Hearth & Altar

We have been praying the Seven Sorrows devotion since the first of September. Today it finishes.

The Gospel puts you at the foot of the cross with four people standing there, and three of them are women. Everything has already happened. There is nothing left to arrange, nothing left to fix, and no reason for any of them to still be standing in that particular spot except that they will not leave him. Then our dying Lord looks down and does one more thing: He gives his mother and his friend John to each other. Woman, behold your son. Behold your mother.

And John writes, "From that hour the disciple took her into his home." Not a vision, not a promise, not a word from heaven. A man walked a grieving woman back to his house and gave her a room. The worst afternoon in history produced that.

The first reading is where the Church tells you what that means, and at first it looks like it belongs to some other day. Paul writing about the body having many parts, about all of us being baptized into one body, about the fact that you are Christ's body and individually parts of it. Put it next to the Gospel and it stops being abstract. Her sorrow did not stay hers. It produced a household, and the household became a Church, and two thousand years later your family is a part of the body that started when a man on a cross arranged for someone to be looked after.

Then the psalm today is a joyful one, which can seem like a mistake on a day about a mother watching her son die. We are his people, the sheep of his flock. Sing joyfully to the Lord, all you lands. It is not a mistake. It is what the sorrow made. If your children notice the strangeness of singing that psalm today, they have understood the feast better than most adults do.

• For our family, that what we suffer would be given away rather than kept, we pray to the Lord.
• For every mother who has watched a child suffer and could do nothing to stop it, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who have no one to take them in, that someone would open a home to them, we pray to the Lord.
• As Our Lady's Thirty Days closes today, for the grace to stand where we would rather not stand, we pray to the Lord.

Finish the chaplet tonight. Name the last four sorrows out loud together and pray one Our Father and seven Hail Marys for each, or one decade for all four if the children are small. Then light a candle and leave it burning while you clean up.

Your family started the Seven Sorrows on September 1 with the sword Simeon promised her. Tonight you finish it, and finishing what you started is most of the lesson. Name the last four in order so the children hear the whole arc: she met him on the road as he carried the cross, she stood beneath it while he died, she received his body when they took him down, and she watched them close the tomb.

Do not soften any of them. Children handle this better than adults expect, and the reason they handle it is that Mary is in every one of the four. She is not being told about it from a distance. She is there, in the road, at the cross, holding him, at the grave. Tell your children that she did not run and she did not faint, and that the tradition of the Church is simply that she stood.

The optional sequence at Mass today is the Stabat Mater, a thirteenth-century hymn about exactly that standing. Look it up together after the chaplet if your children are old enough to read it. It has been sung in this Church for seven hundred years and it asks for one thing over and over: to be allowed to stand there too.

One practical note, because tomorrow starts the Ember Days. At the table tonight, before you pray, have each person name what they are giving up tomorrow. Decide it now rather than in the morning, when nobody decides anything well.