September 17, 2017

Solemnity of Our Lady of Sorrows

Observed liturgically by the parish the September 16 -17, 2017

Fight, Flight or Faith? The Sorrowful Heart of Mary

Msgr. Thomas Gervasio

At the cross her station keeping,
stood the mournful mother weeping,
close to Jesus to the last.
 
Stabat Mater…since the 12 ^th century Christians have sung these words and they provide the image of our Lady that the Gospel imprints in our minds and hearts on this our patronal feast. Calvary was the culminating, decisive moment in the life of our Blessed Lady. When “the hour” had come, the disciples fled, but Mary remained at the foot of the cross, near her Son. She was prepared for even this. This was no surprise. It had been that way from the start.
 
Mary, who was accustomed to meditation, to treasuring all things in her heart must have thought very often about that old man, Simeon who took the Infant Jesus in his arms when she and Joseph presented him in the Temple.
 
How often she would have recalled his distressing prophecy: “A sword will pierce your heart.” Mary had come to understand what he meant. The unconditional “yes” she made brought her incomparable joys but no immunity from sorrow.
 
The Church speaks of Mary’s seven sorrows or dolors …each symbolized by a sword piercing her heart. They are depicted in the paintings that adorn Our Lady’s Alcove in our church. Consider Mary’s experience, so often shared by St. Joseph:
 

• Anxiety in Bethlehem with no room in the inn
• Suffering the indignity of giving birth in a cave, a stable.
• Receiving the gift of myrrh, a resin used in burial rites
• Becoming a refugee, uprooted, to flee to Egypt to save Jesus from the clutches of Herod
• The panic of three days in search of Jesus who was lost
• The grief of Joseph’s death compounded by the hard love of letting go as Jesus began his public ministry.
• The anxiety of wondering where Jesus was, how he was doing during that ministry. It’s been said, “Jesus had no place to lay his head and Mary had nowhere to rest her heart.”
• The heartache of hearing the terrible accusations made by the persecutors of Christ
• Sharing in her Son’s Via Crucis, seeing him stripped and nailed to the cross—a lance thrust in his side
• Holding his dead body in her arms
• The sorrow of having to bury him in haste

Anyone else would have sunk into a pit of despair and desolation but Mary did not. What did she bring to these moments? Confident faith…trust. Our Lord surely saw this in his mother. Did he not so often say, “Do not be afraid” and “Fear is useless; what is needed is trust?”
 
Today we invoke Mary’s intercession for every member of our parish family and for the fruitfulness of its pastoral work. Today we look to Mary who kept her eyes always on Jesus and who was never absorbed in her pain. Today we honor Mary who neither fought nor fled in the face of sorrow. Today we ask her to accompany us as we too seek to “walk by faith and not by sight.”
 
In the joy of this patronal feast we pray as Mary would have surely prayed:

Dear Lord,
Into your hands,
I place my worries, cares, and troubles,.
Into your wisdom,
I place my path, direction, and my goal.
Into your love,
I place my life.