THE FIFTH DOLOR
THE CRUCIFIXION
THE world is a mystery. Life, time, death, doubt, good and evil, and
the uncertainty which hangs about our eternal lot, are all mysteries.
They lie burning on the heart at times. But the Crucifix is the meaning
of them, the solution of them all. It puts the question, and answers it
as well. It is the reading of all riddles, the certainty of all doubts,
and the centre of all faiths, the fountain of all hopes, the symbol of
all loves. It reveals man to himself, and God to man. It holds a light
to time that it may look into eternity and be reassured. It is a sweet
sight to look upon in our times of joy; for it makes the joy tender
without reproving it, and elevates without straining it. In sorrow
there is no sight like it. It draws forth our tears, and makes them
fall faster, and so softly that they become sweeter than very smiles.
It gives light in the darkness, and the silence of its preaching is
always eloquent, and death is life in the face of that grave earnest of
eternal life. The Crucifix is always the same, yet ever varying its
expression so as to be to us in all our moods just what we most want
and it is best for us to have. No wonder saints have hung over their
Crucifixes in such trances of contented love. But Mary is a part of the
reality of this symbol. The Mother and the Apostle stand, as it were,
through all ages at the foot of the Crucifix, symbols themselves of the
great mystery, of the sole true religion, of what God has done for the
world which He created. As we cannot think of the Child at Bethlehem
without His Mother, so neither will the Gospel let us picture to
ourselves the Man on Calvary without His Mother also. Jesus and Mary
were always one; but there was a peculiar union between them on
Calvary. It is to this union we now come, Mary's fifth dolor, the
Crucifixion.
The Way of the Cross was ended, and the summit of the mount has been
attained a little before the hour of noon. If tradition speaks truly,
it was a memorial place even then, fit to be a world's sanctuary; for
it was said to be the site of Adam's grave, the spot where he rested
when the mercy of God accepted and closed his nine hundred years of
heroic penance. Close by was the city of David, which was rather the
city of God, the centre of so much wonderful history, the object of so
much pathetic Divine love. The scene which was now to be enacted there
would uncrown the queenly city; but only to crown, with a far more
glorious crown of light, and hope, and truth, and beauty, every city of
the world where Christ Crucified should be preached and the Blessed
Sacrament should dwell. It was but a little while, an hour perhaps,
since the last dolor; so that only four hours have elapsed between the
fourth dolor and the consummation of the fifth. Yet in sorrow and in
sanctification it is a longer epoch than the eighteen years of
Nazareth. In nothing is it more true, than in our sanctification, that
with God a thousand years are but one day. These hours were filled with
mysteries so Divine, with realities so thrilling, that the lapse of
time is hardly an element in the agony of Mary's soul. She comes to the
Crucifixion a greater marvel of grace, a greater miracle of suffering,
than when an hour ago she had met the Cross-laden Jesus at the corner
of the street.
They have stripped Him of His vestments, from the shame of which
stripping His Human Nature shrank inexpressibly. To His Mother the
indignity was a torture in itself, and the unveiled sight of Her Son's
Heart the while was a horror and a woe words cannot tell. They have
laid Him on the Cross, a harder bed than the Crib of Bethlehem in which
He first was laid. He gives Himself into their hands with as much
docility as a weary child whom his mother is gently preparing for his
rest. It seems, and it really was so, as if it was His own will, rather
than theirs, which was being fulfilled. Beautiful in His disfigurement,
venerable in His shame, the Everlasting God lay upon the Cross, with
His eyes gently fixed on Heaven. Never, Mary thought, had He looked
more worshipful, more manifestly God, than now when He lay outstretched
there, a powerless but willing victim; and she worshipped Him with
profoundest adoration. The executioners now lay His right arm and hand
out upon the Cross. They apply the rough nail to the palm of His Hand,
the Hand out of which the world's graces flow, and the first dull knock
of the hammer is heard in the silence. The trembling of excessive pain
passes over His sacred limbs, but does not dislodge the sweet
expression from His eyes. Now blow follows blow, and is echoed faintly
from somewhere. The Magdalen and John hold their ears; for the sound is
unendurable; it is worse than if the iron hammer were falling on their
living hearts. Mary hears it all. The hammer is falling upon her living
heart; for her love had long since been dead to self, and only lived in
Him. She looked upward to heaven. She could not speak. Words would have
said nothing; The Father alone understood the offering of that heart,
now broken so many times. To her the Nailing was not one action. Each
knock was a separate martyrdom. The hammer played upon her heart as the
hand of the musician changefully presses the keys of his instrument.
The Right Hand is nailed to the Cross. The Left will not reach. Either
they have miscalculated in the hole they have drilled to facilitate the
passage of the nail, or else the Body has contracted through agony.
Fearful was the scene which now ensued, as the saints describe it to us
in their revelations. The executioners pulled the left arm with all
their force; still it would not reach. They knelt against His ribs,
which were distinctly heard to crack, though not to break, beneath the
violent pressure, and, dislocating His arm, they succeeded in
stretching the Hand to the place. Not more than a gentle sigh could be
wrung from Jesus, and the sweet expression in His eyes dwelt there
still. But to Mary,---what imagination can reach the horror of that
sight, of that sound, to her? Oh, there was more grief in them than has
gone to the making of all the Saints that have ever yet been canonized!
Again the dull blows of the hammer commence, changing their sounds
according as it was flesh and muscle, or the hard wood, through which
the nail was driving its cruel way. His legs are stretched out also by
violence; one Foot is crossed upon another, those Feet which have so
often been sore and weary with journeying after souls; and through the
solid mass of shrinking muscles the nail is driven, slowly and with
unutterable agony, because of the unsteadiness of the Feet in that
position. It is useless to speak of the Mother; it is idle to
compassionate her. Our compassion can reach no way, in comparison of
the terrible excess of her agony. But God held His creature up, and she
lived on.
Now the Cross is lifted off from the ground, with Jesus lying on it,
the same sweet expression in His eyes, and is carried near to the hole
which they have dug to receive the foot. They then fasten ropes to it,
and, edging it to the brink of the hole, they begin to rear it
perpendicularly by means of the ropes. When it is raised almost
straight up, they work the foot of it gradually over the edge of the
cavity until it jumps into its socket with a vehement bound, which
dislocates every bone, and nearly tears the Body from the nails.
Indeed, some contemplatives mention a rope fastened round His waist
with such cruel tightness that it was actually hidden in the flesh, to
hinder His Body from detaching itself from the Cross. So one horror
outstrips another, searching out with fiery thrills, like the
vibrations of an earthquake, all the supernatural capabilities of
suffering, which lay like abysses in the Mother's ruined heart: Let us
not compare her woe to any other. It stands by itself. We may look at
it and weep over it in love, in love which is suffering as well. But we
dare not make any commentary on it. Sorrowful Mother! Blessed be the
Most Holy Trinity for the miracles of grace wrought in thee at that
tremendous hour!
Earth trembled to its very centre. Inanimate things shuddered as if
they had intelligence. The rocks were split around, precipices cloven
all along the most distant shores of the Mediterranean, and the
mystical veil of the temple rent in twain by the agitation of the
earth, as if a hand had done it. At that moment,---so one revelation
tells us---there rose up from the temple-courts a long wailing blast of
trumpets, to mark the offering of the noonday sacrifice, and they that
blew the trumpets knew not how, that day, they rang in heaven as the
noonday trumpets never rang before. Darkness began to creep over the
earth; for the satellite of earth might well eclipse the material sun,
when the earth itself was thus eclipsing the Sun of justice, the
Eternal Light of the Father. The animals sought coverts where they
might hide. The songs of the birds were hushed in the gardens beneath.
Horror came over the souls of men, and the beginnings of grace, like
the first uncertain advances of the stealthy dawn, came into many
hearts out of that sympathetic darkness. A moment was an age when men
were environed by such mysteries as these.
The first hour of the three begins,---the three hours that were such
parallels to the three days when she was seeking her lost Boy. In the
darkness she has come close up to the Cross; for others fell away, as
the panic simultaneously infected them. There is a faith in the Jews,
upon which this fear can readily graft itself. But the executioners are
hardened, and the Roman soldiers were not wont to tremble in the
darkness. Near to the Cross, by the glimmering light, they are dicing
for His garments. The coarse words and rude jests pierced the Mother's
heart; for, as we have said before, it belonged to her perfection that
her grief absorbed nothing. Every thing told upon her. Every thing made
its own wound, and occupied her, as if itself were the sole suffering,
the exclusively aggravating circumstance. She saw those
garments---those relics, which were beyond all price the world could
give---in the hands of miserable sinners, who would sacrilegiously
clothe themselves therewith. For thirty years they had grown with our
Lord's growth, and had not been worn by use,---renewing that miracle
which Moses mentions in Deuteronomy, that, through all the forty years
of the desert, the garments of the Jews were not "worn out, neither the
shoes of their feet consumed with age." Now sinners were to wear them,
and to carry them into unknown haunts of drunkenness and sin. Yet what
was it but a type? The whole of an unclean world was to clothe itself
in the beautiful justice of her Son. Sinners were to wear His virtues,
to merit by His merits, to satisfy in His satisfactions, and to draw,
at will, from the wells of His Precious Blood. As Jacob had been
blessed in Esau's clothing, so should all mankind be blessed in the
garments of their elder Brother.
Then there was the seamless tunic she herself had wrought for Him. The
unity of His Church was figured there. She saw them cast lots for it.
She marked to whom it had fallen. One of her first loving duties to the
Church will be to recover it for the faithful as a relic. Then it was
that the history of the Church rose before her. Every schism, which
ever should afflict the Mystical Body of her Son, was like a new rent
in her suffering heart. Every heresy, every quarrel, every unseemly sin
against unity, came to her with keenest anguish, there on Calvary, with
the living Sacrifice being actually offered, and the unity of His
Church being bought with so terrible a price. All this bitterness
filled her soul, without distracting her from Jesus for a single
moment. As holy pontiffs, with hearts broken by the wrongs and
distresses of the Church, have been all engrossed by them, yet never
for an instant lost their interior union with Jesus, so much more was
it with His Mother now. It was on Calvary she felt all this with an
especial feeling, as it is in Lent, and Passiontide, and in devotion to
the Passion, that we learn to love the Church with such sensitive
loyalty.
Fresh fountains of grief were opened to her in the fixing of the title
to the Cross. It had come from Pilate, and a ladder was set up against
the Cross, and the title nailed above our Saviour's Head. Every blow of
the hammer was unutterable torture to Him, torture which had a fearful
echo also in the Mother's heart. Nor was the title itself without power
to extend and rouse her suffering. The sight of the Holy Name blazoned
there in shame to all the world---the Name, which to her was sweeter
than any music, more fragrant than any perfume,---this was in itself a
sorrow. The name of Nazareth, also, how it brought back the past,
surrounding the Cross, in that dim air, with beautiful associations and
marvelous contrasts. Everywhere in the Passion Bethlehem and Nazareth
were making themselves felt, and seen, and heard, and always eliciting
new sorrow from the inexhaustible depths of the Mother's heart. If He
was a king, it was a strange throne on which His people had placed Him.
Why did they not acknowledge Him to be their king? Why did they wait
for a Roman stranger to tell it them as if in scorn? Why did they not
let Him rule in their hearts? Ah! poor people! how much happier would
it be for themselves, how many sins would be hindered, how many souls
saved, how much glory gained for God! King of the Jews! would that it
were so! Yet it was really so. But a king rejected, disowned, deposed,
put to death! What a load lay upon her heart at that moment! It was the
load of self invoked curses, which was to press to the ground that poor
regicide people. She would have borne all her seven dolors over again
to abolish that curse, and reinstate them, as of old, in the
predilection of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was too late.
They had had their day. They had filled up the measure of their
iniquity. It rose to the brim that very morning, and the breaking of
Mary's heart was a portion of their iniquity. But at least over her
heart Jesus was acknowledged king, and reigned supreme. So was it with
the dear Magdalen and the ardent John; and, as she thought of this, she
looked upon them with a very glory of exceeding love. Is it that Jesus
breaks the hearts over which He reigns, or that He comes of special
choice to reign in broken hearts? But as the sense passed over her of
what it was to have Jesus for a king,---of the undisputed reign which
by His own grace He exercised over her sinless heart,---of the vastness
of that heart, far exceeding by his own bounty the grand empire of the
Angels or the multitudinous perfections of the Saints,---and of the
endless reign which He would have in that beautiful "ivory palace" of
hers which made Him so glad,---her love burst out afresh upon Him, as
if the dikes of ocean had given away, and the continents were being
flooded with its waters, and every gush of love was at the same time an
exquisite gush of pain.
She had enough of occupation in herself. But sorrow widens great
hearts, just as it contracts little ones. She had taken to herself the
thieves for sons. She was greedy of children. She felt the value of
them then, in the same way in which we know the value of a friend when
we are losing him. His dead face looks it into us, and means more than
his living expression did. She has wrestled in prayer for those two
malefactors, and God has given her to see the work of grace beginning
in the heart of one of them. Does this content her? Yes! with that
peculiar contentment which comes of answered prayer, that is to say,
she became more covetous because of what she had not. She counted that
only for a beginning. She pleaded, she insisted. One would have thought
such prayer at such a time resistless. It is not Heaven that resists.
Graces descend from above like flights of Angels to the heart of the
impenitent thief. They fluttered there. They sang for entrance. They
waited. They pecked at the heart of flesh. They made it bleed with
pain, with terror, with remorse. But it was its own master. It would
not open. So near Jesus, and to be lost! It might well be incredible to
Mary. Yet so it was. The thief matched his hardness against her
sweetness, and prevailed. Mary may not be queen of any heart where
Jesus is not already king. But, oh, the unutterable anguish to her of
this impenitence! His face so near the Face of Jesus, the sighs of the
spotless victim dwelling in his ear as silence dwells in the mountains,
the very Breath of the Incarnate God reaching to him, the Precious
Blood strewn all around him, like an overflow of waste water, as if
there was more than men knew what to do with, and in the midst of all
this to be damned, to commute the hot strangling throes of that
crucifixion for everlasting fire, to be detached by his own will from
the very side of the Crucifix, and the next moment to become a part of
hopeless Hell! Mary saw his eternity before her as in a vista. She took
in at a glance the peculiar horror of his case. There came a sigh out
of her heart at the loss of this poor wretched son, which had sorrow
enough in it to repair the outraged majesty of God, but not enough to
soften the sinner's heart.
Such were the outward, or rather let us call them the official,
occupations of Mary during the first hour upon the Cross. Her inmost
occupation, and yet outward also, was that which was above her,
overshadowing her in the darkness, and felt more vividly even than if
it had been clearly seen,---Jesus hanging upon the Cross! As our
guardian Angels are ever by our sides, engrossed with a thousand
invisible ministries of love, and yet all the while see God, and in
that one beatifying sight are utterly immersed, so was it with Mary
upon Calvary. While she seemed an attentive witness and listener of the
men dividing our Lord's garments among them, and of the nailing of the
title to the Cross, or appeared to be occupied with the conversion of
the thieves, she did all those things, as the saints do things, in
ecstasy, with perfect attention and faultless accuracy, and yet far
withdrawn into the presence of God and hidden in His light. A whole
hour went by. Jesus was silent. His Blood was on fire with pain. His
Body began to depend from the Cross, as if the nails barely held it.
The Blood was trickling down the wood all the while. He was growing
whiter and whiter. Every moment of that agony was an act of worship
fully worthy of God Himself. He was holding ineffable communion with
the Father. Mysteries, exceeding all mysteries that had ever been on
earth, were going on in His Heart, which was alternately contracted and
dilated with agony too awful for humanity to bear without miraculous
support. It had Divine support; but Divine consolation was carefully
kept apart. The interior of that Heart was clearly disclosed to the
Mother's inward eye, and her heart participated in its sufferings. She,
too, needed a miracle to prolong her life, and the miracle was worked.
But with the same peculiarity. From her, also, all consolation was kept
away. And so one hour passed, and grace had created many worlds of
sanctity, as the laden minutes went slowly by, one by one, then slower
and slower, like the pulses of a clock at midnight when we are ill,
beating sensibly slower to reproach us for our impatient listening.
The second hour began. The darkness deepened, and there were fewer
persons round the Cross. No dicing now, no disturbance of nailing the
title to the Cross. All was as silent as a sanctuary. Then Jesus spoke.
It seemed as if He had been holding secret converse with the Father,
and He had come to a point when He could keep silence no longer. It
sounded as if He had been pleading for sinners, and the Father had said
that the sin of His Crucifixion was too great to be forgiven. To our
human ears the word has that significance. It certainly came out of
some depth, out of something which had been going on before, either His
own thoughts, or the intensity of His pain, or a colloquy with the
Father. "Father! forgive them; for they know not what they do!"
Beautiful, unending prayer, true of all sins and of all sinners in
every time! They know not what they do. No one knows what he does when
he sins. It is his very knowledge that the malice of sin is past his
comprehension which is a great part of the malice of his sin. Beautiful
prayer also, because it discloses the characteristic devotion of our
dearest Lord! When He breaks the silence, it is not about His Mother,
or the apostles, or a word of comfort to that affectionate forlorn
Magdalen,  whom He loved so
fondly. It is for sinners, for the worst of them, for His personal
enemies, for those who crucified Him, for those who had been yelling
after Him in the streets, and loading Him with the uttermost
indignities. It is as if at Nazareth He might seem to love His Mother
more than all the world beside, but that now on Calvary, when His agony
had brought out the deepest realities and the last disclosures of His
Sacred Heart, it was found that His chief devotion was to sinners. Was
Mary hurt by this appearance? Was it a fresh dolor that He had not
thought first of her? Oh, no! Mary had no self on Calvary. It could not
have lived there. Had her heart cried out at the same moment with our
Lord's, it would have uttered the same prayer, and in like words would
have unburdened itself of that of which it was most full. But the word
did draw forth new floods of sorrow. The very sound of His voice above
her in the obscure eclipse melted her heart within her. The marvel of
His uncomplaining silence was more pathetic now that He had spoken.
Grief seemed to have reached its limits; but it had not. That word
threw down the walls, laid a whole world of possible sorrow open to it,
and poured the waters over it in an irresistible flood. The
well-remembered tone pierced her like a spear. The very beauty of the
word was anguish to her. Is it not often so that deathbed words are
harrowing because they are so beautiful, so incomprehensibly full of
love? Mary's broken heart enlarged itself, and took in the whole world,
and bathed it in tears of love. To her that word was like a creative
word. It made the Mother of God Mother of mercy also. Swifter than the
passage of light, as that word was uttered, the mercy of Mary had
thrown round the globe a mantle of light, beautifying its rough places,
and giving lustre in the dark, while incredible sorrow made itself
coextensive with her incalculable love.
The words of Jesus on the Cross might almost have been a dolor by
themselves. They were all of them more touching in themselves than any
words which ever have been spoken on the earth. The incomparable beauty
of our Lord's Soul freights each one of them with itself, and yet how
differently! The sweetness of His Divinity is hidden in them, and for
ages on ages it has ravished the contemplative souls who loved Him
best. If even to ourselves these words are continually giving out new
beauties in our meditations, what must they be to the saints, and then,
far beyond that, what were they to His Blessed Mother? To her, each of
them was a theology, a theology enrapturing the heart while it
illumined the understanding. She knew they would be His last. Through
life they had been but few, and now in less than two hours He will
utter seven, which the world will listen to and wonder at until the end
of time. To her they were not isolated. They recalled other unforgotten
words. There were no forgotten ones. She interpreted them by others,
and others again by them, and so they gave out manifold new meanings.
Besides which, she saw the interior from which they came, and therefore
they were deeper to her. But the growing beauty of Jesus had been
consistently a more and more copious fountain of sorrow all through the
Three-and-Thirty Years. It was not likely that law would be abrogated
upon Calvary. And was there not something perfectly awful, even to
Mary's eye, in the way in which His divine beauty was mastering every
thing and beginning to shine out in that eclipse? It seemed as if the
Godhead were going to lay Itself bare among the very ruins of the
Sacred Humanity, as His bones were showing themselves through His
flesh. It was unspeakable. Mary lifted up her whole soul to its
uttermost height to reach the point of adoration due to Him, and
tranquilly acknowledged that it was beyond her power. Her adoration
sank down into profusest love, and her love condensed under the chill
shadow into an intensity of sorrow, which felt its pain intolerably
everywhere as the low pulsations of His clear gentle voice rang and
undulated through her inmost soul.
The thought which was nearest to our Blessed Saviour's Heart, if we may
reverently venture to speak thus of Him, was the glory of His Father.
We can hardly doubt that after that, chief among the affections of the
created nature which He had condescended to assume, stood the love of
His Immaculate Mother. Among His seven "lords there will be one, a word
following His absolution of the thief at Mary's prayer, a double word,
both to her and of her. That also shall be like a creative word,
creative for Mary, still more creative for His Church. He spoke out of
an unfathomable love, and yet in such mysterious guise as was fitted
still more to deepen His Mother's grief. He styles her "Woman," as if
He had already put off the filial character. He substitutes John for
Himself, and finally appears to transfer to John His own right to call
Mary Mother. How many things were there here to overwhelm our Blessed
Lady with fresh affliction! She well knew the meaning of the mystery.
She understood that by this seeming transfer she had been solemnly
installed in her office of second Eve, the mother of all mankind. She
was aware that now Jesus had drawn her still more closely to Himself,
had likened her to Himself more than ever, and had made their union
more complete. The two relations of Mother and Son were two no longer;
they had melted into one. She knew that never had He loved her more
than now, and never shown her a more palpable proof of His love, of
which, however, no proof was wanting. But each fresh instance of His
love was a new sorrow to her; for it called up more love in her, and
with more love, as usual, more sorrow.
But what a strange Annunciation it was, this proclamation to her of the
Maternity of men, compared with the Annunciation of her Divine
Maternity! The midnight hour, the silent room, the ecstatic prayer, the
lowly promptitude of the consent, the swift marvel of the adorable
mystery,---all these were now exchanged for the top of Calvary in the
dun light of the eclipse, with her Son hanging bleeding on the Cross.
Oh, what surpassing joy went with the first Motherhood, what
intolerable anguish with the second! Yet while God sent His angel to
make the first Annunciation, He Himself, with His sweet Human voice,
condescended to make the second. But in Mary's soul there was the same
tranquility, in her will the same alacrity of devout consent. When we
are in deep sorrow, every action, which we are constrained to do, seems
to excite and multiply our grief. Even the very movements of body
disturb the stillness of the soul. An interruption, an external noise,
the scene that meets the uplifted eye, these are sufficient to burst
the bounds, and throw the mass of bitter waters once more over the
soul. So when Mary's whole nature rose to meet this word of Jesus, and
threw itself into the consent she gave, and turned her forcibly as it
were from Jesus to John, it was as if the whole anguish of the
Crucifixion gained a new life, a fresh activity, a more potent
bitterness, a more desolating power. The thought of Him, while it was
the most terrible of all her thoughts, was also the most endurable. She
felt most, when other thoughts usurped, the place of that. Who has not
felt this in times of mourning? He whom we have lost is our most
terrible thought. Yet there is a softness, a repose, in thinking of
him. The thought sustains our grief. But to think of other people, of
other things, brings with it a rawness, a disquietude, an irritable
dissatisfaction, an inopportune diversion, which makes our grief
intolerable. So now Jesus Himself brought sinners uppermost in Mary's
mind. He turned her thoughts from Himself to the Church, to His
enemies, His persecutors, His murderers. He unsphered her, so to speak,
from the sweet circle of her Motherhood, and placed her in the new
centre of her office and official relation to mankind. For, even when
He spoke to her and of her, it was still rather sinners than herself,
which seemed to be uppermost in His affections. The suffering of all
this was immense, worse than any other woe which that prolific morning
had brought her yet. So the second hour upon the Cross elapsed, an age
of wonders which ages of angelical science and seraphic contemplation
cannot adequately fathom. Jesus still lived; the Blood was still
flowing; the Body still growing whiter in the eclipse; the silence
tingling all around, except when His beautiful words trembled lightly
on the air, deepening, as it seemed, both the darkness and the
silentness.
The third hour began, the third epoch in which this long dolor was
working at the grand world of Mary's heart. His first word in this last
hour was worse than Simeon's sword to our dearest Mother. He said, "I
thirst," Well might He thirst. Since the blessed chalice of His own
Blood the night before, nothing had crossed His lips but the taste of
wine and gall, the pressure of the sponge with vinegar against His
mouth, and His own Blood which had trickled in, Meanwhile the nails
were burning like fires in His Hands and Feet; His limbs from head to
foot had been scorched with the thongs and prickles of the brutal
flagellation; endless thorns were sticking like spikes of flame through
His skull, until His brain throbbed with the intolerable inflammation,
Drop by drop His Blood had been drawn from Him, with all the moisture
of His Body, and the fountains in the Heart were on the very point of
failing. Surely we may well believe that there was never thirst like
His, No shipwrecked sufferers have ever burned with a more agonizing
thirst, or have ever pined and died with tongue and lips and throat
more dry and parched, than His, Yet we know that single torture has
been enough with strong men to sweep reason from its throne, and that
there are few deaths men can die more horrible than death from thirst.
We cannot doubt that our Blessed Lord suffered it beyond the point when
without miracle death must have supervened. How fearful must have been
the pressure of that physical suffering, which caused that
silence-loving Sufferer to exclaim! If ever it was marvelous that in
all her woe Mary had displayed no signs of feminine weakness, no
fainting, no sobbing, no outcry, no wild gesture of uncontrollable
misery, it was doubly marvelous now. Not only was this exclamation of
Jesus a most heart-rending grief to her, but there came upon it that
burden which human grief can never bear, and a grief of mother least of
all, the feeling of impotence to allay the agony of those we love. She
looked into His dying Face with a face on which death was almost as
deeply imprinted as on His. She saw His parched, swollen, quivering
lips, white with that whiteness of the last mortal struggle, which is
like no other whiteness. But she could not reach, not even to wipe with
her veil the Blood that was curdled there. It was vain, and she knew
it, to appeal to the cruel men that were scattered about the mount. For
a cup of cold water to those lips, through what new scenes of sorrow
would she not be eager to pass! But it might not be. She remembered how
He had once looked down into the cold sparkling water of Jacob's well,
and longed in His fatigue and thirst for one draught of that element
which He Himself had created, and then how He had forgotten both thirst
and weariness in His loving labor of converting that poor Samaritan
woman. But now---and it was an overwhelming thought---water was as far
from the lips of the dying Saviour as it was from those of Dives in the
endless fires out of which he had appealed if it were but for a single
drop. No! Her dearest Son must bear it. He has at last complained of
His physical tortures. But of what use was it except to break His
Mother's Heart again, and to call forth the love and adoration of
countless souls through ages and ages of His Church? To Him it brought
no relief. It was for our sakes that He complained, that, even at the
expense of more agony to Mary, we might have. one additional motive to
love our Crucified Brother.
But this was not the only thirst that word was intended to convey. His
Soul thirsted as feverishly for souls as His Body did for the water of
the well. He brooded over all coming ages, and yearned to multiply the
multitudes of the redeemed. Alas! we have approximations by which we
can measure His torment of physical thirst; but we have no shadow even
by which we can guess of the realities of that torment in His Soul. If
the love, which the Creator has for creatures, whom He had called out
of nothing, is unlike any other love either of Angels or of men, if its
kind is without parallel, and its degree an excess out of the reach of
our conception, so also is the spiritual love of souls in the Soul of
the Saviour of the world. Saving love is without similitude, as well as
creative love. As all the loves of earth are but sparks of creative
love so all apostolic instincts, all missionary zeal, all promptitude
of martyrdom, all intercessory penance, and all contemplative
intercession, are but little sparks of that saving love of which
Calvary is at once the symbol and the reality. The torment of this
thirst was incomparably beyond that of the other thirst. Mary saw it;
and no sooner had she seen it, than the very sight translated her, as
it were, into a fresh, unexplored world of sorrow. She saw that this
thirst would be almost as little satisfied as the other. She saw how
Jesus at that moment was beholding in His Soul the endless procession
of men, unbroken daily from dawn to dawn, bearing with them into hell
the character of baptism and the seal of His Precious Blood. See! even
now, while the Saviour is dying of thirst, the impenitent thief will
not give Him even his one polluted soul to drink! So was it going to be
ever more. Mary saw it all. Why had He ever left Nazareth? Why had He
gone through all this world of unnecessary suffering, only to succeed
so inadequately at last? Was God's glory, after all, the end of
Calvary, rather than the salvation of men? Yes! and yet also No! Mary,
like Jesus Himself, grudged not one pang, one lash, one least drop of
Blood that beaded His crowned brow. She too thirsted for souls, as He
did, and her heart sank when she saw that He was not to have His fill.
Oh, poor, miserable children that we are! How much of our souls have we
not kept back, which would have somewhat cheered both the Mother and
the Son that day!
But Jesus had to go down into an abyss of His Passion deeper than any
which He had sounded hitherto. Into that deep Mary must go down also.
Not merely for us was the word He was now to utter. It is beyond us. It
comes like a mysterious far off cry out of the depths of spiritual
anguish, to which even mystical theology can give no name. It is God
abandoned of God,---the creature rejected of the Creator, although
united to Him by a Hypostatic Union,---the Sacred Humanity abandoned by
the Divine Nature to which it is inseparably assumed,---a Human Nature
left Personless, because the Divine Person, who never can withdraw
Himself, has withdrawn,---the Second Person of the Holy Trinity
deserted by the Other Two! What wild words are these? We know they
cannot be, simply cannot. Yet when we put the dereliction of Jesus into
words, these are the impossible expressions in which we become
entangled. "My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?" Was there ever
a more truly created cry? Yet He who uttered it was Himself the
Creator. Not merely for us, then, could such a word be spoken. It was
wrung from Him by the very spirit of adoration in the extremity of His
torture. Some have conjectured that it was at that moment that the
hitherto unconsumed species of the Blessed Sacrament was consumed, and
so that mysterious union of Himself with Himself withdrawn. But this
does not recommend itself to us. Why should He derive comfort and
strength from His own sacramental Flesh and Blood, when He was exposing
both Flesh and Blood to unheard-of torments? Why derive comfort at all,
when He was studiously making all things round Him, even His Mother's
heart, fresh instruments of torture? Why should His Divine Nature in
the Blessed Sacrament be a sweetness and restorative to Him, the loss
of which extracted such a cry, when even in the Hypostatic Union, which
was an incomparably closer union than that of the Blessed Sacrament, He
was cutting off the supplies of His Divine Nature from His Human,
excepting the single communication of His Omnipotence to enable Him to
live, in order that He might suffer more? The sense of the
faithful---that instinct which so seldom errs---points without
hesitation to the Eternal Father, as the cause of that suffering, and
as addressed in that word.
But is there cruelty in God! No! Infinite justice is as far removed
from cruelty as infinite love can be. Yet it was the Father, He who
represents all kindness, all indulgence, all forbearance, all
gentleness, all patience, all fatherliness in heaven and earth, who
chose that moment of in tensest torture, when the storm of created
agonies was beginning to pelt less piteously, because it was now
well-nigh exhausted, to crucify afresh, with a most appalling interior
crucifixion, the Son of His own endless complacency. With effort
unutterably beyond all grace ever given, except the grace of Jesus,
Mary lifted up her heart to the Father, joined her will to His in this
dire extremity, and, in a certain sense, as well as He, abandoned her
Beloved. She gave up the Son to the Father. She sacrificed the love of
the Mother to the duty of the Daughter. She acknowledged the Creator
only as the last end of the creature. She had done this at the outset
in her first dolor, the Presentation of Jesus, and it was consummated
now. O Mother! how far that exacting glory of God led thy royal heart!
She saw Jesus abandoned. She heard the outcry of His freshly-crucified
Soul, pierced to the quick by this new invention of His Father's
justice. And she did not wish it other- wise. She would have Him
abandoned, if it was the Father's will. And it was His will. Therefore,
with all her soul, with the most unretracted, spontaneous consent, she
would have Him abandoned. She would go down from the top of Calvary
this moment if the Father bade her. But her love rose up, as if it were
desperate, to meet this uttermost exigency. No one would have dreamed
that a human soul could have held so much love as she poured out upon
Jesus at that moment. Was her heart in. finite, inexhaustible? It
really seemed so. For at that hour it combined, multiplied, outstripped
all the love of the Three-and-Thirty Years, and rushed into His soul as
if it would fill up with its own self the immense void which the
dereliction of the Father had opened there. Every thing went out of
her, but the horrible bitterness of her martyrdom. Sorrow---pure,
sheer, sharp, fiery sorrow---was flesh, and blood, and bone, and soul,
and all to her. All else was gone into the Heart of Jesus, which
thereupon sent forth upon her an outpouring of love, which deluged her
with a fresh ocean of overwhelming woe. And by one miracle they both
lived still.
Now, Blessed Mother, that thou standest on such incredible heights of
detachment, the end may come I It was finished. All was finished.
Chiefly creation. It had found a home at the grave of the First Adam
under the Cross of the Second. The Father had left Him. He must go to
the Father. It is impossible They should be disunited. Creatures had
done what they could. They had filled to the brim the Saviour's cup of
suffering, and He, with pitiable love, had drained it to the dregs. But
there was one created punishment still left, created rather by the
creature than the Creator, created chiefly by a woman. It was the
punishment of death, the eldest-born child of the first Eve. But could
death hold sway over the living Life of eternity? Could Eve punish God?
Was He to inherit the bitter legacy of the sweet Paradise? How could it
be? How could He die? What could death be like to Him? Mary's heart
must be lifted to the height of this dread hour. High as it is, it must
be raised higher still, to the level of this divinest mystery. The
Three-and-Thirty Years are ending. A new epoch in the world's history
is to open. The most magnificent of all its epochs is closing. What
will death be like to Him? Ah! we may ask also, what will life be like
to her when He is dead? What will Mary herself be like without Jesus?
She was not looking up, but she knew His eye was now resting on her.
What strange power is there in the eyes of the dying, that they often
turn round the averted faces that are there, and attract them to
themselves, that love may see the last of its love? His eye was resting
on the same object on which it rested the moment He was born, when He
lay suddenly on a fold of her robe upon the ground while she knelt in
prayer, and when He smiled, and lifted up His little hands to be taken
up into her arms, and folded to her bosom. His arms were otherwise
lifted up now, inviting us to climb up into them, like fond children,
and see what the embrace of a Saviour's love is like. She felt His eye,
and she looked up into His face. Never did two such faces look into
each other, and speak such unutterable love as this. The Father held
Mary up in His arms, lest she should perish under the load of love; and
the loud cry went out from the hilltop, hushing Mary's soul into any
agony of silence, and the Head drooped toward her, and the eye closed,
and the Soul passed her, like a flash, and sank into the earth, and a
wind arose, and stirred the mantle of darkness, and the sun cleared
itself of the moon's shadow, and the roofs of the city glimmered white,
and the birds began to sing, but only as if they were half reassured,
and Mary stood beneath the Cross a childless Mother. The third hour was
gone.
Such was the fifth dolor, with its creative periods of sanctity and
sorrow. She had stood through it all, notwithstanding the agonizing
yesterday, the sleepless night, the long morning crowded with its
terrible phenomena. In the strength of her unfailing weariness she had
stood through it all, and Scripture is careful to mark the posture, as
if this miracle of endurance was of itself a revelation of the
greatness of the Mother's heart. It is, as it were, a reward for her
dolor, that we cannot preach Christ Crucified unless Mary be in sight.
It is something else we preach---not that---unless she be standing
there. And now she stands on Calvary alone. It is three hours past noon
of the most awful day the world shall ever see.
Something still remains to be said of the peculiarities of this dolor,
notwithstanding that so much has been unavoidably anticipated in the
narrative. Above all things, the Crucifixion has this peculiarity, that
it was the original fountain of all the other dolors, except the third.
That stands apart. It is Mary's own Crucifixion, her Gethsemane and her
Calvary. But the two dolors which came out of the Infancy, and the four
which represent the Passion, have the Crucifixion for their centre. The
Three Days' Loss does not belong to the Infancy, and the shadow of the
Passion is no more thrown over it than it was over the whole life of
Mary. It was the act of Jesus Himself, which seemingly had an especial
relation to His Mother. The third dolor, which prefaces the Eighteen
Years at Nazareth, was to her sorrows what the Eighteen Years were to
her life generally, something between Jesus and herself, a mystery of a
different sphere from those in which both He and she were concerned in
the fulfillment of the world's redemption. But the sword in Simeon's
prophecy was the Crucifixion. The Flight into Egypt was to hinder the
cruelty of Herod from anticipating the moment of our Saviour's death.
The Meeting with the Cross was the road to Calvary. The Taking down
from the Cross, and the Burial, were sorrows which flowed naturally out
of the Crucifixion, and were in unbroken unity with it. The Crucifixion
was therefore the realization of her lifelong woe. The fountain was
reached. She had tracked it up to Calvary. What remained was the waste
water, or rather the water and blood, which flowed down from the mount,
and sank in at the threshold of the Garden Tomb. Compared with the
Crucifixion, the other dolors, the third always excepted, were almost
reliefs and distractions stirring on the fixed depths of her
unfathomable woe. The Crucifixion was a sorrow by itself, without name
or likeness. It was the centre of the system of her dolors, while the
independence of her third dolor betokens the existence of that vast
world which Mary is in her own self, a creation apart, brighter than
this world of ours, and more dear to Jesus. It is a mysterious orb
allowed to come in sight of this other system, where we are,---a
disclosure of all that world of phenomena which is hidden from our eyes
in the Eighteen Years, during which Jesus devoted Himself to her. It
ranks with the Immaculate Conception, the Incarnation, and the
Assumption, all which belong to Mary's world, and would have been even
if sin had not been, though they would have been different from what
they were. But that third dolor shows how the fallen world of sin and
the necessity of a passible Incarnation told on her world, as it did on
His, and passed upon the lineaments of the Maternity as well as upon
those of the Incarnation. There are certainly few mysteries in the
gospel which we understand less than the Three Days' Loss. Another
peculiarity of the Crucifixion is the length of time during which the
tide of suffering remained at its highest point without any sign of
ebbing. The mysteries, which filled the three hours, seem too
diversified for us to regard them, at least till we come to the
Dereliction, as rising from less to greater in any graduated scale.
They are rather separate elevations, of unequal height, standing linked
together like a mountain-chain. But the lowest of them was so immensely
high that it produced most im- measurable agony in her soul. The
anguish of death is momentary. The length of some of the most terrific
operations which can rack the human frame seldom exceeds a quarter of
an hour. Pain pushed beyond a certain limit, as in medieval torture, is
instantaneous death. In human punishments which are not meant to kill,
the hand of science keeps watch on the pulse of the sufferer. But to
Mary the Crucifixion was three hours, three long hours, of mortal
agony, comprising hundreds of types and shapes of torture, each one of
them intolerable in itself, each pushed beyond the limits of human
endurance unless supported by miracle, and each of them kept at that
superhuman pitch for all that length of time. When pain comes we wish
to lie down, unless madness and delirium come with it, or we are fain
to run about, to writhe, gesticulate, and groan. Mary stood upright on
her feet the whole weary while, leaning on no one, and not so much as
an audible sigh accompanied her silent tears. It is difficult to take
this thought in. We can only take it in by prayer, not by hearing or
reading.
It was also a peculiarity of the Crucifixion that it was a heroic trial
of her incomparable faith. Pretty nearly the faith of the whole world
was in her when she stood, with John and Magdalen, at the foot of the
Cross. There was hardly a particle of her belief which was not tried to
the uttermost in that amazing scene. Naturally speaking, our Lord's
Divinity was never so obscured. Supernaturally speaking, it never was
so manifest. Could it be possible that the Incarnate Word should be
subject to the excesses of such unparalleled indignities? Was the light
within Him never to gleam out once? Was the Wisdom of the Father to be
with blasphemous ridicule muffled in a white sack, and pulled about in
absurd, undignified helplessness by the buffooning guards of an
incestuous king? Was there not a point, or rather were there not many
points, in the Passion, when the limit of what was venerable and
fitting was overstepped? Even in the reserved narrative of the Gospels,
how many things there are which the mind cannot dwell on without being
shocked and repulsed, as well as astonished! Even at this distance of
time do they not try our faith by their very horror, make our blood run
cold by their murderous atrocity, and tempt our devotion to withdraw,
sick and fastidious, from the affectionate contemplation of the very
prodigies of disgraceful cruelty, by which our own secret sins and
shames were with such public shame most lovingly expiated? .Is not
devotion to the Passion to this day the touchstone of feeble faith, of
lukewarm love, and of self-indulgent penance? And Mary, more delicate
and more fastidious far than we, drank all these things with her eyes,
and understood the horror of them in her soul, as we can never
understand it. Think what faith was hers.
The Divine Perfections also suffered a strange eclipse in the Passion.
Sin was triumphant. Justice was condemned. Holiness was abandoned even
by the All-holy. Providence seemed to have withdrawn, as if under
constraint. God was trodden out, and creatures had creation to
themselves; nay, more than that, they had the Creator in their power.
There was no divine interference, just when it appeared most needed and
most natural. If men could have their own way then, surely they could
have it always. One while God looked passive, another while cruel. Oh,
it required angelic theology to reconcile the providence of that day
with the attributes of the Most High! Then the angels themselves might
be a trial of her faith. Were there such things, such beings, as
Angels? She had seen them so often she could not doubt it. She had seen
St. Michael but the night before, bending in adoration by the side of
Jesus in His agony, a glorious being, fit for that strange exceptional
mission of consoling the Son of God in His inconsolable distress. But
where was their zeal for the Incarnate Word, that grand grace by which
they had all been established in their final perseverance? Where were
the double-edged cherubic swords that guarded the entrance into Eden
from all but Henoch and Elias? Ah! there were legions of them pressing
forward, yet ever beaten back, like a storm cloud striving to plough
its way up against the wind, eager and burning, yet with difficult
obedience bending backward before the meek, admonishing eye of Jesus.
Then, again, who could have believed, when they saw the beauty of Jesus
and fathomed the depth of His prayer, as Mary only could see the one or
fathom the other, that Divine grace really had power to convert human
hearts? He was the very beauty of holiness. During His Passion men
themselves tore away every veil which humility and reserve could hang
about His sanctity. His humility, His sweetness, His patience, His
modesty, all stood disclosed with the fullest light upon them,
exercised openly and heroically in the midst of the grossest outrage.
And yet men were not won to Him! There were the guards who had fallen
backward in the garden the night before. There were those who had stood
nearest to Him during the scourging, those who had talked with Him as
Pilate had, those who had taken Him to Herod and brought Him back
again. There was the impenitent thief close by His side. Grace was
going out from Him every moment. His effectual prayer was incessant.
Mary's intercession itself was busily engaged. Yet, when the sun set on
Friday, how little visible harvest had all that grace gathered into its
garners! Never did anyone so walk by faith, simple, naked faith, as
Mary did that day. There was faith enough to save a whole world in her
single heart.
Another peculiarity of this fifth dolor is to be found in the seven
words which our Lord uttered from the Cross. They were as seven sharp
thrills in Mary's heart, reaching depths of the human soul to which our
griefs never attain. It was not only the well known accents of her
dying Son, with their association inconceivably heightened by the
circumstances in which they broke upon the stillness. It was not only
the exceeding beauty of the words themselves, disclosing, as death
sometimes does with men, an unexpected interior beauty in the soul. It
was not only that, like the unuttered music of poetry in a kindred
soul, they waked up in her the remembrances of other words of His, and
I gave light to many mysteries in her mind, and played skillfully !
upon the many keys and with the various stops of her wonderful
affections, saying, as they did to her, what they do not say to us, and
what we cannot so much as guess. But they were the words of God, such
words as are spoken of in the Epistle to the Hebrews,. "living and
effectual, and more piercing than any two-edged sword, reaching unto
the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the
marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intents of the heart," Such was
their operation in the heart of Mary, penetrating her as the blast of a
trumpet seems to penetrate the recesses of our hearing, and in their
subtlety and agile swiftness carrying grief into the crevices of her
nature, whither it could not else have reached. She was the broken
cedar, the divided flame of fire, the shaken desert of Cades, in the
twenty-eighth Psalm. "The Voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God
of majesty hath thundered, the Lord upon many waters: The Voice of the
Lord in its omnipotence, the Voice of the Lord in its magnificence. The
Voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars; yea, the Lord shall break the
cedars of Libanus. The Voice of the Lord divideth the flame of fire.
The Voice of the Lord shaketh the desert, and the Lord shall shake the
desert of Cades."
We have already spoken of the parallel between the Crucifixion and the
Annunciation, which is another peculiarity of the fifth dolor, She
became our Mother just when she lost Jesus. It was, as it were, a
ceremonial conclusion to the Thirty-Three Years she had spent with Him
in the most intimate communion, and at the same time a solemn opening
of that life of Mary in the Church to which every Baptized soul is a
debtor for more blessings than it suspects, In the third dolor He had
spoken to her with apparent roughness, as if her office of Mother was
now eclipsed by the mission which His Eternal Father had trusted to
Him. In this fifth dolor He, as it were, merges her Divine Maternity in
a new motherhood of men. Perhaps no two words that he ever spoke to her
were more full of mystery than that in the temple, and now this one
upon the Cross, or ever caused deeper grief in her soul. They are
parallel to each other. With such a love of souls as Mary had,
immensely heightened by the events of that very day, the motherhood of
sinners brought with it an enormous accession of grief. The multitudes
that were then wandering shepherdless over the wide earth, the
ever-increasing multitudes of the prolific ages, all these she received
into her heart, with the most supernatural enlightenment as to the
malice of sin, the most keen perception of the pitiable case and
helpless misery of sinners, the clearest foresight of the successful
resistance which their free will would make to grace, and the most
profound appreciation of the horrors of their eternal exile amidst the
darkness and the flames of punishment. Our Lord's word effected what it
said. It made her the Mother of men, therefore, not merely by an
outward official proclamation, but in the reality of her heart. He
opened up there new fountains of inexhaustible love. He caused her to
love men as He loved them, as nearly as her heart could come to His.
He, as it were, multiplied Himself in the souls of sinners millions of
millions of times, and gave her love enough for all. And such love! so
constant, so burning, so eloquent, so far above all earthly maternal
love, both in hopefulness, tenderness, and perseverance! And what was
this new love but a new power of sorrow? We cannot rightly understand
Mary's sorrow at the Crucifixion under any circumstances, simply
because it is above us. But we shall altogether miss of those just
conceptions which we may attain to unless we bear in mind that she
became our Mother at the foot of the Cross, not merely by a declaration
of her appointment, but by a veritable creation through the effectual
word of God, which at the moment enlarged her broken heart, and fitted
it with new and ample affections, causing thereby an immeasurable
increase of her pains. It was truly in labor that she travailed with us
when we came to the birth. The bitterness of Eve's curse environed her
spotless soul unutterably in that hour of our spiritual nativity.
We must not omit to reckon also among the peculiarities of this dolor
that which it shares with the fourth dolor, and in which it stands in
such striking contrast to the sixth,---her inability to reach Jesus in
order to exercise her maternal offices toward Him. So changeful can
sorrow be in the human heart that the very thing which will minister
sorrow to her by the fulness of its presence in the Taking down from
the Cross is a sorrow to her here by its absence. But they have mourned
little, too little for their own good, who have not long since learned
to understand this contradiction. It is hard for a mother to keep
herself quiet by the deathbed of her son. Grief must be doing
something. The wants of the sufferer are the luxuries of the mourner.
The pillows must be smoothed again, the hair taken out of the eyes,
those beads of death wiped from the clammy brow, those bloodless lips
perpetually moistened, that white hand gently chafed, that curtain put
back to give more air, the weak eyes shielded from the light, the
bedclothes pressed out of the way of his difficult breathing. Even when
it is plain that the softest touch, the very gentlest of these dear
ministries, is fresh pain to the sufferer, the mother's hand can
scarcely restrain itself; for her heart is in every finger. To be quiet
is desolation to her soul. She thinks it is not the skill or the
experience of the nurse which dictates her directions, but her
hard-heartedness, because she is not that fair boy's mother; and
therefore she rebels in her heart against her authority, even if the
chances of being cruel I do in fact restrain her hands. Surely that
foam must be gathered from the mouth, surely that long lock of hair
must tease him hanging across his eye and dividing his sight, surely
that icy hand should have the blood gently, most gently, brought back
again. She forgets that the eye is glazed and sees no more, that the
blood has gone to the heart, and even the mother's hand cannot conjure
it back again. And so she sits murmuring, her sorrow all condensed in
her compulsory stillness. Think, then, what Mary suffered those three
long hours beneath the Cross! Was ever deathbed so uneasy, so
comfortless, as that rough-hewn wood? Was ever posture more torturing
than to hang by nails in the hands, dragging, dragging down as the dead
weight of the Body exerted itself more and more? Where was the pillow
for His Head? If it strove to rest itself against the Title of the
Cross, the crown of thorns drove it back again; if it sank down upon
His Breast, it could not quite reach it, and its weight drew the Body
from the nails. Slow streams of Blood crept about His wounded Body,
making Him tremble under their touch with the most painful excitement
and uneasiness. His eyes were teased with Blood, liquid or half
congealed. His Mouth, quivering with thirst, was also caked with Blood,
while His breath seemed less and less to moisten. There was not a limb
which was not calling out for the Mother's tender hand, and it might
not reach so far. There were multitudes of pains which her touch would
have soothed. O mothers! have you a name by which we may call that
intolerable longing which Mary had, to smooth that hair, to cleanse
those eyes, to moisten those dear lips which had just been speaking
such beautiful words, to pillow that blessed Head upon her arm, to ease
those throbbing hands and hold up for a while the soles of those
crushed and lacerated feet? It was not granted to her; and yet she
stood there in tranquility, motionless as a statue, not a statue of
indifference, nor yet of stupor and amazement, but in that attitude of
reverent adoring misery which was becoming to a broken-hearted creature
who felt the very arms of the Eternal Father round her, holding her up
to live, to love, to suffer, and to be still.
We must also remember that the abandonment of Jesus by His Father was
something to her which it cannot be to us. In religious mysteries we
are continually obliged to take words for things. We speak of the
Eternal Generation of the Son and of the Eternal Procession of the Holy
Spirit, but we cannot embrace the wisdom, the brightness, the love, the
tenderness, the pathos, if we may venture on the word, which those acts
of the Divine Life imply. Consequently the words do not call out in us
an intelligent variety of feelings and sentiments and emotions: we meet
them by a simple act of adoring love. Yet they mean more to theologians
than to uneducated Christians, more to saints than to theologians, more
to the blessed in heaven than to the Saints on earth. But according to
our knowledge so should be our love, and in heaven it is so. Thus,
while the dereliction of Jesus on the Cross fills our minds with a
sacred horror, we only see into it confusedly. We rather see that it is
a mystery, than in what the mystery consists. It is often the very
indistinctness of Divine things which enables us to endure them. Who
could live, if he realized what Hell is, and that every moment immortal
souls are entering there upon their eternity of most shocking and
repulsive punishment? We smell a sweet flower, and just then a soul has
been condemned. We watch with trembling love the elevation of the Host
and Chalice, and meanwhile the gates of that fiery dungeon have closed
on many souls. We lie down upon the grass, and look up at the white
clouds, dipping through the blue sky as if either had waves, and
catching the sun on their snowy shapes, and all the while hell is
underneath that grass, within the measurable diameter of the earth,
living, populous, unutterable, its roaring flames and countless sounds
of agony muffled by the soil that covers the uneasily-riveted crust of
the earth. What agony would this be, if our minds were equal to it, or
coextensive with its reality! Nay, if we realized it, as sometimes for
a moment we do realize it, we could not survive many hours, even if we
did not die upon the spot. For, if the guilt of one venial sin shown to
His Saint by God would have produced the immediate separation of body
and soul, unless He by miraculous interference had supported her, what
must the vision be of the countless enormities of Hell, with the
additional hideousness of final impenitence and the unspeakable horror
of its punishments! So, with this dereliction of our Blessed Lord, none
understood it as Mary did. The whole of the marvelous theology that was
in it was perhaps clear to her. At least she saw in it what no one
else, not even an angel, could see. Hence, while it called out in her a
variety of the most vivid emotions and most sensitive affections, it
also plunged her into fresh sorrow, by transferring all at once the
Passion of Jesus into another and more terrific sphere.
The universality of her suffering is also another peculiarity of the
fifth dolor and in this it was a sort of shadow of the Passion. Who can
number the variety of the pains which those three hours contained? What
portion of her sinless nature was not covered with its appropriate
suffering? There was no spot whereon a sorrow could be grafted where
the hand of God had not inserted one. She was as completely submerged
in grief as a fish is submerged in the great deep sea. The very
omnipresence of God round about her was to her an omnipresence of
suffering. As the fires that punish sin are so dreadfully efficacious,
because God intended their nature to be penal, so the supernatural
sorrows of our Blessed Mother on Calvary were fearfully efficacious,
because they were intended to carry suffering to the utmost limit which
the creature could bear, that so her holiness, her merits, and her
exaltation might exceed those of all other creatures put together,
except the created nature of her Son. There was not an inlet of anyone
of the senses down which pain was not flowing masterfully, like
clashing tides in a narrow gulf. There was not a faculty of her mind
which was not illuminated, or rather scorched, by a light which hurt
nature and gave it pain. Her affections had been cruelly immolated at
the foot of that altar on Calvary, one after another, and the zealous
Priest had not spared His victims. Her will was strained up to the
height of the most unheard-of consents, which the devouring justice of
God had demanded of her. Her soul was crucified. Her body was the
shrinking prey of her mental agony. Her feet were weary with standing,
her hands wet with His Blood, her eyes filled with her own. "How hath
the Lord covered with obscurity the daughter of Zion! Weeping, she hath
wept in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks. There is none to
comfort her among all of them that were dear to her. From above He hath
sent fire into my bones, and hath chastised me; He hath spread a net
for my feet; He hath turned me back; He hath made me desolate, wasted
with sorrow all the day long. The Lord hath taken all my mighty
men out of the midst of me. He hath proclaimed against me a time, to
destroy my chosen men. The Lord hath trodden the wine- press for the
virgin daughter of Juda. Therefore do I weep, and my eyes run down with
water, because the Comforter, the relief of my soul, is far from me. My
children are desolate, because the enemy hath prevailed. My heart is
turned within me, for I am full of bitterness. Abroad the sword
destroyeth; and at home there is death alike. O, all ye that pass by
the way! attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow; for
He hath made a vintage of me, as the Lord spoke in the day of His
fierce anger!" [Lamentations, i]
Last of all, there was her inability to die with Him. Many a time, to
die with the dead would be the only true consolation of the bereaved.
One heart has been the light of life, the unsetting light of long years
of various fortune, bright in the blue sky of prosperity, brighter
still in the black clouds of adversity. Now that light is put out by
death. Why should we survive? Henceforth, what significance can there
be to us in life? That cold heart was the end of all our avenues. Every
prospect terminated there. We valued no past where that heart was not.
We saw no future in which it did not play its part. All our plans ended
there. The weight of our expectations was concentrated on that one
point, and now it has given way, and we are falling through, we know
not whither. Ah! this loss is truly the end of life, more truly far
than the mere physical dissolution of soul and body. The
Apostles---especially the quick, affectionate Thomas---wished to go and
die with Lazarus, simply because Jesus loved him so. Oh, surely we can
all remember days which were the world's end to us,---days which it
seemed impossible should have a morrow! There was a bed-laden with a
sad weight, with a beautiful terror---which was to us the end of time,
the edge of the world, the threshold of eternity. It had been long
looked for, and yet words would not tell how cruelly unexpected it came
at last. All our hopes, and fears, and loves were gathered up, as if
the Judge were coming then to settle them. Common things could not go
on after that. Daily duties must not recur. Habits were run out. It was
an end, an end of so much,---so much so cruelly ended. It was as
fearful to have no prospect as it is to have no hope; and therefore we
longed to lie down and die, on the same bed, and be buried in the same
grave, though it seemed strange that anyone should remain behind to
bury us, so completely did it seem a universal end. This is a wild
extremity of human grief. Our Lady's dolor was something else than
this. The end of the Thirty-Three Years was not like any other end. Her
Son was God. It all lies in that. Think, after that, of the unutterable
misery of the Mother's life protracted, when His was done. It will not
bear explaining. It cannot be explained. But we can feel it, below the
world from which words come; we can see it,---a light beyond the region
where thought can grasp things,---that actual sundering of Jesus and
Mary, the dissolution of that union which had been the world's divine
mystery for all those wonderful and wonder-peopled years! Which of us
can tell what grief is like, when it has gone beyond the point at which
it would kill us, and we only live by a miracle external to ourselves?
Such grief was our Mother's when our Lord breathed out His Soul into
His Father's hands.
But let us turn from the peculiarities of the fifth dolor to the
dispositions in which our Blessed Lady endured it. Yet the task of
describing these is impossible. We read the lives of the Saints, and
see in each one of them a peculiar inward sanctity, sometimes different
from that of all others that we know,--- sometimes congenial to the
spirit of another Saint,---sometimes, though not often, allowing itself
to be grouped in numerous classes. Many of the graces which we read of,
have no names in the nomenclature of the virtues of their kindred
dispositions. We wonder as we read. We are dazzled by the lights which
keep appearing in the beauties of holiness, in splendoribus sanctorum. Yet we
know that what we see is as nothing to that which we do not see. As the
Queen of the South said of Solomon, not the half is told. All that
comes to the surface is a mere indication of the depths which are
below, hardly enough to let us guess at the interior beauty which the
eye of God beholds in the saintly soul. But, if this is the case with
the" saints, how much more so is it with our Blessed Lady! It is
expressly said of her that the beauty of the king's daughter is all
within; and when our Lord, in the Canticle, describes her loveliness,
He adds twice over, "besides that which lieth hid within." It is,
therefore, impossible to speak worthily of the interior beauty of Mary.
As we have considered each dolor it has become more difficult to speak
of her dispositions. We are obliged to use common words for things
which are singular and only akin to what is common. The realities keep
rising taller and taller above the words, until these last almost
mislead us, instead of elucidating the subject, and we have to repeat
the same words for dispositions which have become different in the
transition from one sorrow to another, as well by the novelty of their
exercise as by the increased magnificence of their heroism. Thus the
depth and grandeur of our Blessed Mother's inward life are sufficient
of themselves to hinder our doing it justice. Mary is one of those
Divine visions which expands before expanding holiness, and, even like
the Blissful Vision itself, excites hunger in the beholder, even while
it is satisfying his soul unutterably.
But there is another reason also of this difficulty, which bears
especially upon her dolors. It is the comprehended reality of the
present. We must explain our meaning. It hardly ever happens to us,
either in sorrow or in joy, fully to take in the present at once. We
realize our sorrows and our joys piecemeal. We are constantly finding
new features in them; and coming across peculiarities which did not
strike us at the first. In every thing which happens to us there is
always far more implied than is expressed. This is what we mean when we
speak of a growing sorrow. It is not the sorrow that grows: it is our
own appreciation of it. It belongs to the imperfection of our minds
that this process should be gradual. All that years unfold, apply,
bring home to us, was in the transient act, whether death, misfortune,
or disgrace, when it was present; only we were unable to embrace it.
Hence it is that we often seem more heroic in sorrow than we really
are. We bear no more of our burden than what we see, and we see but a
portion of it. Our heavenly Father lets it down gradually upon us,
dividing the weight between His own hand and our shoulders, till use
enables us to bear the full pressure without being crushed. We commit
ourselves to Him, engaging ourselves to what is implied, while our eyes
are fixed upon what is expressed. Our venture succeeds not so much by
our own courage as by His grace. It even sometimes happens that we lose
a friend, whose death affects us very moderately. Somehow the light of
life is not thrown on the chasm that he has made in leaving. Years pass
on, and circumstances change. All at once, or by degrees, we miss him.
We cannot do without him. He is a want which, just at this particular
moment, must be supplied, and cannot be supplied. The loss is
irreparable, and is now fast becoming intolerable. It seems as if
something which had to be gone through cannot be gone through, simply
because he was the part of our life needful to the going through with
it, and now he is not here. A false, a cruel, a suspecting friend we
lose before he dies. But we never miss him. It never comes out that he
is wanted. He is found to have been always in reality outside of our
lives; and he is dismissed from our minds with a sad sort of relief
that we have done with him, and the pious consolation that after all no
love is ever wasted which at any time, or for any object, has been
mixed up with God. But it is not so with a true friend. The loss of him
is never over; it is continually reappearing, and making our hearts as
strangely tender as if his spirit were touching them at the moment. All
this comes of the present being too much swollen with realities, so
that we cannot get into our souls at once. Thus we are always
behindhand with life, understanding ourselves and others, and, most of
all, God, when it is too late. We cannot keep up with the present by
intelligence or sentiment. We can only keep up with it by a spiritual
quickness which prompts us to act, to suffer, and, above all, to
compromise ourselves, at the bidding of the instincts of grace. Thus it
is that sorrows are mostly less hard to bear than they seem; for we ate
almost unconsciously bearing them by degrees. Now, it was not so with
our Lady. She took in the present in its fulness; she embraced it in
the tranquility of her vast comprehension. A sorrow revealed itself to
her in its completeness, and thus pressed with all its weight upon her
soul at once. Thus her sorrows are greater than they seem. They grow
upon us, but they did not grow upon her. This is very much to be
remembered when we speak of her dispositions in her sufferings. Her
endurance was of another kind from ours, because of her complete
realization of the present; and hence her dispositions, while the
poverty of language compels us to call them by the same names, must be
magnified and multiplied into something quite different from what they
were before.
Having premised this, we must look first of all, as we have had to do
in the other dolors, at our Blessed Mother's tranquility. If we pass in
review the manifold horrors of the Crucifixion, and see the various
assaults of grief of which her soul was the centre, it will seem as if
tranquility was just that grace the exercise of which would be
impossible. If we did not know that God was everlasting peace, there
would appear something almost incongruous and out of keeping with the
scene, in a holiness which was stayed in the deepest calm at such a
time. With us depth of feeling is for the most part accompanied by
agitation, which makes it difficult for us to conceive the union of the
liveliest sorrow and the most delicate sensitiveness with a tranquility
which looks as if it were impassible. Among men, calmness in grief is
but a token of insensibility. Our Lady's peace is like that of God,
undisturbed amid the sounds of ten million worlds, unruffled by the
portentous revolt of sin, and self-possessed in the very profusest
outpouring of intense and burning love. Nothing discloses to us more
astonishingly her union with God than this unbroken calm. Where God is
there can be no trouble; and there was not a recess in our Lady's
nature where God was not, and which He did not possess with the most
undivided sovereignty. Hence, while horror followed horror, there was
no amazement in her soul, no stupefaction, no bewilderment. As the
mystery unfolded strangest depths of suffering, even the counsels of
God did not seem to take his chosen creature by surprise. In what an
abiding presence of God must her soul have dwelt! How trained must each
faculty of the mind have been to fall in with the ways of God as it met
them, and with such unquestioning promptitude, with such unstartled
dignity! In what subordination must every affection have been to the
instantaneous dominion of grace, a subordination which would so
increase their freedom as to augment their powers of loving and of
sorrowing a thousandfold! There was no effort, no struggle, no pause,
no token that her inward life felt the pressure of outward
circumstance. The creature kept step with the Creator, and the Angels
marveled at the Divine repose of her beautiful dependence.
Out of this calmness came her silent courage. We must remember that,
although her surviving so great a sorrow was miraculous, her endurance
of the sorrow was not a miracle, but a grace. Her life was kept in her
by the hand of God; but she received no such support in her endurance
as for one moment interfered with the perfection of its merit. It was
fortitude such as the most glorious spirit in the choir of Thrones
could not attain to. It was a courage the very silence of which showed
at once the severity of its trial and the earnestness of its
generosity. The silence itself was another proof of Mary's amazing
union with God. For they who are much with Him lose their habits of
speaking, and acquire in their stead habits of supernatural listening.
She spoke not, because she reposed in God. She did not even gather
herself up to bear, or prepare her courage for the combat. She let the
burden take her as it found her. She neither quickened her pace nor
slackened it. How could a resolution so quiet be at the same time so
strong? This is the question which our limited notion of sanctity is
tempted to ask. The answer is easy: its strength was in its very
quietness. But, if we understand the words, do we comprehend the thing?
Do we fathom the disposition of Mary's soul in which this grandeur of
strength was wedded to this childlike simplicity of unwondering
quietness?
Out of her quietness we pass into her silent courage, out of her silent
courage into her generosity. They are like ample halls within her soul,
where we dare hardly speak above a whisper lest we wake the echoes, and
where we gaze, without questioning, on the wonderful trophies which
hang upon the walls. A creature has but one will to give away to God,
and when he has given it irrevocably, what further oblation is left?
All generosity then is but a perseverance in the first grand
generosity, and, if perseverance is a grander thing than the act or
disposition in which we persevere, it is so only in its completeness,
and not in each of its separate stages. Yet it seemed as if Mary had
endless wills to give to God, and as if they came as fast as He could
call for them. The Divine Will tried her everywhere, and everywhere it
found the most entire conformity. There was no failure, no lagging
behind, nothing unequable. There was a strain, certainly. How shall the
creature not strain who has to keep up with God, especially when His
awful justice was urging its chariot wheels through the Red Sea of the
Passion? But it was a strain of the most heavenly peace, of the most
graceful adoration. When God went quicker, she went quicker. Her will
actually entered more promptly into His will, in proportion as it
exacted more from her. Her soul seemed to become more inexhaustible the
more it was exhausted, like the souls of the Blessed, endlessly loving,
endlessly adoring, as they sink deeper still and deeper in the Vision
of the Holy Trinity.
But the very thought of these impossibilities of Mary's generosity
turns us from her dispositions to the lessons which this fifth dolor
teaches to ourselves. The last dolor taught us how to carry our
crosses, this one how to stand by them. We must not leave the Cross. We
must not come down from Calvary until we are crucified, and then the
Cross and ourselves will have become inseparable. But Calvary is a
great place for impatience. Many have the courage to march up the hill,
shouldering their cross with decent manfulness. But when they get
there, they lay their cross on the ground, and go down again into the
city to keep the remainder of the feast with the people. Some are .i
stripped and then leave, refusing to be nailed. Some are nailed, but
unfasten themselves before the elevation. Some stand the shock of the
elevation, and then come down from the cross, before the three hours
are out, some in the first hour, some in the second, some, alas! when
even the third hour is drawing to its close. Alas! the world is full of
deserters from Calvary, so full that politic or disdainful grace seems
to take no trouble to arrest them. For grace crucifies no one against
his will. It leaves that work to the world, and treacherously and
tyrannically does the world do it. Men appear to believe that to
breathe the fresh air on the top of Calvary for half a minute is to act
upon them like a charm. Crucifixion, like a plunge in the cold sea, the
briefer it is, will have the healthier glow and the more sensible
reaction. But unfortunately it is not so. Sorrow is a slow workman, and
crucifixion a long business. A tree takes root in a new ground quicker
than the cross in a new heart. But all this is by no means agreeable to
rapid, impulsive nature. It will allow sanctification to be like an
operation, sharp but soon over. It cannot wait if it comes in the shape
of a gradual cure. Yet who is there that has ever tried to kill self in
anyone of its least departments, and has not almost despairingly
wondered at its amazing and provoking vitality? How many great minds
are there, who have traveled far along the road of sanctity, before
they are out of sight of personal feeling and wounded sensibility! Oh,
then, for the grace to remain our three full hours on the top of
Calvary! Can there be a sadder sight on earth than that which tells how
often and how easily great heights in heaven are missed, those
half-crucified souls we meet in all companies, so strangely out of
place, such mournful monuments of the impatience of nature and the
jealousy of grace? God is very exacting. They who love Him can say so
without loving Him less. Nay, to them the very thought is an additional
degree of love. He is not content with our remaining on Calvary our
three full hours. When we are not nailed to our cross, we must stand.
There must be no sitting, no lying down, no leaning on our cross, as if
forsooth that was meant for our support which is waiting there only to
crucify. Indeed, and this is significant enough, kneeling is not so
good as standing. We go there to suffer, not to worship. Our suffering
will turn into worship. We are not to adore our cross, or say fine
words about it, or put ourselves into sentimental attitudes before it.
We are to do the commonplace thing of standing by it, which is the
posture of men. Standing is what the ceremonial of Calvary prescribes.
Here again what sad sights we see! It is well if we do not play a part
in them ourselves. There are souls whose Way of the Cross is full of
promise, and yet who spoil every thing on the top of Calvary. Perhaps
if they had been crucified at once they might have done well. But that
was not God's Will. Waiting has unmanned them. Their courage has oozed
out among the ugly skulls that strew the faded herbage of the mount.
They have sat down, because the delay was long. Or they have knelt to
pray that the cross might pass from them. Foolish souls! that belongs
to Gethsemane, not to Calvary. We must not put our beginnings where our
end should be. Or the preparations frighten them, the digging of the
fosse, the measuring of the breadth from hand to hand, done so
carelessly as it seems to be, and yet a matter in which the least
carelessness may be infinite torture, the repointing of those blunt
nails, and then those cruel unnecessary flourishes of the hammer. Some
shrink from stripping in the cold air, and have to be stripped almost
by force. Some are terrified by the eclipse, which hides friends' faces
and the consolations of creatures. Some cry out and jump up when the
cold iron touches the palm of the first hand. Most fail then. Is it not
better to go down from Calvary, in the honest confession of our
cowardice, than to behave so weakly on the summit of that sacred hill?
Oh, no! it is better far to stay. Better a reluctant crucifixion than
none at all. Let us stand, if we can; if we cannot, let us be rolled
about like logs, as if we had died of fright, and bt nailed by force or
in unconsciousness. Only let us be crucified; gracefully, if it may be,
but ungracefully rather than not at all.
Why do so many fail? Because they are not silent. Endurance depends
much on silence. Power escapes with words. It is only by the help of
the grace of silence that the Saints carry such heavy crosses. A cross
for which we have received sympathy is far heavier than it was before,
or it may be that the sympathy has unnerved ourselves, so that the
weight seems greater, and the wound in our shoulder sorer. Silence is
the proper atmosphere of the cross, and secrecy its native climate. The
best crosses are secret ones, and we may be silent under those that are
not secret. Indeed, silence creates a sort of secrecy even in public.
For at least we can hide how much we suffer, if we cannot hide
altogether the fact that we are suffering. We can conceal how often we
are almost at the point of sinking beneath our burden. We can keep to
ourselves those individual peculiarities of sufferings which are far
its sharpest points, and which feed the sympathy of others more than
greater things can do. In some way or other human sympathy desecrates
the operations of grace. It mingles a debasing element with that which
is Divine. The Holy Spirit withdraws from its company, because it is
"of the earth, earthy." The Comforter gives His best consolations only
to the inconsolable of earth. They who seek creatures first must be
content with creatures; for they will not find God afterward, let them
seek ever so much. They to whom God is not enough by Himself, but must
have comforting creatures mixed with Him, will never find out their sad
mistake; for to them God will never open those treasures which will
show them how different He is from creatures. But all this is hard to
nature. Nature never yet breathed freely on the top of Calvary. Men do
not take their ease on mountain-heights. They hardly rest there, except
to admire the magnificence of the view, because the breathing is so
difficult. It is very hard to put away all consolation from ourselves.
Sympathy seems often to be just that which makes our pain endurable.
Well, then, let us go down a step lower. Let us not put it away; but do
not let us ask it. Let it find us out without our seeking. As the world
goes, we shall not greatly peril what is divine in our sorrows by being
simply passive about sympathy. But even this passiveness is hard. How
should it be anything else but hard, when it is part of our
crucifixion? It is Calvary's hardest lesson. Let us take it to
ourselves, although we fear it; neither let us be cast down because we
fear. Who ever did anything well which he had not first feared to do?
What is there upon earth that is worth doing, which is not worth
fearing also?
But there is a true consolation---deeply hidden, indeed, yet near at
hand---in this putting away of human consolation. It is in the darkness
of nature that we realize the vicinity of Jesus. It is in the absence
of creatures that we are held up in the sensible embrace of the
Creator. Creatures bring obscurity with them, wherever they intrude.
They are forever in our way, intercepting graces, hiding God,
defrauding us of spiritual consolations, making us languid and
irritable. They so fill our senses that the inner senses of our souls
are unable to act. We often wish our lives were more Divine. But they
are, in fact, much more divine than we believe. It is sorrow which
reveals this to us. It comes like a shroud around us. By degrees our
horizon narrows in, and our great world becomes a little world. Onward
still it creeps: first one object disappears, and then another. We are
growing less and less distracted. Our inward life is more awake. Our
soul gets strong. Now the line of darkness has touched Jerusalem
itself. Even the consolations of the spiritual city have disappeared.
The helmets of the Roman soldiers catch the light for a moment above
the level of the cloud, as if they were floating away on a dark
current. The greenness of the mount grows black. For a moment it blinds
us; then, by degrees, the white Figure of Jesus comes out in the dim
obscurity. We feel the warm Blood on our hands as we grasp the Cross.
It is no apparition: it is life. We are with God, with our Creator,
with our Saviour. He is all our own. The withdrawal of creatures has
made Him so. But He has not come. He was always there,---always thus
within our souls,---only He was overpowered with the false brightness
of creatures. He comes out in the dark like the stars. The white moon
of noonday does not allure us by its beauty; it enchants us only in the
night: so it is the darkness of a spiritual Calvary which covers our
souls with the soft shining of our beautiful Saviour.
But the couching of our spiritual sight is not the only operation which
the senses of our soul undergo on Calvary. All souls are hard of
hearing with respect to the sounds of the invisible world. The inner
ear is opened upon Calvary. The sounds of Jerusalem travel up to us
through the darkness, and perhaps the sounds of labor in the gardens
near. But they rise up as admonitions rather than as distractions. They
come to us softly and indistinctly, and do not jar the silence of our
endurance, or the low whisperings of prayer. Least of all do they
muffle the clearness of our Saviour's words when He vouchsafes to
speak. Down below, how the world deafened us by its tumultuous noises,
and jaded our spirits with its multiplicity of sounds! We knew that
Jesus was at our sides, and yet we could not converse with Him. It was
like trying to listen when the loud wheels are rattling harshly along
the streets, when listening is no better than an unsuccessful strain,
or a perplexed misunderstanding. The mere noise the world makes in its
going so amazes us that it hinders our feet upon the road to heaven. It
is only on Calvary that earth is subdued enough to make music with
Heaven; for it is there only that God is heard distinctly, while the
low-laying world murmurs like a wind, a sound which is discordant
nowhere, because it is rather the accompaniment of a sound than a sound
itself.
We see but two things on Calvary, Jesus and Mary; and from each we
learn a lesson, one about our own deaths, and one about the deaths of
others. Jesus vouchsafes to teach us how to die. If He in His great
hour would have His Mother by Him, how shall we dare to die without
her? In all things must we imitate Jesus, although it be in a sphere so
infinitely below Him. But most of all, it is of importance to us to
imitate Him in His death. If it had been well, He would have loved to
spare her that terrific scene, though she perhaps would have accounted
her absence a cruel mercy. It was there, at that deathbed, that she
became our Mother. There is surely not one of us into whose mouth faith
does not many times a day put that universal prayer, the prayer of the
pope and the peasant, of the doctor and the scholar, of the rich and
the poor, of the religious and the secular, that the Mother of God may
assist us in the hour of death. But we must imbed this petition into
all our prayers. Let us leave to God, without dictation or even wish,
the time, and place, and manner of our death, so only that it be not an
unprovided death, and above all things not unprovided with Mary. The
hour of death is a thirsty time, and exhausts great graces. Unsuspected
chasms open suddenly in the soul, and swallow up past years, old
habits, and a thousand other things we can ill spare then. The devil
reserves his worst weapons for the last. It is very terrible not to be
able to die twice, lest the novelty get the better of us the first
time,---and it is a tremendous stake. There are great sacraments for
that hour, but not greater than are needed. Watch a dying man! See how
absolutions sink swiftly into his dry soul, like summer rain into the
gaping ground. And yet the battle is still coming and going in his
eyes. Let us have Mary. Whether she be there visibly or invisibly,
whether she speak and work, or work without speaking, let it be an
agreement of long standing, a pledge not to be broken, that she shall
be present to conduct for us a ceremonial so difficult and yet of such
unutterable import. It is worth while to spend a whole life in asking
this, if only we gain the object of our petition at the last. What is a
good life worth, if it be not crowned by a good death? Yet a good life
is the nearest approach in our power to a good death. There have
perhaps been comparatively few good deaths which have not come at the
end of good lives. And those few, so all the believing world says, have
been contrived by Mary. But a good life is the likeliest of all things
to bring her to our bedsides in that hour. A cross-bearing life is
forever meeting Mary. At crucifixions she is present as it were
officially. If Jesus would not die without her, she will love us all
the more if we refuse to do so either. However long the agony has been,
however troubled in spirit the poor passing soul, blessed above all the
dead are those whose eyes Mary herself has closed!
Such is the lesson which Jesus teaches us about our own deaths. We
learn one from Mary about the deaths of others. It is, that devotion
for those in their last agony is a Mary-like devotion, and most
acceptable to her Immaculate Heart. There is not a moment of day or
night in which that dread pomp of dying is not going on. There are
persons like ourselves, or better than ourselves, and whose friends
have with reason loved them more than ever ours have loved us, who are
now straitened in their agony, and whose eternal sight of God is
trembling anxiously in the balance. Can any appeal to our charity be
more piteously eloquent than this? When ",e think of all that Mary has
done for each of those souls, those who are ceaselessly, momentarily
fixing their eternity in death, when we call to mind the long train of
graces which she has brought to everyone of them, and consequently the
yearning of her maternal heart for their final perseverance and
everlasting salvation, we may form some idea of the gratefulness of
this devotion to her. The deathbed is one of her peculiar spheres. She
seems to exercise quite a particular jurisdiction over it. It is there
that she so visibly co-operates with Jesus in the redemption of
mankind. But she seeks for us to co-operate with her also. She would
fain draw our hearts with hers, our prayers to hers. Is she not the one
Mother of us all? Are not the dying our brothers and our sisters in the
sweet motherhood of Mary? The family is concerned. We must not coldly
absent ourselves. We must assist in spirit at every death that is died
the whole world over, deaths of heretics and heathens as well as
Christians. For they, too, are our brothers and sisters; they have
souls; they have eternities at stake; Mary has an interest in them. And
their eternity is in more than double danger. How much more must they
need prayers, who have no Sacraments! How much darker must their
closing scene be, where the full light of faith shines not! How much
more earnest must be the prayers, when not ordinary grace, but a
miracle of grace, must be impetrated for them! Alas! they will have
none of our other gifts; at least, and affectionately in their own
despite, they shall have our prayers. We must remember also that we too
have to die. We shall one day lie in the same strait, and need
unspeakably the same charitable prayers. The measure which we mete to
others shall be measured to us again. This is the Divine rule of
retribution. Nothing will prepare a smoother deathbed for ourselves
than a lifelong daily devotion to those who are daily dying. Mary
assisted her Son to die in many mysterious ways. By His will, and in
the satisfaction of her own maternal love, she has now assisted at the
deathbeds of many millions. She has great experience by this time, if
we might so speak, and is wonderfully skilled in the science of the
last hour. By prayerful thoughts, by pious practices, by frequent
ejaculations, by the usages the Church has indulgenced, let us win a
bright and gentle end for ourselves, by following Mary everywhere to
the deathbeds she attends.
Such are the lessons we learn from the fifth dolor. The Crucifixion can
never be rightly understood without Mary, because without her it is not
truthfully represented. What a picture it is, the High Mass of the
world's redemption, offered by Jesus to the Eternal Father, while the
countless angels are the audience and the spectators! When the Host is
elevated, the whole frame of inanimate nature trembles with terror and
adoration, and earth darkens itself, which is to be a rubric it is to
observe in the presence of Jesus for all ages. But what is Mary's part?
Her Immaculate Heart is the living Altar-stone on which the Sacrifice
is offered; it is the Server, the beatings of whose broken heart are
the responses of the liturgy; it is the Thurible, in which the world's
faith, the world's hope, the world's love, the world's worship, are
being burnt like incense before the slain Lamb that taketh away the
sins of the world; and, finally, the same Immaculate Heart is the
Choir, the more than angelic Choir, of that tremendous Mass; for did
not the silence of her beautiful sufferings sing unutterable, voiceless
songs into the ravished ear of the Bleeding Host?
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