VIII. The Blessed Virgin's Compassion

{Preached on the Friday in Passion Week.) ^

" Stabat autem juxta crucem Jesu, mater ejus" (St. John xix. 25). " Dixit Jesus Matri suae: Mulier, ecce filius tuus, deinde dicit discipulo: Ecce Mater tua " (St. John xix, 26).

In sacred and profane history alike, last words — that is, the words addressed by the dying to those they leave behind — are held to be of extreme interest, wherever recorded; and when such words are spoken to those whom the one departing has loved and been loved by most upon earth, then they come down to us invested with a double interest and importance.

Now, the two beings whom the Evangelist St. John loved best in the whole world were, first His Divine Master and then that Master's holy Mother, whilst he, in his turn, was his dear Lord's chosen friend; and hence he has taken special care to record for our benefit the last words spoken by Christ to Mary and himself. Well, indeed, were those words worth hand- * That is, the Friday before Palm-Sunday.

ing down to posterity, and a most beautiful subject they form for meditation; for they bring before us a touching picture of Jesus Our Saviour, dying in absolute want — having throughout all His public life had nowhere to lay His head — His last garment having gone to the soldiers who cast lots for it — stripped by His executioners of almost the very semblance of humanity — and yet bestowing something from the midst of His abject poverty: — leaving a precious pledge of His friendship to those He loves before He departs this life. This pledge, moreover, is a double one; for He not only gives His beloved Mother to His friend, but makes over that friend to her. He gives them both away, and in so doing leaves them to each other, so that His legacy benefits both at once: " Behold thy son! " " Behold thy mother! " ^

Now, in Our Lord's last humiliation, all His disciples had for the time being forsaken Him, but this one — his well-beloved John; hence he alone was left to stand for all the faithful at the foot of the Cross. We therefore hold that this most precious legacy left by Christ to the Evangelist was left in his person to every one of us; and that we in like manner were given, in him, to Christ's Mother. She, standing by the Cross and hearing the words: Ecce filius tuus! received through her Son's chosen Apostle that special office of Motherhood to all the adopted children of God — that " fertility of love " — which I have referred

• St. John xix. 26.

to before as having been intentionally conferred upon her in the midst of sorrows.

Mary at the foot of the Cross, then, heroically enduring the keenest anguish that a mother could endure, with the full meaning and consequence of her presence there, is the subject we must consider to-day.

And, first, no one must suppose that Our Saviour's Mother was called to this post of anguish merely that she might have her heart torn by gazing on the horrible spectacle of her Only Son's torments. Providence had higher designs than this on her, when she was brought to the feet of Jesus abandoned. It was the Eternal Father's will that she should be not only offered in sacrifice with that innocent victim, and nailed*to the Cross by the very same nails that pierced His flesh, but that she should share in the accomplishment of the whole mystery wrought by His Death. This is an important truth; and I would here lay before you as clearly as possible the foundations on which it rests.

Observe, to begin with, that three things concurred to make Our Saviour's sacrifice perfect. First, there were the sufferings that crushed and broke His humanity; then there was the humble resignation with which He submitted to His Father's Will; and lastly there was His giving birth to us, in grace, by His own death. To suffer as a Victim — to submit as making a voluntary offering — and to bring forth for God a new people, begotten of His wounds, in suffering: these were the three great acts to be consummated by the Son of God on the Cross. The sufferings concerned His humanity, which was to bear the burden and the punishment of our crimes; the submission concerned His Father Who, having been angered by disobedience, was to be appeased by obedience; whilst the begetting of children concerned us; for, the pleasure of our first and criminal father having caused our death, the sorrow of our second and innocent one must restore us to life.

In every one of these three divisions of Our Lord's great Sacrifice Mary is to have a share. For this she is called close to the Cross, to its very foot, that there the Holy Spirit may impress on her these three sacred marksj or characters, of her Son's passion, and so make of her a true and living image of Christ Crucified. Holy Simeon had prophesied that a sword should pierce her heart, and here she was to receive that sword's sharpest stroke: here also, by her very closeness to the instrument of our Redemption, she was to gain her strongest likeness to her Son: Stabat juxta Crucem.

We will consider the Blessed Virgin's part in each of Christ's sacrificial acts separately, and in the order 1 have named; therefore we must first contemplate her sufferings. To depict the sufferings of even an ordinary mother, truly, is no easy task; and the only possible way of bringing Mary's grief at her Son's passion before one's mind, vividly enough to realise it at all, is to recall the oft-repeated fact that the source of her martyrdom at the sight of His torments was the same as that of her joy in being His Mother — her peculiar and surpassing love for Him. All other martyrs have needed executioners and implements of bodily torture — the fire, the rack, the wheel, the pincers — to impress the mark of Christ on their quivering flesh. For her, none of this horrible apparatus is needed; and whoso imagines that it is can but little understand the nature of her love. One cross is enough for her and her Beloved; she endures the pangs of all His wounds by only gazing on them; her heart makes her torments exquisite, and ranks her at the head of martyrs, without any need for her body to be touched. If any one inclines to doubt this, let him think for a moment of the many mothers, loving their children only in the order of nature, who would confess to feeling those children's pains as if they were their own. Look at that Canaanitish woman in the Gospels at the feet of her Saviour! See her tears — hear her cries — and you will hardly be able to decide whether she herself, or her poor devil-tormented child, is suffering most. " Have mercy on me, O Son of David! my daughter is grievously troubled by a devil." ^ She says not "have pity on my daughter" but " have pity on me ". Why? Because the fact of her child's terrible sufferings, she takes for granted, is enough to make her an object of compassion. She seems to bear her afflicted offspring once more within 1 Matt. XV. 22.

ii6 Devotion to the Blessed Virgin.

her own body, and to be herself tormented with her: so says St. Basil of Seleucia,^ dwelling at length on this story; and the woman here depicted is but a vivid example of what innumerable mothers are capable of feeling through mere love. If, then, the natural maternal tie alone can produce such wonderful sympathy in suffering, surely such a bond as that between Mary and her Divine Child must make her sorrows reach a depth far beyond description. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the intense feelings of the Canaanitish woman, and of all ordinary women typified by her, are but faint reflections of the Blessed Virgin's utterly unselfish anguish at the foot of the Cross.

Again, if we would attempt a right estimate of her grief, we must not only remember that it has its source in her love: we must go farther back, and reflect on the source of that love itself. It is unnecessary to say much on this subject here, as it has been dwelt on in treating of Mary's Nativity and the glories to which she was born; but it will help towards realising her sorrow to keep in mind that her love differs not only in degree, but in kind, from that of other women. We shall do this best by recalling shortly what has already been said of the origin of her motherhood: — namely, that it originated not at all in nature, but purely in grace; and was brought about by her own acts of faith and obedience. Further, we have seen that she was allowed in a mysterious way to share in the 1 Orat. XX. in Chanau.

Paternity of God the Father by being made the human mother of His only-begotten Son. Since, then, Mary's maternity has a supernatural source, her maternal love must have the same; and hence (whilst including all natural affection) is of a far higher kind than the love of mere nature.

The Blessed Virgin, in short, loves the Son at Whose cruel death she is assisting in something the same way — though of course in an infinitely less degree — that the Eternal Father loves the Word Who is His own Image and Substance. Such a love as this, emanating as it does from the very principle of all unity, must necessarily produce a union and a power of inter-communication, between Jesus Christ and His holy Mother, corresponding in some sort to the perfect union subsisting between God the Son and His Divine Father. Now, considering what unspeakably keen sympathy a union of this kind must engender, we are surely justified in believing that Mary's sorrow as a mother was unlike any other that ever has been or ever will be, both in itself and in its effects. The Father and the Son share the same glory in Eternity, the Mother and the Son share the same sufferings in Time: — for the Father and Son one fount of joys, for the Mother and Son one torrent of griefs; for the Father and Son a single throne, for the Mother and Son a single cross. If they pierce His head with thorns, Mary's brow is torn with every point of the sharp crown; if they offer Him gall and vinegar to ii8 Devotion to the Blessed Virgin.

drink, Mary tastes the draught in all its bitterness; if they stretch out His body on a cross, Mary's limbs are racked by the violence. What brings all this about but her love? Surely, in such a sad case, she may cry with St. Augustine, though in another sense than his: Pondus meum amor meus! ^ for how heavily does not her love oppress her mother's heart! It is like a band of iron round her breast, tightening it so as to stifle her very sobs. It is as a leaden weight on her head, all the harder to bear that she cannot relieve her oppressive sadness by tears. It overwhelms her whole body with a crushing languor, till her limbs nearly fail her altogether. But the heaviest part of all her trouble is that she knows it is adding to Christ's trouble, and that she is constrained against her will to grieve Him by the sight of her own grief, to which she knows He is pitifully alive. Mother and Son see their respective sufferings reflected as in two mirrors, while they gaze each on the other, and have their pains indefinitely multiplied by this mutual reciprocity of feeling. The Blessed Virgin's love momentarily increases her anguish, because it is powerless either to console Jesus or to lessen His torments — but on the contrary is compelled to be the means of redoubling them; for it is the intimate knowledge of His Mother's intense love that makes her Son so keenly realise the intensity of her grief, and thus suffer more from the reaction on Himself.,

^ Con/., lib. xiii., cap. ix., torn, i., col. 228.

Still, however true and high reasons we may find for the depth of Mary's sorrows at the foot of the Cross, they must always remain really incomprehensible to us. It is better, in face of them, rather to do our best to imitate and sympathise than to try to understand what we cannot. With the week that we are about to enter upon before us, the sight of Christ's mother racked with His torments, and absolutely dead to everything but Him, should move us at least to desire such compassion for our Redeemer's sufferings as will make us indifferent to worldly pleasures. Well for us if we can go further, and learn that there is no lot so really blessed as that of being allowed a share in the Cross of Jesus, and receiving the gift of incessant mourning for His sufferings and our sins. If we doubt our own courage for accepting such a lot we may get help by meditating on the next point we have to consider: namely, Mary's part in the perfect submission and voluntariness of Christ's Sacrifice, which is shown by her manner of enduring her share in His sufferings.

Now, great afflictions may be nobly overcome in three different ways. First, by actually banishing all mourning or sadness about them, and losing even the sense of grief; secondly, by bearing them with resolute patience, though the soul be troubled by them never so sorely; thirdly, by feeling the sorrow itself with the greatest keenness, and yet not feeling any trouble or disturbance about it. In the first of these states.

all feeling of sorrow has passed, and we enjoy perfect repose: " I am filled with comfort. I exceedingly abound with joy in our tribulation," ^ says St. Paul: that is, a holy and even superabundant joy seems to have banished all sense of trouble. In the second state, we fight against our affliction with patience; but the struggle is so severe that, though the soul be victorious, it cannot possibly be peaceful. " Indeed," Tertullian declares, " the very opposite is the case: — the soul troubles and disturbs itself by its very effort to be calm; and, though not crushed down by weakness, is shaken by its own resistance and upset by force of its own firmness." ^ But in the third state — which can be reached only by a great miracle — God bestows such great strength against suffering that its full violence can be borne without the disturbance of our peace. Thus, in the first of these three states tranquillity banishes suffering; in the second, suffering prevents tranquillity; whilst the third unites the two, and joins extreme suffering to supreme tranquillity of soul.

Holy Scripture frequently compares grief to a troubled sea: — " The waters are come in even to my soul "; ^ " my calamities... have overwhelmed me with their paths as with waves; " ^ for instance: — and Almighty God's three ways of overcoming our grief may be actually illustrated from three different means

^ 2 Cor. vii. 4. 2 Tertull., de Anitna, n. 10.

^ Ps. Ixviii. I. * Job xxx. 12.

used by Our Lord to subdue the waters. At one time we see Him simply command the winds and waves, and then there comes, says the EvangeHst, " a great calm "} Even so God, when He chooses, calms a soul tossed about with troubles by simply sending forth His Holy Spirit upon that soul and bidding its tempests to cease: " our flesh had no rest... but God, Who comforts the humble, comforted us "!^ Here is God calming the waves of the soul and restoring her lost serenity.

On another occasion Christ gives the waters their will, and lets the waves rise with furious vehemence, so that the vessel — driven violently before them — is threatened with instant shipwreck; while Peter, struggling through the waters, expects to be buried in their depths. Nevertheless, Our Lord guides the ship and bears up the trembling Apostle with His own hands.^ Thus a soul, struggling with very violent grief, feels as if she must be overwhelmed and swallowed up by it: " we were pressed out of measure above our strength ": ^ but Christ gives the poor soul such firm support that the tempest of sorrow, while shaking her to her very foundations, cannot lay her low. This is the second state above referred to. Now we come to the last, noblest, and most glorious way whereby Jesus mastered the waters. Again He gives full rein to the storm, and allows the winds to

^ Matt. viii. 26. 2 2 Cor. vii. 5, 6.

^ Matt. xiv. 24-32. * 2 Cor. i. 8.

lash the waves into fury and make them rise to a fearful height. Then, treading the angry billows under foot, He walks firmly and confidently over them as if glorying in His power to brave the ungovernable element even in its fiercest rage.^ In like manner does God let suffering loose upon us that it may act with its fullest force, so that we " should not trust in ourselves but in God Who raiseth the dead ".^ Then the faithful soul, strong and confident amidst this spiritual tumult, lets the waves of trouble surge harmless around her, and walks over them with so calm and even a step that they are compelled, against their very nature, to serve for her support. Here we have the third and highest supernatural way of overcoming afflictions, and the one in which Jesus Christ Himself overcomes His.

The Blessed Virgin, watching Our Saviour die, is in this third state of soul. The flood of grief rises high above her head — the storm-driven waves of sorrow dash against her heart — a very gulf of misery seems to open in the waters beneath her feet and threaten her destruction — but her constancy remains unshaken. Not for a moment does she wish for any abatement of the sufferings that make her like unto her Son, or for any comfort to help her in bearing them. She dreams not of asking the Eternal Father to lessen her anguish by one single throb, when she beholds Him pouring out the full vials of His wrath

1 John vi. 17-21. ^ 2 Cor. i. 9.

on the head of His Only-begotten till Jesus Himself must perforce call aloud that His Father has forsaken Him. However terrible her griefs, nothing could grieve her so much as to receive treatment less severe than His, and not to feel all the pangs of Her Beloved. She wills that her sorrows should reach their very utmost possible limit in union with His, and that she should be able to say with Him, " all thy heights and thy billows have passed over me " } Let the storm of grief rage as it will, the Holy Spirit will never allow His own temple to be shaken, for He has laid "the foundations thereof in the holy mountains," ^ and will keep it firm under every shock. The higher region of Mary's soul, in which her Heavenly Spouse has made His dwelling-place, will keep its serenity undisturbed amid the tempest.

St. John Chrysostom, commenting on to-day's Gospel, calls our attention to one particular aspect of Christ about to yield up His soul on the Cross, which will clearly show the reason of His holy Mother's attitude at the foot of that Cross if we meditate on it here. It is the marvellous calmness and self-possession of Jesus in His agony that fills this great Saint with admiring awe. On the eve of His death, the preacher bids us observe, Our Lord sweats, trembles and shudders at the terrible vision of His torture that rises before Him; but when His heavy troubles have actually come upon Him He

^ Ps. xli. 8. "^ Ps. Ixxxvi. i.

seems to be another man, to whom torments are indifferent. He talks quietly to the happy thief; He looks upon and recognises all those of His own people who are at the foot of the Cross, speaks to them, and comforts them; and at last — seeing that He has accomplished all He had to do, and carried out the Will of His Father in every particular — He gives up His Soul to Him in such a peaceful, free and deliberate manner that there can be no doubt of its being His own act. It is just as He had said: — " No man taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of Myself".!

The holy doctor then goes on to ask the meaning of this: how it was that the fear of suffering oppressed Him so terribly, when the suffering itself hardly seems to touch Him? And he answers that the reason probably is that the scheme of our redemption was necessarily a work of strength and weakness combined. Christ wished to show by His fears that, like unto us, He felt trouble keenly; whilst by His firmness He had to prove that He could perfectly master His feelings and make them yield to His Fathers Will. Such is the reason of our Redeemer's attitude at this supreme moment given by St. John Chrysostom; and doubtless it is a solid one. Yet other reasons too may be found; and I venture to suggest one in connection with the present subject which seems of even a higher kind, and to go nearer to the heart of the mystery. 1 St. John X. i8.

I think we may believe that one most probable cause of Our Lord's peace on Calvary, when the Mount of Olives had witnessed His agony, was the fact that the Cross on Mount Calvary found Him in the very act of His Sacrifice, and there is no action in the world that should be performed in so calm a spirit as this one. Those who let their thoughts wander here and there without restraint, according as curiosity or inclination suggest, while present at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, cannot have the least idea of what Sacrifice means.

Sacrifice is an act by which we offer our homage to God; and who does not know that any act of respect demands a quiet and collected demeanour? It is the very nature of respect to require this. God sees into the depth of all hearts, and holds us to be wanting in due respect for His majesty when our souls are uncontrolled and distracted in His presence. How important, then, that the High priest who actually offers the sacrifice should do so with a perfectly calm mind! The oil with which Aaron is anointed — that symbol of peace poured so abundantly over his head — is in fact intended to warn him of the peace that he should attain to in his own mind and heart by banishing every* distracting thought and feeling. Hence it was, we cannot doubt, that Our Divine Pontiff Jesus Christ showed Himself so perfectly calm in His death-agony. If He had appeared troubled on Mount Olivet, it was, says St. Augustine, a voluntary anguish that He suffered; for only by his own will could it affect Him; and for this reason: — He was then, in His own eyes, simply the victim, and as a victim He willed to behave. Therefore He adopted — if we may be allowed to say so — the very actions and posture of a victim which was being dragged, terrified and shuddering, to the altar. But on the Cross it is quite otherwise. He it now at the altar, as priest; and from the moment that His innocent hands have been raised to present Himself as our victim to the Wrath of Heaven, He is exercising His priestly function; and He will allow no more fear to be seen lest it should imply any repugnance for the sacrifice. His Divine Will, to which all His emotions are subject, prevents the peace of His Soul from being troubled and represses all outward sign of anguish; and thus we are made to understand that our most merciful High-Priest offers Himself for us quite freely and from pure love of our salvation. According to St. Augustine, again, " He dies as gently as we might go to sleep "}

Now, Mary is appointed to share in this great sacrifice, and to offer up her own Son; and this is why she, as well as He, gathers up her full strength and stands composed and upright beneath the Cross. This is why, despite all her sufferings, she gives Him with her whole heart to the Eternal Father to be the victim of His vengeance. We must remember, too, that Christ's Mother did not offer up her Son on this one ^ Tract, cxix,, n. 6, occasion only: she had been offering Him unceasingly from the moment when Holy Simeon had, by God's command, foretold to her the strange contradictions of which he was to be the object, and which were to " pierce her heart with a sword ". ^ She had not known what the contradictions were to be, nor to what special manner of persecution her beloved Son was to be subject; but she had always had to endure the double torment of knowing that He mu^t suffer, and of being in uncertainty as to how: so that she herself, as Jesus grew up under her eyes, suffered His passion over and over again, in anticipation that was all the more terrible from being vague. But through it all she never slackened in her perfect submission to the Will of God; and she showed this resignation by the double act of accepting the uncertainty and of being ready to offer the Child in whatever way it should please His Father when the time and manner should be disclosed. Ever since He had lain a little infant in her arms she had looked upon Him as a Victim; and now that she sees the death-blow inflicted on the Cross she is but completing the sacrifice that she had begun to take part in long ago. Just as Our Saviour Himself takes care to show that He makes His Sacrifice voluntarily, so she would rather have her very heart torn out than withhold for a moment her full consent to His passion and death.

But she is to receive more than she has offered

1 Luke ii. 34, 35.

up; for God will restore that well-beloved Son to her arms, and meantime He gives her for children all His Christian people. He does this, as we have seen, through the faithful Apostle who has himself described the wondrous mystery in the Apocalypse: — " And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars: and being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered "} St. Augustine declares that this woman is the Blessed Virgin, ^ and there are many convincing proofs to be given for the statement. But how can the painful child-birth here named be explained, when it is the belief of the Church that Mary was exempt from the common curse of mothers, and brought forth her Son without suffering just as she conceived Him without concupiscence? These assertions seem contradictory, but are in fact not so; for the. bringing forth of Jesus Christ and of the Faithful are two separate births, and this passage of Scripture is interpreted of the latter. Mary brought forth the Innocent One painlessly; but she is to become the Mother of sinners amidst grief and tears, the natural effect of the high price she has to pay for her universal maternity. This price is no less than her only Son, whom she must see die before she can bring forth God's adopted children, and of whom it is

' Apoc. xii. I.

^ Serm. iv., de Simp, ad Catec, cap. i., torn, 'u, col, 575, therefore truly said that she bore them in pain and sorrow. And in this painfully-acquired second motherhood she is again mysteriously sharing the characteristics of the Eternal Father's own Paternity; for has He not given up His Son by nature, and delivered Him to death, that He might make man into His Son by adoption and co-heir of His Only Begotten? By the same love with which He delivers up, forsakes, and sacrifices His Divine Son He adopts, quickens, and regenerates us: almost as though He wished to justify His adoption of us by in some sense losing His rightful Heir to make room for us. We can never sufficiently wonder at, or be grateful enough for, love such as this.

If Mary, then, is to take her part in fulfilling the third condition of Christ's perfect sacrifice, whereby He begets a new and regenerate family of children for His Divine Father hy the Cross, the reason is clear for her being appointed Mother of the Faithful at the foot of that Cross and nowhere else. She is the Eve of the New Covenant, as we have seen; and in that capacity must make satisfaction for the sin of our first mother just as the Second Adam makes it for that of our first father. She is destined to do this by uniting her will to the Eternal Father's Will, and making with Him the sacrifice of the Son common to both. And how is the sacrifice carried out? By means of a few words spoken by Jesus from His bed of death that must have pierced her heart with a stab sharper than any she had felt in her whole life before. What does she hear Him say as He hangs dying before her eyes? What is His last farewell? " Woman, behold thy son" He says. We have but to think for a moment over these words to realise that all the pangs Mary ever suffered must have been concentrated in them — for what an exchange do they imply! John, in whom she was to behold all of us, could become her child only at the cost of Christ; a mere man must henceforth take the place, for the rest of her earthly life, of God Himself; and, whatever comfort St. John may be to her afterwards, the very thought of the contrast at the moment brings her terrible loss more vividly before her than anything else could have done. In short, the death-warrant of Mary's divine maternity seems to be conveyed in the very same words that bring to pass her human motherhood; and thus her heart is opened wide to admit us by a piercing sword indeed.

Holy Scripture as well as natural affection tells us " not to forget the groanings of our Mother "} Let no Christian who sees His mother Mary, when Jesus has given up the Ghost, standing desolate beneath the Cross for His sake, forget that she helped to bring Him forth to grace in pain and anguish; and let him further remember that the sharpest sting of all her sorrows lay in the fear that so many of the dearly-bought race would make her Son's death of no avail

^ Ecclesiasticus vii. 29.

by rejecting, of their own free will, the grace it won for them. Keeping this thought in mind, it will surely not be difficult, for any of us who may be crucifying Christ over again by mortal sin, to use this solemn time of His passion for " bringing forth fruits worthy of penance," and so consoling and rejoicing that torn and wounded Mother's Heart by our own loving tears of sorrow.