Our Lady of Sorrows: reflection on the feast
Indonesia, Lolín Menéndez rscj
“Standing by the cross of Jesus.” These words from today’s gospel give us a powerful image of Mary as a faithful servant of Yahweh willing to stay with Jesus to the end. In fact, the gospel author observed that other women also stayed with Jesus: “his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (Jn19:25).
In an article called "The Women Who Stayed," Rosemary Haughton perceives that the women around Jesus, who had been liberated by him and who provided for his bodily needs, stayed by him during and after his passion and death with a constancy that endured beyond the doubts, the fears, and the arguments:
Their love was focused on his human presence, the physical reality of his being, and the teaching they heard and treasured was known in its relation to that very personal relationship which they had with him.#1
This constancy drew them to stay with him at the foot of the cross. It also drew them to tend his dead body, even after his burial, since "it was unthinkable to stay away" ("WWS" 39). They were drawn to stay with him as long as possible.
Have you ever stayed with a relative, friend, or stranger during a hard time – a woman whose husband has just left her, a young man who has just learned he has leukemia, a poor person who has just lost his job? Have you ever just let this person talk and cry in your presence, feeling that person’s anguish, but knowing that you are powerless to help? When hard things happen to people, Rabbi Harold Kushner urges us to say simply “I am sorry” and hold that person’s hand, not trying to offer advice, fix the situation, or solve the problem. This is difficult to do.
Maybe many of you have been very hurt. A Catholic couple whose son, a victim of a priest’s pedophilia, committed suicide, choose to stay in the church and go to daily eucharist. A woman stayed for years with her partner, convicted of the second-degree murder of their son, visiting him in prison until he was acquitted and they got married. A father ran the twenty-six mile marathon, pushing the wheelchair of his paralyzed son in front of him, and ended in the top quarter. A teacher offered to quit teaching in order to tutor a brain-damaged child who could not read and whose parents had been told that he would be a vegetable. Staying in these instances means loving fidelity. There are situations of codependency or abuse that we should leave.#2
In the recent movie The Cinderella Man, Renée Zellweger plays the part of the wife of a boxer played by Russell Crowe. She stays with him when he wins and when he loses. Before the last fight with a boxer known to stay in the ring unto death, she is tempted not to support her husband in what seems to her to be a reckless venture, but the invitation remains for her to convey to him the constancy of her love. Today’s gospel invites us to ponder the constancy of Mary’s love and of our own.
Annice Callahan rscj
Province of the United States
University of San Diego
September 15, 2205
- Rosemary Haughton, "The Women Who Stayed,” Sign, 61 (April 1983), 36-41, esp. 38.
- I am indebted to Terri Monroe, RSCJ for the material in this paragraph, conversation, Casa Maria, USD, 9/04/05. She referred me to Dateline a few weeks ago, and to Tyler Currie, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Read,” Reader’s Digest (September 2005): 72A-F.
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