THE SEVENTH DOLOR
THE BURIAL OF JESUS
THE shades of evening fall fast and silently round
that Mother, sitting at the foot of the Cross with the covered Head of
her dead Son upon her lap. The very earth is weary with the weight of
that eventful day. The animals were fatigued after the panic of the
eclipse, whose darkness they had mistaken for the night, so that the
beasts slunk to their lairs, the birds to their roosts, and the lizards
went to rest in the crevices of the rocks. Men themselves were outworn
with sin and the impetuous activity of their own evil passions, while
the scattered few who composed the Church were weary with shame, and
fear, and sorrow, and the agitation of accumulated thoughts. The well
known sounds of night begin to succeed to the sharper and more frequent
noises of the day. There is a Divine light in the heart of Mary, more
golden than that last lingering rim of departed sunset, that sun which
seemed so glad to set after the burden of such a day, and she is
resting on it for a moment, before she girds up her whole nature to
meet her seventh sorrow and her last.
It was a strange station for a Mother
to choose for her repose, just at the foot of the cruel tree on which
her Son had died, and which was yet bedewed with His Precious Blood.
Yet it is also just the very spot where, with Mary-like instinct, the
mourners of eighteen centuries have come to rest, and have found peace
there, when there was no peace, at least for them, in any other corner
of the earth. It is a place of spells, since Jesus hung there and since
Mary sat there. Here tears have been dried which it had seemed would
never cease to flow. Here hearts have consented to live which a while
ago were fain to die. Here the widow has found another and a heavenly
Husband. The mother has had her lost children restored to her. The
orphans have gone there in the dark, and, when they were done sobbing,
they found the arms of their new Mother Mary round them. Here thousands
of hearts have discovered how good a thing it was to have been broken;
for through the rent of their own hearts they saw God. When Mary sat on
that hilltop, and enthroned the Dead Christ upon her knee, she left an
inexhaustible legacy of blessings behind her to all generations, with
the condition of residence on the top of Calvary attached to their
enjoyment.
It was not therefore for herself, but for us, that she sat there, and
rested for a moment. But the time has now come, and she signifies with
calm self-collection to the disciples round to form the procession to
the tomb. There was Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, John and
Magdalen, the devout women who had come up to the Cross, some of the
trusted servants of Joseph and Nicodemus, and to these was now added
the converted centurion, who at the moment of our Lord's death had
confessed that He was the Son of God. Perhaps also some of the apostles
and other disciples may by this time, as some of the Saints have
conjectured, have been gathered to the Cross. It seemed sad to break up
so fair a scene of beautiful sorrow; but it was time to fulfill the
Scripture. With calm heroism, yet not without the direst martyrdom,
Mary gave up the treasure which lay across her lap. Who had any right
to touch Him but herself? Ah, Mother! thou knowest we have all of us
got those rights now. He has become the property of the world, the
inheritance of sinners, and thou thyself too art the universal Mother.
What the poor old heathen called the earth, that art thou to us, and
much more also. But she had borne Him into Egypt. Should she not bear
Him also to the tomb? No, Mother! God hath given thee strength by
miracle, that thou mightest suffer; but He will not give thee strength
to do that which will be a consolation to thy woe! There is that other
Joseph, haunting thee with his sweet look of reverence and love through
these last two mysteries of thy sorrow. He and Nicodemus will bear the
burden, while John and Magdalen will go along with thee.
The rude world intruded not upon the silence of that wonderful
procession. The multitude had long since flowed back, like an ebb tide,
from that sacred hill. The earthquake had sobered many hearts which
diabolical possession had maddened in the morning. The crowded city had
enough to think of for itself. For there had been processions also in
the streets of Jerusalem, strange processions, such as made men seek
their homes, and close their doors, and speak low, and think of God. A
shadow was over all hearts. The dead had walked. The earthquake had
burst the tombs open, and had awakened their inmates, and, like those
impatient prognostics which so often usher in a Divine work, there was
a resurrection before the time. The old Saints of the land, the dead of
other generations, had gone about the city, and had been seen of many,
with their beautiful threatening faces speaking unutterable silent
things. The memory of the day hung like a cold stone around the souls
of many. In others it was burning like a hot restless fire, the
harbinger of converting grace. Many wept, many more were sad, and all
were weary, dulled by a shadow oppressed by a Divine terror. Hell had
lighted a volcano in the people during the morning. Now it was burnt
out, and human nature could hardly find its place again in many of the
hearts from which it had been so awfully displaced. There was therefore
no interruption from the city. The city was brooding over itself, like
a disconsolate bird over its robbed nest. The very trumpets of Titus
were almost in its ears, and might have been heard by prophetic
listening. Poor Jerusalem! God has loved thee long, and loved thee with
a mysterious fondness; but today's disloyalty has filled up thy
measure, and thy doom has received its orders, and is now upon its way.
From the top of that hill, brown in the dusky twilight, they are
carrying to His tomb the Body of thy rejected King!
What awful shapes and shadows, of history, of prophecy, of dim Divine
decrees, gather like waving banners in the darkness round that sacred
procession! Has creation come to this, that a few faithful creatures
are bearing the Dead Creator to a tomb in the rock, and that a mortal
Mother, who numbers less than fifty years, is chief mourner there as
the veritable Mother of the Eternal! The songless angels are marshalled
round in serried phalanxes. Their science almost makes them afraid, so
overwhelming is the mystery. Now they have passed over the grave of
Adam, the First Man, in which the Cross had been set up. The Soul of
Jesus had already gone to Adam to give him the Beatific Vision. Now his
descendants were treading on his grave. His daughter Mary, the second
Eve, had been sitting there a while ago with the second Adam on her
lap. The bones and skulls of malefactors, luckless tokens of the fall,
strewed their path, half bedded in the tufts of faded grass, or lying
loose upon the smooth herbage which the goats had cropped. They are
descending now into a garden, another Eden, to plant a tree there in
the rock, better incomparably than all the trees of that old Paradise,
better even than the tree of life, and which should bloom in three days
with an inconceivable blooming. It was a garden where the vines grew
and the olive-trees dropped fatness. But this tree should give forth
wine more gladdening to the heart of man than any which ever bled in
the winepress from the vine, were it from the rarest clusters of
Engaddi. It should yield oil, as no olive ever yielded it, an oil to
heal all wounds, and to be the inexhaustible balsam of the world. There
were no flowers on earth like that withered one upon the bier, none to
compare with it for beauty or for fragrance, none that should have so
vernal a spring as He should have when but another sun was set. So they
went onward to the garden, a whole cloud of divinest mysteries,
accomplished types, fulfilled prophecies, historical consummations,
resting on them as they went; and over all was poured the soft light of
the paschal moon, hanging low in the western heavens, as if it were the
light escaped from Mary's heart which was making all the scene so
deeply sad, so sadly beautiful!
Slowly they went, and in silence as soft as the foot of midnight
itself. If they had sung psalms, the restless city might have heard.
But in truth what psalms were there which they could sing? Not even the
inspired harp of David could have shed sweet sounds fit for a dirge for
such a funeral. No one spoke in all that company. What should they say?
What words could have expressed their thoughts? "Out of the abundance
of the heart the mouth speaketh." But there are times when the heart is
over full, and then it cannot speak. So was it with that procession. A
deeper shadow of sorrow had never fallen upon men, than the gloom which
fell on those who now were wending from the top of Calvary to the
garden tomb. There was grief enough to have darkened a whole world in
Mary's single heart. Human suffering is not infinite; but it is near
upon it, and she had come now to its very uttermost extremity. There
was only one sacrifice she could make now, and she was in the very act
of making it. She was going to put away from herself and out of her own
power, to hide in a rocky tomb and let Roman soldiers come and keep
watch over it, that Body which though it was dead ,vas more than life
to her. Then, indeed, she would stand upon the highest pinnacle of
evangelical poverty, to which God had promised such mighty things. She
would only keep for herself that which she could not part with, and
would not have parted with if she could, a broken heart utterly
submerged in such waters of bitterness as had never flowed round any
living creature heretofore. There never would have been joy on this
planet again, if her accumulated woe had been divided into little
parcels, and distributed to each child of Adam as he comes into the
world. Then look with eyes of admiring wonder at adventurous travelers
and the successful explorers of unknown lands. Look now at Mary, as she
closes the funeral procession. That woman is a creature of the Most
High more exalted than any Angel in Heaven. The throne that awaits her
is one of the marvels of the heavenly court. She is as sinless as the
sunbeam, and her empire is over all creation. The Three Persons of the
Undivided Trinity will themselves perform her coronation. But she has
explored now all the vast realms of pain. She has sounded the depths of
every heartache man can know. She has traversed vast regions of
suffering which none ever traversed before her, and whither none can
follow her. She has been with the Incarnate Word in abysses of His
Passion which theology has never named, because not even Saints have
ever imagined their existence. She has exhausted all the possibilities
of mortal anguish. Her dolors have outreached the tall science of the
angels. They are known to none but Jesus and herself. At this present
moment she is drawing near to the term of that which is so nearly
infinite. The mystical border is close at hand. The outside of possible
suffering, like the end of space, is inconceivable. A few more
footsteps, and she will have reached that indescribable point of human
life. Who would have dreamed of such a possible suffering as the Dead
Body of the Living God? There is only one suffering beyond it: it is
the parting with that Body, and going back into the world alone in such
a solitude as never creature knew before.
But now the garden-tomb is reached, the new tomb of the second Adam. It
was hewn in the solid rock, and was new. Joseph had meant it for
himself. But no man had ever lain there yet. All things were fitting,
and full of all manner of meanings and proprieties. The tomb of this
new Joseph was to be to Him what the arms of the other Joseph had often
been before, His resting-place a while, when Mary had to part with Him.
But in those days there had never been such partings as this was to be.
Mary enters the tomb with Joseph. It was his help she chose. Her hands
arranged every thing. How gently they lowered His Head into the tomb!
As to His arms, perhaps they now allowed her to close them to the Body;
or perhaps, if there was room, He rested even in the grave with that
wide crucified embrace, ready to receive a whole world of sinners. We
are not told. She adjusts and composes the winding-sheet, and puts the
feet together, which had been so painfully together those three hours
upon the Cross. The instruments of the Passion too she takes, and
kisses them, and deposits them in the tomb. There is no unnecessary
delay over each action, such as marks the weakness of common grief. All
was done in order, assiduity, and silence. Then came perhaps the last
look. Perhaps she lifted up the cloth to see that the moving of the
Body had not discomposed the venerable features. How pale it must have
looked by the wan torch light inside that rocky tomb! The eyes were
closed whose single look had converted Peter. The lips were shut that
but a while ago uttered those seven marvelous words upon the Cross, the
sound of which had not yet died out of her listening ears. Slowly the
cloth was replaced; and on her knees she made her last act of adoration
of that lifeless Body. Never surely had any anguish so awful, any woe
so utterly superhuman, desolated the soul of living creature. There
have been many last looks in the world. Many graves have closed on
earth, shutting in worlds of hope and love, and imprisoning often more
of the survivor's life than death has robbed from the departed. Yet
none has ever come nigh this. It stands alone, a grief without a
parallel; because she who mourned and He whom she mourned were alike
incomparable. Perhaps in none of her dolors was there any single
isolated moment that for accumulated and intense woe could be reckoned
along with this. She was widowed and orphaned as none else were before.
She sank down in depths of widowhood and orphanhood which had never
opened to anyone else. But what are father and mother and husband and
child to an Incarnate God? To be fatherless, motherless, husbandless,
and childless, how little measure of grief do these dismal words
represent compared with that for which there is no real word! For a
soul to be Christ less is simply heathenism and Hell. For Mary, His own
Mother, to be Christless, and on the night of such a day,---oh, the
sorrow lies out dark before us, like the sea at night, and we know no
more!
All who were present at the burial genuflected before the Body, and
adored profoundly, and then turned away, as though they were tearing
themselves from a strong attraction, and departed in silence. Joseph,
as St. Matthew tells us, rolled a great stone to the door of the
monument, and then went his way also. Mary, with john and Magdalen,
return slowly over the summit of Calvary. She will need repose after
the terrific agony of that moment in the tomb. But repose is far away
from that brokenhearted Mother yet. Her soul, shattered by that last
assault of suffering, has yet to pass through a fearful ordeal before
she reaches the house of John in Jerusalem. After that, there is to be
no respite to the anguish of her desolation for three days, three
scriptural days, from this Friday evening till the dawn of Sunday's
sun, the aurora of the Resurrection.
The Cross lies in their path across Calvary. The fatal tree is still
discernible in the darkness, for the light of the low moon creeps up
over the earth and lights objects from below. But its dimensions look
larger and more swollen than before. Mary rests awhile, and falls down
upon her knees to adore the blood-stained Cross. She kisses the wood,
partly as if it were in sign of reconciliation with it after its cruel
yet blessed office of the day, and partly as if it were the most
precious object she could touch now that the Body, which had hung on
it, was laid in the tomb, and partly also in sign of love and worship
of the Precious Blood. When she rose up, her lips were stained with it.
Dreadful seal of love which the Son has printed on His Mother's mouth
and cheek, from those lips of His which were "as lilies dropping choice
myrrh!" O Mother! "thy cheeks are as the bark of a pomegranate, besides
what is hidden within thee!" O Blood-stained mouth, giving voice to
that heavenly soul, how much has passed since thou didst sing that
wonderful Magnificat! Thy silence now is as eloquent before God as thy
song was then!
She turns from the Cross. Below her lies the guilty city, magnified and
indistinct in the murky air, with a few restless lights glancing here
and there, and the irregular broken sounds of night rising up into the
air. There were no words of reproach upon her lips, no look of reproach
in her eyes. She took it all in, from the stately temple to the outer
gateways of the city. She saw the host of Titus beleaguering its walls,
and the mothers that slew their little ones for food. She saw the old
predilection of God withdrawing from His ancient Zion, as a golden
cloud follows the sunset under the horizon. But she yearned over
Jerusalem. Not a week has passed since He whom she had just buried had
shed tears of vexed love and lingering fondness over that chosen city
of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Since then, how had it done
penance? Alas! it had crucified Him who wept, Him whom its little ones
out of their pure hearts had greeted with Hosannas. Poor Jerusalem! She
knew that it was doomed. But there was room in her broken heart for the
guilty city as well as for the slaughtered Son. A cloud of beautiful
history rests over its dreary sanctuaries to this day, even in its
dishonor; and Mary's entrance into it that night, next to the tears of
Jesus, is one of the most pathetic of its memorials. Half buried in its
ruins, no city upon earth is so dear to the believer's heart, a city he
will assuredly one day see, when he goes to meet His Saviour, whom it
slew, come to judge the tribes of men in the valley of Josaphat hard
by. Through the same gate, by which she had left the city in the
morning, she re-entered it that night. As men count time, some ten
hours or so had passed; but in the purposes of God, in the annals of
grace, in the chronicles of that broken heart, it was a long secular
epoch, longer than the years that had fled since Abraham's day. It was
that Friday which we name The Good, partly to veil the bad deed it
held, and partly because out of that injustice comes to us an infinity
of mercy.
In order to understand the agony which our Blessed Mother had now to
suffer, we must take several circumstances into consideration. There
was too much of the satiety of bitterness in her soul to allow her to
feel, sensibly the pain of hunger. She had not done so during the Three
Days' Loss. But her long fast told grievously upon her strength. No
food had crossed her lips since the evening before. No sleep had
visited her eyelids on the Thursday night, and there was little hope of
her sleeping now while Jesus lay in the tomb. Moreover, the twenty-four
hours had been filled with the most astonishing events, gigantic
mysteries following each other in almost indistinguishably rapid
succession. Her soul had been on the rack of extremest torture the
whole while. Her mind, serene and capacious as it was, had been
stretched and fatigued incessantly by the very comprehension of what
was going on around her. Her nature had been shaken to its centre by
terror. She was worn out by the bodily fatigue of standing so many
hours. The very intensity of her sustained adoration had preyed
upon the supplies of her life. That indescribable moment in the tomb
had been eclipse and earthquake in her soul both at once. Now, fasting,
thirsty, foot- sore, her eyes tingling with sleeplessness, her limbs
aching with fatigue, her mind burning with terrible memories and still
more terrible understandings, her heart crushed and desolate within
her, a very wreck which the tempests of supernatural woe have been
unable to submerge, she enters at the gate of jerusalem, on another
course of the most dire and heart-rending affliction.
She is retracing the morning's pilgrimage, and making the stations of
the Cross from last to first, instead of from first to last. Slowly she
traversed the intolerable scenes of the morning. Not a gesture had
escaped from her retentive memory that evening, just as none had
escaped the vigilant anxiety of her eye before. She heard His low soft
sighs upon the night wind. His beautiful disfigured face looked at her
through the darkness. Here He fell, and her feet burned and trembled as
she stood upon the spot. She knew that she was treading on the pavement
stained with His Blood, though the night veiled the ruddy traces from
her eyes. There the Cyrenian had taken His Cross. There He had spoken
His gentle words, yet words of saddest doom, to the daughters of
jerusalem, whose women's hearts had melted in them at the cruelty of
which He was the victim. There He had impressed His adorable lineaments
on the cloth which Veronica had brought Him. There was the corner of
the street where Mary herself had met Him. It seems ages ago. Those
eyes were on her still. That look was in her soul, burning with a fire
of love whose heat was torture to the weakness of mortality. There was
the guard-room where He was crowned, and there the pillar of the
scourging. She knew what lay around the foot of it; from her mind's
eye, at least, the darkness could not veil it. There were the steps of
Pilate's judgment hall, where He had been shown with derisive pity to
the raging people. The silent air seemed still to ring with their cries
of Barabbas. Verily His Blood was on them and on their children now. It
was an awful pilgrimage, and her heart bled within her as she made it.
It is always a great trial to love to revisit scenes of deep sorrow.
Even when time has closed the wound, it is a bitter pain to bear,
bitter although our love may drive us to seek it of ourselves. Eyes
weep then that have not wept for years. Strong men sob as if they were
weak women, and are rightly not ashamed of it. Hearts are broken afresh
which patient, dutiful endurance had pieced together as well as might
be. Fountains of bitterness from underneath, long closed and almost
unsuspected now, break up, and flow, and inundate the soul with gall.
All this, too, takes place when use has blunted the edge of grief, so
that it cannot cut as deeply or as fierily as it did before. But what
is this compared with Mary's backward way of the Cross, the second she
had made that day? The peculiar horror of the mysteries, the
incomparable sharpness of the anguish, the crushed and broken heart of
the sufferer, her intense bodily fatigue and fainting lassitude, and
the rawness of the recent Passion, bear her sorrow far beyond the
limits of all comparison.
In such unutterable woeful plight it was that the streets of Jerusalem
beheld their unknown queen that night wending her weary way to the
house of John. This was the home she had received in exchange for the
House of Nazareth. John is her son now instead of Jesus. He is the man
and she the woman. But he must lean on her, not she on him. He who last
night pillowed his tired head on the Sacred Heart of Jesus must now, in
spirit at least, find his repose upon the Immaculate Heart of the
sorrowing Mother. The door closed upon her. She was now at home. Home!
surely the word was mockery. It was less of a home to her than the
chance cave is to the wounded wild beast. How could she have a home
except where Jesus was? Bethlehem had been a home, and distant, foreign
Heliopolis, and sequestered Nazareth, and the open hilltop of Calvary,
and the inside of the garden-tomb. They were homes, because Jesus made
a home for her wherever He was. It was when she left the tomb that her
true homelessness began. The first step from that sad second Eden was
the beginning of her exile. And John's house, too,---had it no dreadful
associations which would weight heavily and haunt darkly a broken
heart? Who does not know how, in the extremity of sorrow, the eye and
the mind busy themselves, not in despite of us, but to our complete
unconsciousness, with all the minutest details of the place in which we
are? The furniture, the position in which it stands, the pictures on
the wall, the pattern of the carpet, the exact folds of the curtains,
the lines across the ceiling, the mouldings of the cornice, little
things that are crooked and awry or Gut of place, are all indelibly
transferred to our souls, never to be forgotten, and each detail, each
outline, can hereafter become a well of dark associations, replenishing
forever the fountains of our tears. So was it with Mary. In that room,
with her spirit at Gethsemane, she had spent the three hours of the
agony; and the look of the room brought it all back to her, living, and
real, and unbearable. From that room she had gone forth with John and
Magdalen to try to gain admittance to the house of the high priest. To
that room she had returned when Jesus was thrown into the dungeon for
the night. In that room she had spent such a vigil as no other mother
could have spent without forfeiting either her reason or her life. And
now she had come back to it again the most bereaved, the most desolate
among all the countless creatures of our heavenly Father, and all this
because she was nearest to Him, and His best-beloved.
There, with the silent companionship of John and Magdalen deepening the
utter solitude, she abode for more than four-and-twenty hours. Her
grief meanwhile remained preternaturally at its height, because it was
beyond the reach of use and time and calm. One could assuage it but
God; and His time was not come yet. In fact, it rather grew than
otherwise. Like ail divine works, its dimensions were in such exquisite
proportion that it looked less than it really was. Its vastness, which
was hidden from the eye, manifested itself to experience. The storm
also grew and thickened in her soul without flash or sound; yet a true
and fearful storm it was, lightening invisibly in the very centre of
her fixed tranquility, and imprisoned storm, but painful and desolate
exceedingly. It kept up the swiftness, energy, and vitality of her
sorrow, that it might penetrate the more piercingly into every part of
her nature. It settled down into the depths of her soul, filling up
every void, commuting to itself, absorbing and transforming, all other
things which it found there. So that her faith became an agony, her
love an agony, and even her hope an agony. Every faculty of her mind
was on the rack. Her reason was deep suffering. Her imagination brought
with its exercise acutest pain. Her memory thronged into the avenues of
every one of her senses, filling them up with fire and bitterness and
terror. Her will, weighted with all these mysterious dolors, hung
suspended as on a sort of rack, in the most agonizing tension, yet calm
and brave, uttering no cry, letting no sign of torture pass on its
features, but peaceably and passively abiding all for God. It is not
impossible also that the outward Divine abandonment in which she was
might have its fearful inward counterpart, as was the case during the
Three Days' Loss, of which this seventh dolor is in many ways itself
the counterpart. It was a complete possession of sorrow, a miraculous
transfiguration of a human life, grander and broader than other human
lives, into a living impersonation of unutterable grief.
Such was the mystery of the seventh dolor, or rather of those few
outskirts of it which escape from the secrecy of Mary's heart and come
within the range of our limited vision. If it has been hard to tell the
story, it will be harder still to specify the peculiarities. The
greatest peculiarity of this dolor consisted in its being the last.
Very much is implied in this. No one can have failed to perceive that
our Lady's dolors are a Divine system, a world governed by laws of
which we have but a very partial intelligence. We have already
classified them on different principles, and have seemed to gain light
by doing so. Nevertheless our view of them is by no means complete.
Perhaps it never can be. We feel, as if by instinct or divination, that
there is a unity in them which we have been unable to grasp, and that
they are one in the same way that the Passion is one, though the method
is beyond our view. There are lights now and then, strong lights, in
dark places. But they only prove to us that we do not see the whole.
Like a landscape by moonlight, all is mottled and visionary, shadows
and objects confused together, heights and distances falsified, a view
which is see through an inadequate medium. All is real and
recognizable, but it is with a visionary reality. Her sorrows were
beyond all doubt a very special Divine work. The Church does not leave
us in any uncertainty as to that question. Now, the end of a Divine
work must be worthy of its beginnings, and in keeping with them, as it
were a crown of grandeur to them. Titus the seventh dolor, whatever may
be the peculiar kind of sorrow which it brought along with it, must
have been an adequate and congruous consummation of the rest. We have
seen what they were; what then must this have been!
From this it follows, further, that the sorrow of the seventh dolor was
a sorrow without a name, a grief which cannot be classed as belonging
to the family of any other known grief. It is a class of its own. If we
give it a name, it would be an arbitrary one, because we have no
similitudes or analogies to guide us in imposing the name. The numerous
resemblances which we can trace between the seventh and the third dolor
are enough to satisfy us that this last sorrow must have been one of
colossal stature. We cannot tell what suffering is like when the heart
has got beyond life's possibility of suffering, and the victim is kept
alive by power external to himself, not power which mitigates the pain
or elevates the capability of endurance by alleviating and consoling,
but sheer power of miracle. We have seen this even in her earlier
sorrows. Now, here, in like manner, we cannot tell what grief is when
it has outrun all the actual experience of the griefs of men, and
attained tIle solitary term beyond which grief cannot go. All
possibilities are finite; the possibilities of grief, therefore among
the rest. He only is truly infinite who is not a possibility, but an
Eternal Simple Act. But what can we know of the uttermost territories
of possible sorrow? Only as a mysterious place where the Mother of God
has been, and where she was when she knelt to make her last adoration
of the Body in the tomb. We call it the seventh dolor, and we can call
it nothing else. So far as our intelligence goes, her third dolor was
her greatest. But her seventh dolor is beyond our intelligence, both in
kind and in degree, and therefore was her greatest in another sense.
The circumstances which formed the material of the sorrow were without
parallel on earth. They have happened only once, and the unassisted
science of the wisest Angel would never have dreamed that such things
could have happened at all in the bosom of God's creation, rife as it
is with unexpected wonders. Mary's heart also was an instrument
unparalleled on earth, now that the Sacred Heart was cold and
motionless in the tomb. Even when it lived and beat, its union with the
Divine Person took it out of the parallel. Mary's state at the close of
this vast system of dolor, through which she had revolved, was also
quite without parallel, both in respect of holiness, of powers of
suffering, and of the miraculous holding together of her shattered
life. Thus every thing about this dolor is without parallel. We can but
shadow forth in our spirits some nameless immensity of grief, and say
it was the seventh which our Mother bore.
Another peculiarity of this dolor, and immediately connected with what
has been said, consisted in its being beyond the reach of consolation.
It was this which kept its bitter and tempestuous waves unnaturally
poised in the air during those four-and-twenty hours in the house of
John. It could not be assuaged. It had no power of itself to ebb. It
was beyond the laws of grief's common tides. It had nothing to do with
creatures, and therefore creatures could not minister consolation to
it. The cruelty of men and the rage of devils reached to the death upon
the Cross. In the fifth dolor, therefore, they found their term. Human
agency could not reach the seventh dolor. It struggled feebly and
faintly, or at least comparatively so, in the sixth; it reflected
itself, depicted itself, there; it failed and died out before the
seventh, and fell short of that moment at the tomb. Like the third
dolor, its affliction was altogether divine. We may guess the
proportions of a sorrow coming express from God, and from Him to a
creature such as Mary, when compared with the sorrows men or devils can
inflict. But here, again, we do not know what it is to be beyond the
reach of human consolations. Men tell us, with the usual flattery of
comfort or the monitory commonplaces of edification, that our griefs
are beyond human consolation. But it is not really so. Time consoles us
inevitably, even though it may do its work tardily. Kindness consoles
us, even while it irritates us. Life consoles us by the very
importunity of its distractions. But Mary was further removed even than
this. She was beyond the consolations, not only of common grace, but of
that prodigious grace which she herself brought down from the top of
Calvary. What is a creature like who is beyond the consolations both or
nature and of an unparalleled grace, and whom God Himself can alone
console by immediate union with Himself?
We think of those who lie on the bleak confines of creation, in eternal
exile from their Father. Oh, woe is their unutterable and yet
ineradicable life! Yet there the mighty cloud of an unanswerable
justice casts something softening and tolerable over their endless
solitude of pain, by the very fact that it renders it even to their
blackened spirits so confessedly reasonable. But Mary was beyond
consolation, even when she was meriting more divine sweetnesses than
all the angels and the Saints together. So that she is not to be
paralleled for woe of that kind, even with the lost. Moreover, if, we
may so dare to speak, love is in some sense a more energetic agent than
justice. Thus there is a sense in which an inconsolable desolation
prepared by eternal love to inflict suffering must be a more
penetrative and overwhelming thing than an inconsolable desolation
prepared by eternal justice for the punishment of sin. Nay, the Blood
of Jesus somewhat quells the fierceness of the flames of hell; whereas
it was that very Blood which was kindling the flames in Mary's soul and
heating the furnace of her heart sevenfold hotter than it was before.
So that even the desolation of the lost may not compare itself in its
excess with that mystical inconsolable affliction which was God's last
trial of His Mother's heart. Even He, so seemed it, had no more proofs
whereby unutterable sanctity might be established.
But there are some lesser peculiarities, lying on the outside of this
seventh dolor, which we must not omit to notice. We saw that the
loneliness of the sixth dolor had not yet reached the point of
desolation, because Mary still had the companion- ship of the Body. It
became desolation when the great stone was rolled to the door of the
monument and she went forth from the garden of His sepulchre. This has
been a well known moment in the grief of all of us. All was not over
when death was over. We spoke of the lifeless frame in the masculine or
feminine, as if the body was the real self of the one we loved. The
house was not forlorn,---at least, not utterly forlorn,---though it was
darkened and silent. The dead furnished it, peopled it with one
exclusive growing life, and filled it with a mysterious attraction. It
made home more home. It was now a consecrated home. It had but been a
common home before. Oh, there was such manifold companionship in the
dead! Its white face was so eloquent. It did not tell of pain just
passed, and the gnawing of hungry disease, and the blight of
pestilence. But it spoke of old times, of simple childish years. It was
a very resurrection of bygone looks, of almost forgotten expressions,
of innocent youthful pleasantness of countenance, blooming above death
like the snowdrops above the hoar-frost. The compressed lips smiled at
us. The closed eyes looked at us, without opening. The blue-veined
hands were full of meaning. It was a dark hour when the coffin closed,
but the spell was not gone yet. The moment of desolation did not come
when the blue spires of incense uncurled themselves out of the damp
grave, and the clods rattled on the coffin lid, and the hollow sound
was like a frightening echo of eternity. But it came when the mourner
set his first step again on the threshold of his door, having left the
partner of his life, or the child of his hopes, or the mother of his
boyhood, behind him in the grave. Then the house was empty indeed, and
his heart was empty too, and desolate. If we substitute Mary for
ourselves, and Jesus for the love we lost, and make allowance for those
wide disparities, like grief was Mary's when she turned away from the
garden-tomb. This it is within our compass to understand, and there are
dark days in our own past to testify to its reality.
It is another peculiarity of this dolor, which it shares with the
sixth, and which we have already alluded to repeatedly, that Mary was
surrounded in it by images of the Sacred Infancy. These were a twofold
fountain of sorrow, both in their contrasts and their similitudes. His
imprisonment in the tomb was an image to her of the nine months He had
spent in her blessed womb. But she had borne Him then herself over the
hill country of Judea, with swiftest exultation, while each thought was
a Magnificat within her soul. Joseph of Arimathea reminded her of him
who was chosen of all men by the Eternal Father to be the foster-father
of Jesus. But he had gone to sleep peaceably, with his head on the
bosom of Jesus; while Joseph of Arimathea was just reversing the
pleasant sadness of that older mystery. When she laid Jesus in the
tomb, and arranged the winding-sheet, she remembered the crib of the
manger, wherein she had laid Him at Bethlehem. But between the crib and
the tomb there was all the vast interval which lies between the poles
of Christian devotion, Christmas and Passiontide. The two mysteries
were so alike, and yet so different! He was more helpless now than ever
He was then. What was loveliest obedience then is rigid passiveness
now. His silence was voluntary then; so is it now, but with a different
kind of will. He had noticed her then; He takes no notice now. When He
slept as a Babe, and His eyes were closed, she knew that He was
thinking, loving, worshipping, all the while; and His sleep was in
itself a beauty and a charm. But now the Heart was cold and motionless;
worshipful, because of its union with the Godhead, but not beating with
conscious love of her. They had had one strange union since His death.
It was when she had knelt with Him extended on her arms, and they two
together had made the figure of one Crucifix, and it was neither
altogether Jesus who ,vas crucified, nor altogether Mary, but God's one
victim out of two lives. That was a figure with a strong Divine light
upon it, never to be forgotten, though we should soon sink out of our
depth in its theology of love.
Yet the Passion was there as well as the Infancy. They met upon that
ground. That marble Body, many-streaked with intertwisted red and livid
blue, was no monument of Bethlehem. The whole Passion was elaborately
written out upon His limbs; nay, it is gorgeously illuminated on His
Hands and Feet and Side this hour in Heaven. Those instruments of the
Passion, too, those precious relics which are deposited in the tomb,
tell not of Bethlehem and Nazareth, but of Jerusalem and Calvary, of
the Praetorium and of Golgotha. Others touching, handling, carrying Him
rather than herself,---this painful characteristic of the Passion,
which had cut so deep into her soul in the fourth dolor, was renewed in
the sixth and seventh. It was a sort of token of the presence of the
Passion. But tokens were hardly needed, and, if present, were scarcely
perceptible in a mystery which breathed the aromatic bitter of the
Passion in all its bearings and in each minutest incident. In the
Sacred Infancy she had none to lean their weight on her weariness and
weakness; for she and Joseph both leaned on Jesus, and rest, and peace,
and joy are all one abiding thing to those who lean on Him. But she had
to carry the Church in her heart at the Passion. When Jesus died,
Peter, the Rock, leaned his repentant faith and love on hers. She
upheld by her gentle bravery both John and Magdalen. Joseph and
Nicodemus would scarcely have had nerve to detach the Body from the
Cross if she had not been there to inspire them with her own tender
fortitude. Yet this leaning of others made her heart ache. It was a
fresh sorrow of itself. It multiplied the number of dear hearts in
which she had to suffer, while it was also a strain upon her own. The
Passion reached its height in Mary, not when the Soul of Jesus sank
through the greensward at the foot of the Cross, but during that final
moment at the tomb.
Here also the Three Days' Loss, that mystery which shines apart, finds
something like its fellow. The essence of the sorrow is the same in
both cases. It is the loss of Jesus. The time which the loss endures is
mysteriously the same. There is the same absence of human agency and
secondary causes. The occupations of the absent Jesus are not alike in
both cases. In the first He was illuminating the doctors of His nation.
In the second He was giving beatific light in the limbus of the
Fathers, the older doctors of His people. There was a Joseph to sorrow
with Mary at the tomb, as there had been a Joseph to sorrow with her in
the temple; and both Josephs were the choice of God Himself. The
Inature of the suffering was the same in both cases, because it came
from a Divine abandonment. Desolation was equally the form of sorrow
then and now. She had lost Him both times in the same place, just
outside the gates of Jerusalem. There can be little doubt that the
Three Days' Loss was a prophetical foreshadowing of the present
separation. But there was one notable exception to all these
similitudes. The darkness in the seventh dolor arose from the
impossibility of consolation. The darkness in the third was a
mysterious ordeal of supernatural ignorance. Here she knew every thing.
She had watched the Passion to its close with heroic fidelity. She had
embalmed Him herself. She had helped to lay Him in the tomb. She knew
where He was and how He had been lost, and she knew of the Resurrection
that was to come on Easter morning. But as one deep calleth to another
in the ways of God, so doubtless, the third dolor calls to the seventh,
and the echoes answer to the call. The voices of both agree in telling
us that they both have abysses which we cannot sound, and that beyond
the deep places, in which we have nearly lost ourselves, there are
deeper places still, which we suspect not.
But the seventh dolor has a prerogative of its own. The Hypostatic
Union had long been an object of blissful contemplation to Mary, just
as it was the work of God into which the delighted science of the
Angels most desired to look. The union of our Lord's Body with His
Soul, and the union of both Body and Soul with His Divine Person as the
Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, had been to
her the type of all unions, the monument of immutability in the mutable
works of the Creator. Like the mystery of the Holy Trinity itself, it
had seemed to her as that three-fold cord of which Scripture says, with
significant moderation, that it is not "easily broken." There was
something like a break in it now, and the very thought of such a thing
is too terrible for words. What the Word once assumed, that He never
put away. The Hypostatic Union could not by possibility be broken. The
Body, the Soul, the Blood on the Cross, on the pavement, on men's
sandals, and on Mary's garments, all, awaiting the Resurrection, were
united to the Person of the Eternal Word, all equally so, though all
apart. But the Flesh and Blood were sundered, both worshipful, but both
separate. The Blood, precious and Divine, was outlying in all
directions, in the most unthought-of places, in the most degraded
mixtures, in the most complicated, inextricable confusion, as if it was
not in its generous, prodigal, world-saving nature to be cooped up in
one place, as the Body was, and be inactive in a tomb. Its color should
be its voice, and its mute red should preach stirringly wheresoever it
might be scattered. But this separation of Flesh and Blood was a
fearful invasion of the sanctuary of that heavenly union. Yet more
awful far was the sundering of Body and of Soul, that old, dread
mystery which God had first invented as a punishment for sin. Here,
too, which is more terrible still, it had been done as a punishment,
and as a punishment for sin. In the first moments of the Incarnation
there had been no succession. The Soul was not an instant before the
Body, nor the Body before the Soul, nor either of them an instant
without the Divinity. But the Union which was effected in the womb was
broken in the grave, and Mary ministered to both the mysteries. The
grief which this appalling separation caused in Mary's heart must have
resembled in its pain the disruption which caused it, and it is one of
those things which have to stand alone, because God willed that they
should be mysteries without mates in His vast creation.
Thus it appears that this seventh dolor was a sort of centre, or a
harbor, in which all the various lines of mysteries of the Thirty-Three
Years converged. Bethlehem and Calvary, Nazareth and Jerusalem, the
Infancy and the Passion, the Boyhood and the Ministry, were all
represented here. The possibilities of sorrow were exhausted. Simeon's
last sword is sheathed in the Mother's heart. If none can tell the
sorrow that she bore, so none can tell the holiness she reached. The
frenzy of man's sin and the pressure of divine justice had separated
the Body and Soul of Jesus. Both of them combined could do no more; and
so the Passion ended. Mary's woes have been mounting, various in their
cruelty, inventive in their ruthless tortures, and with her too
separation is the last. She is separated from Jesus, from His Soul
first of all in the fifth dolor, and from His Body now. Her last
separation is from that which she herself gave Him, His Sacred Flesh.
Man's sin and the ever-blessed cruelty of Divine love have forced the
Mother and the Son asunder, though for three-and-thirty years their
union had been second to none in creation, save that of the Hypostatic
Union. Jesus was without Mary, and Mary was without Jesus, that darkest
of all desolations which the evil one and heresy can imagine in order
to rob a poor perishing world of the Precious Blood. Ah, venerable
Simeon! thy last sword is indeed sheathed in the Mother's heart. Thou
hast departed in peace, according to thy prayer. Thou art gladdening
thyself now in the light of Jesus. Yet thy peace beyond the grave is
not more glorious than that peace of hers, which for these so many
years thy prophecy has turned into inexpressible bitterness!
From these peculiarities of the seventh dolor we may turn now to the
dispositions in which our Blessed Mother suffered it. It was the
characteristic of Our Lady's holiness that it consisted in a perfect
correspondence to grace. All holiness is of course simply a
correspondence to grace; but with ordinary men, and even with the
Saints, there is a great deal of failure, of fluctuation, of falling
and then rising again, and consequently of imperfect correspondence to
grace. Self-will diverts grace from its legitimate channel, and
impresses its own character even upon its Divine action. Sin also
leaves its prints and vestiges even upon our holiness. Temper and
disposition too are clearly cognizable in the structure when it is
completed. Thus there is something human, something special, something
strongly savoring of their natural bent and individual character, in
the holiness of the Saints. By it we distinguish one saint from
another. It is an attraction to our devotion, a stimulus to excite us,
a model to copy. This arises from their sanctity not being merely a
correspondence to grace, but a result of struggle, of temptations,
revolutions, catastrophes. and even ruinous accidents. It is a Divine
work, but inextricably mixed up with what is human. It is almost a
beauty in our eyes that it should be so. Our Lady's holiness was of
quite a different character. It was a simple, unmixed, unthwarted,
perfectly accomplished transmutation of grace into holiness, without
delay, as the fresh grace came. Hence it is altogether a Divine work,
sustained by a human will. Sin has left no trace there. There is no
vestige of catastrophe, but only the beautiful uniformity of calm and
equable law acting with resistless power upon the most glorious theatre
in unspeakable pacific majesty. There is no alloy with the pure gold,
and, as far as our dim eyes can see, but little individual character.
Not that she was without character of her own, and doubtless a very
marked one. But it is too near God for us to see it. It is hidden in
the vicinity of the intolerable light, as a planet would be if it lay
close to the shores of the sun. It is this Divine purity of her
holiness which, when we reflect maturely upon it, is far more wonderful
than its colossal proportions, and distinguishes her with a more nearly
infinite distinction from. the Saints.
A single grace from God is a marvelous thing. Theologians have said
that one communion is enough to make a Saint. Even in the very
commonest graces experience sometimes enables us to discover the most
manifold capabilities, the most incredible power of duration, the most
extraordinary empire over the soul. It seems occasionally as if a
single grace was sometimes a fountain of spiritual miracles within us,
or had power enough of itself to turn the helm of our whole lives, and
to contain all Heaven and the width of eternity within its own compass.
A Saint perhaps corresponds to a thousandth part of His grace, we to
much less. So far is our meanness, even when it strives, from matching
the free magnificence of God. But a grace corresponded to instantly
brings another grace, and that another, and so on through an endless
series rising in number, in multitude, in beauty, and in efficacy. Thus
the irresistible swiftness of the process of sanctification dawns upon
us almost as a thing to fear. The possibilities of sanctity cannot be
thought of without trembling. The holiness of creatures dazzles us,
while the holiness of the Creator seems ever removing and removing
further off from us, at the very time it is drawing us onward toward
itself in breathless adoration. But our imperfect correspondence
frustrates the work. We tie up the liberality of God. We squander,
corrupt, dilute His grace, even when we use it, and we delay as if we
wished to let it stand and evaporate and lose its peculiar celestial
freshness before we take heart to use it. Thus, if we may reverently
say it, God with His grace in men's souls is like a man whose thoughts
are eloquent and beautiful, but who has not the gift of speech, and
cannot utter them, or only in a stammering way which both hides and
spoils them. He has not free scope with us. He can but produce a very
inferior work at best, because His materials are willfully incapable of
a better. Grace was never so gloriously unbound as it was in Mary's
soul, except in the Human Soul of Jesus, which is out of all
comparison. In her heart it expatiated as if it were in Heaven, and
developed itself in all its unhindered magnificence. She corresponded
to every grace to the very uttermost. Her graces were gigantic,
immeasurable, even when compared with the graces of the apostles; and
yet she corresponded perfectly to their vastness. Thus every moment of
life was bringing down fresh inundations of grace, which were foliage,
flower, and fruit almost the moment they had touched the virgin soil of
her immaculate heart. Days went on adding themselves to days, and years
to years; and like some fabulous machinery, with overwhelming force and
with invisible speed, the process of correspondence and sanctification
went on, multiplying itself in one short hour beyond the figures of all
human sums. Her life moved too amid tall mysteries, each of which was a
universe of sanctification in itself. The march of her soul was among
Immaculate Conceptions, adorable Incarnations, Hidden Lives of God,
Passions of the Impassible, Defeats of the Omnipotent, Birth and Growth
and Death of the Immutable and Eternal, the Government of a God,
mysterious prodigies of Dolor, Descents of the Holy Ghost, Queenships
of Apostles, and the like. What oceans of grace might not such a life
of supernatural heroism absorb, and convert into a holiness which,
soberly speaking, is unimaginable by Angel or by Saint! No wonder we
always speak so unworthily of Mary. It is one of those sad human
infirmities from which we never can escape; for all language is so
inexpressibly unworthy of her, that the most glowing praise and the
coldest commonplace sink down into one level from such a distance as
the inaccessible mountains of her holiness. Love alone can feel its way
far on toward her; and happy is he whose love for her is ever growing.
He is enjoying in time one of the choicest blisses of eternity.
This view of Mary's holiness, that it is a purely Divine work, because
it is simply God's own grace realized, and realized to the utmost, by
correspondence, not only gives us the true height of her sanctity, and
shows that its world-wide dimensions are not magnified by any mists of
affectionate exaggeration, and that all that ever has been said of her
by Bernard, Bernardine, and the rest, is far below the level of her
tremendous grandeur, but it also explains to us the difficulty we have
in getting any clear conceptions of her interior dispositions. In the
first place, we are obliged to use the same words to express
correspondence to different graces. We speak of her conformity to the
will of God, or her generosity, or her fortitude, or her union, when
the change of circumstances and the varying refinements of grace have
caused the words really to mean different things at different times. We
have not keenness or subtlety of spiritual discernment to distinguish
between these niceties of grace, these shadings of heavenly beauty. Yet
we know them to be so real, that one shade of one of Mary's graces
would produce a different kind of Saint from another shade of the same
grace; and we know them also to be so great and powerful, that each
single shade of anyone of her graces could fill with color and splendor
the souls of a multitude of Saints, or the spirits of a hierarchy of
Angels. But there is such a thing as an eloquent stammering, when we
are discoursing on the things of God; and we must speak, even though
what we say is far below what we mean, and what we mean is but a
wavering likeness of the reality which we see blindedly in the burning
fires of the majesty of God.
In the second place, if Mary's holiness consists in tranquil, adequate,
congenial correspondence to grace, it is that correspondence which must
give the name and character to her dispositions. But, if the graces are
far out of our sight, if their abysses are not registered in our
theology, (and who can lay down soundings for the unfathomable?) then
must her correspondence also be far out of our sight, and with it those
conceivable dispositions which form her interior loveliness and
grandeur. We can do no more than hazard guesses, and imagine shadows,
which shall stand for those invisible realities. We can but make
calculations, and then allow for errors from our knowledge of the
superlative excellence of the Mother of God, and then let the sum
stand, not as an accuracy, but as a mere help to getting an idea. Each
succeeding dolor the difficulty of speaking of her dispositions has
been greater; and yet we could not be silent, because her dispositions
were the graces of her sorrows in blossom, passing on to the fruit of
solid holiness. For Mary was no mere monument of marvels, upon which
God had hung external dignities, and endless banners, and figurative
emblems, and the external spoils of a redeemed world. The bewildering
glory outside---and truly it was bewildering---was as nothing compared
to that which was within. Mary was a creature, a woman, a mother, a
sufferer; and by stupendous correspondence to them she had made God's
gifts her own. They are at this moment not mere ornaments, or
privileges, or decorations, or offices conferred, or prerogatives
communicated, or even inalienable jewels; neither are they simple
attributes, or perfections referred to her, or glories separable from
her, or wonders predicated of her, or merits imputed to her; in Heaven
they are Mary's own self, her own human, maternal, characteristic,
loving, quiet self; a self which is in glory what God made it twice
over, in nature and in grace. Oh, it is sweet to think that our
Heavenly Father has such a daughter, to be ever at His feet worshipping
Him with the little greatness of her love! Of all the interior
dispositions of the Saints, that which strikes us as the most
magnificent, more magnificent than the spirit of martyrdom, is that of
perseverance in a complete sacrifice. Perseverance is in itself the
most uncreaturelike of graces. It is as if the immutability of the
Creator had dropped like a mantle upon the creature, and became him
well. There is something at once more graceful in its movements and
more heroic in its demeanor than characterized the beautiful fervor in
which the soul irrevocably committed itself to the first generous
sacrifice. There is more of heaven in its stateliness, while there is
also more of a man's own in the courage of the sustained effort. But
the glory of perseverance is greatly increased when it is in a complete
sacrifice. There is a completeness and unity about the whole work,
which seems to render it an offering worthy of the Divine compassion.
Strange to say, while many souls fail under the effort while the
sacrifice is yet incomplete, there are not a few who dishonor it in its
completeness. Nature gives way and seeks repose, when it has attained
the summit that was before it; and it seldom happens on earth that
there is not something ignoble and: unworthy about repose. Others look
back on what they have done almost with cowardly regret; for it is
rarely the case that any sacrifice is strictly speaking complete in
itself. A man has committed himself by it to something further,
something higher. All efforts in the spiritual life, properly speaking,
have to be sustained till the end. The difficulty, and therefore the
costliness of perseverance, consists in its tension never being
relaxed. It is on this account that perseverance is an uncreaturelike
grace, a supernatural similitude of God. Others again do not regret the
efforts expended or the sacrifices made; but they look at once for
their reward. They lower the nobility of what they have done by a want
of disinterestedness. We are not offended when little services look for
their reward. But great services remind us of God, and do not look so
palpably unworthy of Him, and therefore they offend us by the mention
of their recompense. So it is, that in one way or other there are few
souls, who do not somewhat disfigure and impair their sacrifice, and
take the unearthly freshness from it. Thus when we see anyone
persisting in his complete sacrifice with the same ardor and fortitude
and magnanimity and patience, almost gracefully unconscious that he has
done or is doing any great thing, not that he does not understand what
he has done, but because when all his thoughts are fixed on God there
are none left for attention to himself, then do we call it the most
magnificent of all interior dispositions, a shadow of the rest of the
unfatigued Creator when His sabbath succeeded to the making of the
world. Such was Mary's disposition in this seventh dolor. It was the
sabbath of her world of sorrows. But when we think of the sacrifice
which she had made, of the completeness with which she had made it, and
then of her quiet bravery in that desolate solitude of creatures which
was all around her uncompanioned soul, we may conceive how far it is
beyond our power to realize the intrinsic majesty of such a
disposition, and how much we should lower it, if we strove to compare
it with the corresponding disposition in the saints, to which in the
paucity of words we are fain to give the selfsame name. God rested on
Himself in the hollow of uncircumscribed eternity, when His dread
sabbath came. Can a creature share in such a sabbath? Yet to what else
shall we liken Mary in the repose of her dolors finished?
Another disposition of her soul in this dolor was her detachment from
all spiritual consolations and the sweetness of Divine things. This is
a height of love which he who practises it not on earth loses the
opportunity of practising forever; for there can be no such love in
Heaven. We talk so often of the love of suffering, urging it on others
and on ourselves, that we almost forget how high and rare a grace it
is, and how rash the pursuit of it is to common souls. There are few
indeed to whom such a grace is a reality, and fewer still with whom it
is at home, or amidst whose other graces it finds a place that fits it.
Yet Saints, who have loved such suffering as creatures could inflict
upon them, have shrunk from those processes of suffering which God
Himself immediately imposes on the soul. Many, who have willingly
parted with the light of the earth, have drawn back trembling from the
darkness of Heaven, when it threatened to descend upon them, and have
averted it by the energy of their prayers. There have been Saints, who
for the love of God would forego His spiritual sweetnesses and
consolations, who yet could not bear to have His blessed Self laid upon
them as a dread instrument of mysterious pain. The cloudy solitudes of
Divine abandonment have been trodden by very few, and they for the most
part, when they had entered into the obscurity, let us know how far
they had advanced by the cries of anguish which escaped from them, as
from wounded eagles, in their torture. Jesus Himself had cried aloud as
He sank down into that appalling death. Mary, in this dolor, was
allowed to try this perilous descent, and to share still further than
she had done beneath the Cross the dereliction of our Blessed Lord. As
this came upon Him at the end of His Passion, as the crowning sorrow,
just when it was least possible for nature to endure it, so hers came
on her at the end of her Compassion, as the crowning dolor, when
suffering had left nature but as a wreck amid the abounding waters of
divinest grace. The two sorrows, His and hers, ended in the same
mysterious Divine affliction, whither we cannot reach, but where we
know that out of speechless woe there rose unutterable beautiful light
from out their souls, which worshipped God with the perfection of
created worship, carrying, as can some mighty resistless wave, the
offering of human love far beyond the highest point which the tide of
angelical intelligence was ever known to reach.
There are also two growths of heroic sorrow which we must not forget to
notice, and which we may assuredly reckon among her dispositions in
this dolor, the spirit of intercession and the spirit of thanksgiving.
The products of grace are not infrequently the contradictories of
nature, even while they are grafted upon them. It would seem as if the
natural result of sorrow were to make us selfish, by forcibly occupying
us with ourselves, and concentrating our attention upon our sufferings.
Yet we know that the proper grace of sorrow is unselfishness. It is as
if the very multitude of things we had to bear made large room in our
hearts, and caused a leisurely tranquility there, which enabled us to
think of others, and to legislate with the most minute and foreseeing
consideration for their comfort. The spirit of intercession is part of
the unselfishness which comes from the sanctification of sorrow. Our
kindliness toward others takes especially a religious and supernatural
form, because we are bearing our sorrow in the presence of God, and our
whole being is softened by it, and drawn into deeper and more heavenly
relations with Him. The spirit of intercession belongs to hearts, which
are victims,---victims, voluntary or involuntary, of God's loving
justice. Every Christian who is in sorrow is so far forth a living copy
of Christ Crucified, and the spirit of expiation is an inevitable
element in his grace. Moreover, human agents are generally more or less
concerned with our griefs, and, for the most part, not innocently or
unintentionally so; and our thoughts, in being occupied with ourselves,
are necessarily occupied with them. Thus Jesus prayed for His murderers
upon the Cross. Thus the martyrs prayed for their tormentors. Thus,
also, to wrong a saint has generally been the royal road to his
choicest prayers. Who can doubt, therefore, and especially in those
critical circumstances of the world and out of the very abysses of the
mysteries of redeeming grace, that Mary's soul, the more it was
overwhelmed with the waters of bitterness, with all the more quiet
intensity poured itself out on others? And inasmuch as her prayers were
her treasures, treasures that could enrich the world far beyond its own
suspicion or belief, it would necessarily be in intercession that the
largeness and exuberance of her love found vent, especially when this
spirit of intercession was, at the same time, the most efficacious
reparation to Jesus for the wrongs He had sustained.
But, while sanctified sorrow melts the heart in kindliness toward
others, much more does it absolutely liquefy it, to use the favorite
word of mystical writers, in kindliness toward God; and this, in the
same spirit of contradiction to nature, takes the form of thanksgiving.
On natural principles, the times of sorrow are the times when we have
least to thank God for; but to an enlightened and discerning faith they
are the times into which blessings are miraculously compressed,
miraculously both for number and for greatness. Yet even here there is
something also which is deeply natural. When a friend has wounded us in
any way, his change of conduct somehow brings out his love for us in
our hearts, and the past is brightly magnified from behind the present
cloud. Thus in our relations with God, sorrow makes us feel our own
unworthiness more deeply, so that the contemplation of past mercies
fills us with an humble astonishment, whose only voice is wondering
praise and the thanksgiving of happy tears. This is that glorifying of
God in the fires, which is one of the magnificences of tried souls. As
we crush the aromatic leaves of the cypress and the bay to extract
their fragrance from them, so God presses our hearts till they bleed,
that they may worship Him with the perfume of their gratitude, and draw
Him closer to themselves with the new delight and love with which they
inspire His compassion and His tenderness. Who can doubt that, as Mary
sank deeper down and deeper in those amazing gulfs of her dolors, her
Magnificat became ever more louder, and deeper, and quicker, and more
full of adoring significance in the enraptured ear of God?
Last of all, the magnitude of her faith, in the dark hour of that
seventh dolor, did of itself worship the Holy Trinity most
incomparably. This is another of the many resemblances which there are
between the seventh dolor and the third, the immensity and the repose
of faith in unutterable darkness, faith without the light of faith, the
sense of faith, the enjoyment of faith, without the ever-present
self-reward as well as self-conviction which faith ordinarily brings
with it. Here also is the same spirit of contradiction to unregenerate
nature. We believe God the more readily, the more firmly, the more
lovingly, just the more incredible He vouchsafes to make Himself to us.
He never seems more good than when we ourselves have the least cause to
think Him good, never more just than when He looks as if He were
positively unjust. Faith is a gift which grows under demand, and
becomes the more inexhaustible when its waters are let loose. It is in
itself a worship of the truth of God, and in this perhaps resides the
secret of its apparently unaccountable acceptableness with Him. Hence
the more clearly we see this eternal truth in the midst of blinding
darkness, so much the more firmly do we adhere to it in spite of
seeming evidence to the contrary, and so much the less are we moved by
difficulties; or, rather, the less we apprehend them as difficulties,
so much the more worship does our faith contain. Though he slay me, yet
will I trust in Him, were the grand words of Job. Hence too it follows
that calmness enhances faith. It is a testimony to its reality, and an
evidence of its empire. Tranquil faith is sweetest worship, because it
seems to say that all is at peace because God is concerned. There is no
need of agitation, or of trouble, or of any manner of unquietness; God
is His own guarantee: all must be right and best and most beautiful,
because it is from Him. His word is dearer to us than knowledge, easier
to read than proof, and nestles deeper in our hearts than a conviction.
Yet never was faith exercised under such circumstances as by Mary in
this dolor, never was faith greater, nor ever faith more tranquil. The
faith of the whole of the little scattered Church was in her; and there
is not more faith today in the whole of the huge worldwide Church
Militant than was in her single heart that night.
All this gives us but a faint idea of the inward beauty of our Blessed
Lady in the endurance of this seventh dolor. Unknown graces were
accompanied by unknown dispositions. The heights which she had reached
are inaccessible to our mystical theology. God only can tell how
beautiful she was within, and into what new unions with Himself she had
by this last sorrow been permitted to enter. It is enough for us to
know that, next to the Body of Jesus, her immaculate heart was the most
wonderful thing on earth that night.
The seventh dolor contains also many lessons for ourselves. which are
quite within the scope of those who are endeavoring to serve God in an
ordinary way, while at the same time, like all the other sorrows of our
Blessed Mother, it calls us to serve Him with a higher, more detached,
and more disinterested love than we have ever done before. We learn
from the promptitude with which she left the tomb to do her work, and
to fulfill in her cheerless desolation the will of God, how we
ourselves should put duty before all other considerations, and, in
comparison with it, estimate as nothing the highest spiritual
consolations. Now, as if Providence arranged it so on purpose, duty
seems often to lead from the sensible enjoyment of Jesus. Even in
common domestic life the unselfishness of daily charity will lead us to
sacrifice what looks like a religious advantage, to forfeit what it is
hard not to persuade ourselves is a spiritual improvement, for an
agreeableness which others do not particularly value, and which appears
to be only a growth of acquired politeness or of natural kindliness,
and not at all an obedience to a supernatural bidding of grace. It is
hard at all times to persuade ourselves that there is no spiritual
advantage to be compared to the giving up of our own will, and that
petty mortifications, which concern our own private ways, and the use
of our time, and habits even of devotion, are, so long as they are
painful to us, among the highest methods of sanctification. It is
necessary to add, so long as they are painful to us, for, unlike other
mortifications, when they cease to be painful they cease to be
mortifications, and become symptoms of the world having got the better
of us, and then unfortunately there is no discretion left us but the
apparently selfish rudeness of those who have real cause to be afraid
about their souls. If the ordinary civilities of society may often
claim our time and attention at the seeming sacrifice of spiritual
sweetness and communion with our Lord, much more imperative is the
jurisdiction which charity may lawfully exercise over us in this
respect. Un- fortunately spirituality tends to be selfish. Our nature
is so bad that good things acquire evil propensities from their union
with us, and it is the best things which have the worst propensities.
So even the love of our Blessed Lord, when discretion does not guide
it, may interfere with our love of others, and so come at last to be an
untrue love of Him. Untrue, because merely sentimental; for there is no
Divine love which is not at the same time self-denying. To have to give
up our own ways to those of others, to have our times of prayer at
hours which we dislike, to accommodate our habits of piety to the
habits of others, is certainly a delicate and perilous process, one
needing great discretion, safe discretion, and an abiding fear of
worldliness. Nevertheless, it is often a most needful means of
sanctification, especially to those whose duties, health, or position
do not allow them to lead mortified and penitential lives. The use of
time, whether we consider the annoying weariness of punctuality and the
supernatural captivity of regular hours, or whether we look at the
unwelcome interruptions and somewhat excessive demands upon it made by
the inconsiderateness and importunity of others, is a most copious
source of vigorous and bracing mortification for those who are trying
to love God purely amid the inevitable follies and multifarious
distractions of the world. It is the especial mortification of priests.
But, if manners and charity may lawfully draw us from the sensible
enjoyment of Jesus, it would be simply unlawful to deny the claims of
duty to compel such an act of self-denial. Yet it is a point in which
pious people, especially beginners, almost invariably fail. There are
few households or neighborhoods in which the spiritual life has got an
unjustly bad name, where the mischief has not been caused by the
indiscretion of an ill-regulated piety in this respect, and, while it
is to be hoped that we look upon such households or neighborhoods with
an entirely unsympathetic coldness, it is not the less sad that the
evil should be there, because it is not the less true that our Blessed
Lord is the sufferer. Beginners cannot easily persuade themselves that
Jesus can be more really anywhere than in the sensible enjoyments of
intercourse with Him. The more advanced souls know well that Jesus
unfelt is a greater grace than Jesus felt, in a multitude of instances;
yet even with them practice falls below knowledge, because nature
rebels to the very last against whatever limits the prerogatives of
sense.
If Mary sought for no consolation in the house of John, but abandoned
herself there to her desolation till Easter morning, does it not seem
as if there was some kind of justification for those who cherish their
grief and brood over it? We must distinguish. Grief in Divine things so
far differs from grief arising from earthly losses and bereavements,
that we have no right to put it away from ourselves or to seek
consolation, until the impulses of grace bid us do so. The suffering of
Divine sorrow is so different a thing from that of common sorrow, that
there is no danger of sentimentality, or effeminacy, or selfishness
arising from it. The endurance of Divine sorrow is not the indulgence
of it, but the continuation of a crucifixion; whereas the endurance of
common sorrow soon ceases to be sorrow, and becomes an indulgence, an
elegant and interesting self-importance, and a dissipating softness of
luxurious melancholy. Thus sorrow for sin, sadness because of the sins
of others, grief because of the vicissitudes of the Church, grief
because of our Lord's Passion, or sorrowing sympathy with our Lady's
dolors, are not so much events of human sadness which befall us as
direct operations of grace, and therefore aiming at different ends and
working by other laws. Such griefs should be cherished, their
remembrances kindled, and their shadows be, perhaps, with some slight
degree of violence, retained, when they seem as if they were departing.
All this is unlawful with ordinary sorrows. Yet even in the case of
Divine sorrows it is to be remembered that any grace which is out of
the jurisdiction of discretion is a phenomenon utterly unknown to the
highest theology of the Saints.
Since there are so many resemblances between the seventh dolor and the
third, it is not surprising that they should in some respect teach the
same lessons. We learn from this last sorrow that there is no darkness
like the darkness of a world without Jesus, such as Mary's world was on
that fearful night. It is darker than the darkness of Calvary; for that
is a darkness which cheers, refreshes, and inspires. Jesus is there. He
is the very heart of that darkness. He is felt more plainly than if He
were seen. He is heard more distinctly because all is so dark about
Him, and other sounds are hushed by the gloom. It is like being in the
cloud with God, as tried souls often are. It is truly a darkness, and
brings with it the pain of darkness; yet there is hardly a loving soul
on earth to whom such darkness would not be more welcome far than
light. But the darkness of the absence of Jesus is, as it were, a
participation in the most grievous pain of hell. If it is by our own
fault, then it is the greatest of sorrows. If it is a trial from God,
then it is the greatest of sufferings. In either case we must not let
the light of the world tempt us out of the darkness. In such a gloom it
is indeed dreadful to abide; but the consequences of leaving it by our
own self-will are more dreadful still. It is not safe there to think of
creatures. We must think of God only. It is the sanctuary of "God
Alone," the motto of the Saints and of the saintly. We must deal only
with the supernatural, and leave Him who brought us there, whether, for
chastisement or fervor, to take us out when it shall be His will.
Meanwhile we should unite ourselves to the dispositions in which Mary
endured her seventh dolor, and this will bring us into closer union
with God.
One more lesson still she teaches. She did her work in the world, as it
were, with all her heart; and yet her heart was not there, but in the
tomb with Jesus. This is the grand work which sorrow does for all of
us. It entombs us in the will of God. It buries our love, together with
our sorrow, in the Blessed Sacrament. Sorrow is, as it were, the
missionary of the Divine will. It is the prince of the apostles. The
Church is built upon it. The gates of Hell shall not prevail against
it. Our Lord is with it always to the end. It is sorrow that digs the
grave of self, and blesses it, and burns incense in it, and buries self
therein, and fills it up, and makes the flowers grow upon the tomb. The
great secret of holiness is never to have our hearts in our own
breasts, but living and beating in the Heart of Jesus; and this can
rarely be accomplished except through the operation of sanctified
sorrow. Happy, therefore, is he who has a sorrow at all hours to
sanctify!
We have now brought our Blessed Mother to the threshold of those
mysterious fifteen years which followed her dolors and the Ascension of
our Lord. She began with fifteen years without Him, and so in like
manner she ended with fifteen years without Him. Only as in the first
fifteen years the image of the Messias was engraven upon her heart, and
the shadow of His coming lay over all her growths in holiness, so in
the last fifteen years He dwelt bodily within her in the unconsumed
Blessed Sacrament, from Communion to Communion, and was the living
fountain of all those nameless and unimaginable growths in holiness
which, during that time, went on within her soul. The destiny of the
Mother of God was a destiny of unutterable sorrow, exhausting at once
the possibilities of woe and the capabilities of the creature. This
might be expected, since it was by sorrow, shame, and the Passion that
the Incarnate God came to save the world. The dolors of our Blessed
Lady, therefore, are inseparable from her Divine Maternity. They ate
not accidents of her life, one way out of many ways in which God might
have chosen to sanctify her. They were inevitable to her as Mother of
God, of God who took flesh to suffer and to die. Thus, rightly
considered, Mary's dolors are Mary's self. Her first fifteen years,
commencing with the Immaculate Conception, were a preparation for her
dolors. Her last fifteen years, commencing with the descent of the Holy
Ghost, were the maturity of her dolors. During them her sea of sorrow
settled till it became a clear, profound, translucent depth of
unmingled love, whose last act of taking the tranquil plenitude of
possession of its glorious victim was the dislodging of her soul from
her body, by the most marvelous and beautiful death which creature
could ever die. Such an edifice of sorrow as the Divine Motherhood was
to bring along with it could not rest on foundations less broad and
deep than the immeasurable graces of her first fifteen years. What,
then, must have been the grandeur of the graces which came upon that
edifice when it was completed, and were its domes, and towers, and
pinnacles? We have often wondered what could be done to Mary, in the
way of sanctification, at the descent of the Holy Ghost. What was left
to do? In what direction was she to grow? The mere fact of the delaying
of the Assumption meant something; and what could it have meant but
increase of holiness and multiplication of grace? If she was kept on
earth to nurse the Infant Church, as she had nursed the Infant Saviour,
to be herself a living Bethlehem, with the Blessed Sacrament forever in
her, and her queenship of the Apostles and external ministry of
Bethlehem to the childhood of the Church, still, untold and
incalculable augmentations of grace and merit are implied in the very
office, as well as in the fact that it was God's Mother who fulfilled
the office. It was her dolors which opened out in her soul fresh
abysses for eager grace to fill. It was the dolors which rendered her
capable of that other new creation of grace in the descent of the Holy
Ghost. His graces are absolutely inexhaustible: her capacities of grace
are practically inexhaustible, to our limited comprehension. The grace
which prepared her for the Divine Maternity prepared her also for her
singular and lifelong martyrdom. Her martyrdom prepared her for those
ineffable augmentations of grace and merit which were compressed into
her last fifteen years. Thus her dolors are, as it were, the centre of
her holiness. They reveal Mary to us as she was in herself more than
any other of her mysteries. Indeed, they are hardly to be called
mysteries; they are more than that: they are her life, her self, her
maternity. They enable us to understand her holiness. They help us to
see that what theologians say of the momentary accumulation of her
merits is not so incredible as it often seems to those who have not
loved and meditated their way into Mary's greatness. There is nothing
about Mary which unites in itself so much of Mary's part in the
Incarnation, of her own peculiar personal holiness, and of her
similitude to God, as the system of her dolors. They are at once the
plainest and the completest as well as the most tender and pathetic
revelation of the Mother of God. As her first fifteen years were
secret, so were her last fifteen; but over the marvelous processes of
grace which fill them both lies the shadow of her dolors, the shadow of
a coming time in the one case, the shadow of a lofty mountainous past
in the other. He who would learn Mary must enter into her broken heart
to do so. It is the "dolorous Mother" who illuminates the Immaculate
Conception on the one side and the fair pomp of the Assumption on the
other.
Look once more at the great Mother, as she leaves the garden of the
sepulchre. Eve going forth from Eden was not more sorrow-laden, and
bore with her into the unpeopled earth a heart less broken and less
desolate. That woe-worn woman is the strength of the Church, the Queen
of the Apostles, the true Mother of all that outspread world, over
which the blue mantle of darkness is falling fast and silently. Sleep
on, tired world! sleep on, beneath the paschal moon and the stars that
are brightening as it sets; thy mother's heart watches and wakes for
thee!
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