be envied now for her joys even amidst the number
of her sorrows.
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