Day 41, SORROWFUL MYSTERIES, Thursday March 12

Meditating on the Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary

We should cling to [Jesus] as a child clings to its mother. We should hang about Him as a Friend whose absence we cannot bear. We should keep Him fondly in our thoughts, as men sometimes do with a sweet grief, which has become to them the soft and restful light of their whole lives.

Now, the way in which Our Lady’s dolors keep His Passion continually before us has a special virtue to produce this tenderness in us. We love Him, who is infinitely to be loved in all ways, in a peculiar manner when He is reflected in His Mother’s heart. Although it is absolutely necessary for us perpetually to contemplate His Passion in all the nakedness of its harrowing circumstances and revolting shame, for else we shall never have a true idea of the sinfulness of sin , yet there is something in the Passion, seen through Mary, which makes us forget ourselves, and tranquilly engrosses us in the most melting tenderness and endearing sympathy toward our Blessed Lord. The emotions which are awakened by the Passion in itself are manifold and exciting, whereas the spirit of tenderness presides over Mary’s sorrows with one exclusive, constraining presence. But out of this tenderness comes also a great hatred of sin. If God were to let us choose which of the great and extraordinary gifts that He has given to His Saints should be conferred upon ourselves, we could not do better than ask for that piercing and overwhelming hatred of sin which some have had. It is a gift which lies at the root of all perfection, and is the supernatural vigor of all perseverance. It is at once the safest and the most operative of all singular graces. Devotion to Our Lady’s dolors is a great help both to acquiring the hatred of sin as a habit, and to meriting it as a grace. The desolation wrought by sin in the heart of the sinless Mother, and the reflection that her sorrows were not, like those of Jesus, the redemption of the world, fill us with horror, with pity, with indignation , with self -reproach.

There is nothing to distract us from this thought, as there is in the sacrifice of Our Lord, who was thus accomplishing His own great work, satisfying the justice of His Father, earning the exaltation of His Sacred Humanity, and becoming the Father Himself of a countless multitude of the elect. The Mother’s heart bleeds, simply because she is His Mother; and it is our sins which are making it bleed so cruelly. We are ourselves part of the shadow of that eclipse which is passing so darkly over her spotless life. We can never help thinking of sin, so long as we see those seven swords, springing, like a dreadful sheaf, from the very inmost sanctuary of her broken heart.

Faber, Fr. Frederick William (2015-02-14). The Foot of the Cross with Mary: or The Sorrows of Mary (Kindle Locations 1053-1073). KIC. Kindle Edition.