STABAT MATER Dear Friends: I am posting this today, Sunday, Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, in honor of tomorrows Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, just in case time turns to be at a premium tomorrow, Monday. Stabat mater dolorosa iuxta crucem lacrimosa dum pendebat filius cuius animam gementem contristatam et dolentem pertransitivit gladius Jacopone da Todi, OFM, ca. 1228/30-1306)s Today’s feast, Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, is (surprisingly for some) a particularly fecund source of meditation and theological reflection on the unique, blessed, risky, passionate defining center of human life and history, the Paschal Mystery of Christ The entire history of Christian theology and mysticism, and more recently, the Constitution “Lumen Gentium,” the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church promulgated by the Second Vatican Counci (#52-69)l, has always been quite lucid and emphatic on the fact that whatever we can, and should say, about Mary, we say in the hermeneutic key of her Son. Every single Marian doctrine or dogma is a Christological doctrine and dogma as well – in fact, as Karl Rahner has reminded us, should we deny Mary the title Mother of God, just to mention the most glaring example, the entire edifice of Christology would crumble in the dust. On the other hand from the dogmatic/doctrinal spectrum, the sufferings of Mary cannot be dismissed as the province of souls tired and weary by the recitation of endless devotions and novenas, to which they add one more, the prayers of the Feast of the Sorrows of Mary. This would be not only spiritually, but theologically disastrous. There is a deep voice, clamoring from the bowels of fundamental theological anthropology, that beckons us to pause and reflect on what the sufferings of Mary really mean. Let us consider a few points: FIRST: There is the vulnerable, dangerous YES uttered by Mary, not only at the beginning, as the Gospel of Luke tells us in that ever ancient, ever new, forever beautiful and magnificent story of the Annunciation (Lk 1: 26-38). Mary’s YES bears a lifetime echo, thundering across the years, from that perilous and insane encounter with Gabriel, to the flight into an alien land Mtt 2: 13-15: (Mary, the “alien” par excellence), to the convulsion of a mother’s heart whose son has been lost in the immense crowd attending the High Feasts in Jerusalem, to her intervention, the brief and discreet, but abidingly messianic intercession for the embarrassed family which had run out of wine at the wedding (wine, as Raymond Collins has reminded us, it’s a symbol of the messianic times, cf. Hos. 14: 8; Joel 2: 24), to the silent, probably not entirely lucid reason why she must keep a distance from the public ministry of her Son, . . . to that yellow-gray afternoon of inexplicable gloom, where the baby of Bethlehem, now about 34-36 years old, hangs from the cross of ignominy, mocked, ridiculed, tortured, despised by his executioners (Jn 19: 25-27) . . . BUT, SECOND, we know, from contemporary accounts and scholarly research (Raymond Brown, Martin Hengel), that the female relatives or friends of crucified prisoners were the easy target of lurid, prurient, debasing jokes and taunts from the soldiers – she participated in her Son’s humiliation, she was bearing with Him, as a willing co-sufferer, the denigration and horror lavished on all the crucified ones of human history, past and present: all the innocent children starved to death today, to the tune of 34,700 each day, those denied a chance to enter human history by assassination in their mothers’ wombs, the migrants who run into walls of racist, xenophobic protestors at the border . . . the marginalized and excluded of society, those consigned to the margins as unproductive, those best-forgotten for their physical or mental deformities or illness – we don’t like ugliness, sickness, unproductivity, we shy away from those whose physical or mental scars, from the “leftovers” of society . . . and when we engage in that ultimate form of racist, xenophobic, hedonist, power- and money seeking debauchery, we shy away from, we reject and despise, we consign to the periphery Mary, the Mother of Sorrows. THIRD: Some (certainly not all!) of our wealthy parishes seemingly do not like them, either, or to be fair, those wealthy parishes that I am acquainted with in this area. Their Sunday masses look more like fashion shows, the men in their fancy suits or stylish summer wear, the women with their best dresses, some of them with hats borrowed from a John Wayne movie . . . they don’t like Mary, the humble, useless, alien foreigner, the plain-looking townswoman, the marginalized Jewish woman whom God had chosen as the privileged crucible where the most insane and incredible event in human history happened, the Incarnation of the eternal Son of God, Mary, the Mother of God, she who was redeemed in her conception as the living anticipation of God’s redeeming power . . . . FOURTH: I did a pilgrimage of research and prayer to Rome 4 years ago: I was there from Jan. 31 to March 2, 2010m, 31 days. I caught, as one of my dear faculty friends told me, “the Roman bug,” and, he added, “there is no cure for that,” nor do I wish to be cured. I love Rome. I walked all over the city, never took a bus or taxi, and allowed myself to be embraced by the grace that is Rome – but, the place I visited the most frequently was St. Peter’s Basilica, 6 times, not just for the obvious reasons of its meaning and beauty, but mainly because I enjoyed the fascination of praying endlessly before Michelangelo’s Pieta, that magnificent witness to the most unbearable sorrow of human history. The wonder of it: finished in 1498, when Michealangelo was only 22 years old, the suffering Virgin Mother, beholding her dead Son in her lap grasped my heart andsoul and refused to let go . . . I prayed and pondered, oblivious to the dozens (hundreds?) of tourists all around me (90% of them Japanese) taking photos, flashing hurting my eyes with hypnotic frequency. FIFTH: It was in my second visit, that I realized that I was looking at a representation of a woman whose heart was bigger than all the pain of the world, at Mary of Nazareth, whose heart had also been broken by the ignominy of the Cross, and realized that the heartbreaks of the whole world, past and present, had been assumed by her into her own . . . Mary, the alien par excellence in her own land, the small-town, plainly-dressed woman, with cracked hands from doing the wash, with her black or brown hair dripping sweat (how I despise those Scandinavian or Northern German images of a blond Mary, read to debut as Tom Cruise’s love interest in next winters’s blockbuster – forgive the blasphemy, or don’t, but I have no apologies, it is sadly true!) . I pondered, as I sat in front of La Pieta’s, trying to pretend those Japanese shutter bugs were not there (all behaving quite respectfully, I hasten to add), sheltered from the still frigid Roman winter (it snowed in Rome during my fourth visit to St. Peter’s), as I still do, and particularly today, on the agony, the suffering, the incomprehensible loneliness of migrants, of the homeless, the starving , the poor, the “leftovers” . . . and my own (quite small, by comparison), past and present heartbreaks , and those lurking in my immediate future, not difficult to foresee, and waiting for me around the corner . . . but, loving Mary of Nazareth as I do, as imperfectly and sometimes selfishly, but sincerely, should I care, should I be worried, should I be ridden from head to toe by anxiety? SIXTH: The answer to the preceding is, of course, no – BUT the immediate thought that comes rushing to mind is that, within my own broken finitude, aware as I am of my sinfulness, I know I will, again, at the crossroads of fear and uncertainty, to allow anxiety, contradictions, pain to invade my soul . . . but, no matter, today, following St. Bernard’s immortally beautiful and inexhaustibly wise advice, I look to Mary, I call on Mary, the Mother of Sorrows, Mary, the alien, Mary, the forgotten one, the despised one, and I feel consoled, for I am peacefully, safely, tenderly resting upon my Mother’s lap. Oremus pro invicem.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 23:50:05 +0000
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