Thursday of the Thirtieth Week in Ordinary Time

The Grotto in Portland, Oregon
with a replica of
Michelangelo's Pieta

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/102711.cfm

Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,
how many times I yearned to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,
but you were unwilling!

While vacationing in Portland Oregon I was privileged to preside over the Saint Francis Day Mass with the sisters and their guests in Our Lady of Peace Retreat House. Concluding the Mass I also formally welcomed a young woman to join the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows. I blessed a small medallion the sisters wear and then the Mother gave it to the postulant.

Blessing the medallion, I was struck the title of this community, the Sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows; and I remembered the blessedness of sorrow. 

Sorrow is one of those normal life experiences, like disappointment, pain and suffering, that we rarely welcome. An "entitled" society actually believes it should not happen, and there is something terribly wrong when it does. 

Our Lady of Sorrows is there to reassure us that sadness and sorrow are beautiful, normal and healthy. Life would not be complete without them. As Christians we walk with Jesus and Mary to Jerusalem where we will encounter a sorrow beyond all imagining. It is in fact beyond our human capacity for hurt; its depths lie in the infinite mystery of God. 

Saint Paul, always the hopeful apostle even as he endured imprisonment, wrote:

I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. Collosians 1:24

No one complains as loudly as I do about misery but nevertheless I have a divine mission to remind Veterans and others that suffering is normal. I am sometimes compelled (hopefully by the Holy Spirit and not my own obtuseness) to remind parents and grandparents that feeling acute disappointment in their children and grandchildren is a part of their vocation. Didn't the Lord promise Eve she would feel agony in her child-bearing? That doesn't stop with the birth of the child; it continues in various forms for a lifetime. 
At one time an overly pious Church insisted Mary felt no pain in her labor on that first Christmas Day; but, however that may be, I don't think that memory gave her much consolation as she stood at the foot of the cross. 
Rather, she welcomed sorrow in the Spirit of that ferocious Maccabean widow who encouraged all seven of her sons to keep the faith as they died in agony. Mary might not have understood why her Son had to die on the cross -- though the pious tradition insists that she did -- but she never lost faith in the work he was accomplishing. She could not dismiss the pain of that moment with the assurance of Easter. I think she remained with Jesus saying, "I am here, Son. I am with you. I am offering you to my God even as you are, in the sure and certain Hope which God has given us:

‘I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.’ 

‘My son, have pity on me. I carried you for nine months in my womb, and nursed you for three years, and have reared you and brought you up to this point in your life, and have taken care of you. I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed.And in the same way the human race came into being. Do not fear this butcher, but prove worthy of your brothers. Accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may get you back again along with your brothers.’  Maccabees 7:20-23 & 27-29

Confronted by such courage in the face of our Mother Mary, who among us feels she should not also welcome occasional sorrow?