Vessel & Altar

"Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene." - John 19:25

Sister, this is her day, and the four sorrows left to us belong together rather than apart. They are one descent, and she goes down all of it without stopping.

She meets him on the road first. He is carrying it and she cannot take it from him, and the tradition has always held that they looked at each other. Then she stands at the cross, which is the sorrow the whole devotion is built around, and stands there long enough to be spoken to and given away to somebody else. Then they bring him down and put him in her arms, and she holds a grown man the way she held an infant, in the same arms, thirty-three years apart. Then she watches other people close the tomb, and she goes home, and there is nothing to do in the morning.

Nobody spared her any of it, and today asks you to sit with that rather than move past it. There was no arrangement made so that she would not have to see the middle portion. She was present for the road, present for the death, present for the body, present for the burial, and the Church has never once suggested she was given strength that removed the weight of it. What the tradition says about her is that she stood.

Then comes the most ordinary sentence in the Gospel. From that hour the disciple took her into his home. While she is standing there with nothing left, her son arranges for her to be received by someone, and arranges for that someone to be received by her. What was poured out in her became something handed on. The sorrow did not stay private. It produced a household, and Paul tells you what the household became: you are Christ's body, and individually parts of it. The Church you belong to began as a grieving woman being walked home.

Today the devotion completes. You have prayed all seven. Over the coming weeks these last four will come back one at a time, and you will find they are different on the second reading, the way anything is when you already know how it ends. Today is not the day to analyze them. Today is the day to stand there with her, and let the psalm sound as strange as it sounds, and notice by the end of it that the joy in it is not a contradiction of the sorrow but the thing the sorrow made.

Take the last four sorrows one at a time today, without hurrying and without commentary. Read John 19:25-27 slowly, and stay with the sentence about the disciple taking her home until you can say what has been handed to you out of something you suffered.

Lord, she stood, and you did not spare her the sight of any of it, and out of her sorrow you made a household that has held me my whole life. Teach me to stand, and to let what is poured out of me become something handed on. Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us. Amen.