Virgo Potens

Madonna della Pietà ~ Our Lady of Piety (1498-1499) ~ Michelangelo Buonarroti Month of the The Seven Dolors of Mary / The Sorrowful Mother ~ September 24th

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors (continued) The augmentation of her merits is another reason of her dolors; and nowhere has the force of merit such velocity as in suffering. Her being the Mother of God will not raise her high in heaven, apart from the sanctifying grace preceding and following the dignity of the Divine Maternity. The greatness of her dignity is an argument with us for the greatness of her grace, because in the purposes of God the two things are inseparable; and thus the dignity which we see is an index to us of the grace which we do not see. Her exaltation must depend upon her merits, and her merits must be acquired by lifelong suffering. Oh, who shall tell the crowds of nameless raptures this day in heaven, and within her soul, in which our Blessed Mother recognises the distinct rewards of each separate suffering, the special crown of each supernatural act? And in all these, discerning it even through the amazing excess of the recompense, she beholds a congruity, a suitableness, to the sorrows rewarded, nay, even a sort of natural growth of them, though in a supernatural way. For grace is not a different thing from glory. It is only glory in exile, while glory is but grace at home. Grace is the solid treasure; glory is only its exultation and success. So that huge Compassion of Mary's has come to be glory by the ordinary and lawful processes of the kingdom of heaven. Sixty-three years of ecstatic joys would never, under the present dispensation of things, have raised that Maternal Throne in such extraordinary vicinity to God. The queen of heaven must of necessity be trained as a queen, that she might queen it the more lawfully and the more supremely when the day of her accession came. The buoyancy of the Assumption was due to the bitterness of the Compassion. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) II.—Why God permitted Our Lady's Dolors But may we now ask why God permitted these dolors of Mary? Is it reverent to institute such an inquiry? All things are reverent which are done in love. We do not inquire because we are in doubt, or as if we were calling God to account, or as though we had a right to know; but we inquire in order that we may gain fresh knowledge to mint into fresh love. Perhaps there is no one work of God of which we are capable of knowing all the reasons, or of understanding them if He vouchsafed to tell them. Things, which God does, come out of infinite depths. But we find that the more we know the more we love, and therefore we inquire into many things, where love alone gives us the right of questioning, and the courage also. Why did God permit the dolors of His Mother, whom he loved so unspeakably, who was sinless and had nothing in herself to expiate by penance, and whose tears were in no way needful to the Precious Blood which was of its sole self the redemption of the world? Such reasons as we see on the surface of the matter are these. It was because of His love for her. What can love give, which is better than self? But, with Him, self was suffering. Even in the matter of earthly greatness high destinies are destinies of glorious pain and more than common trial. And how human and earthly, even when most heavenly, is all in the Three-and-Thirty Years! The same law which lies round Him must also lie round her. She could not have a more passionate wish than this in her tranquil soul. But the law is a law of suffering, of sacrifice, of expiation, of ignominy, of abjection almost touching on annihilation. She would have been a mere instrument rather than a Mother had she been disjoined from all this, had she lain like a quiet low-lying landscape with the sun on it, away from the storm-enveloped glory of those heights of Calvary, more terrible by far than the ledges of ancient Sinai. Is it not even now, even to those far off from Him compared with the nearness of His Mother, is it not the fashion of His love to show itself in crosses? He left heaven because pain was such a paradise for Him, and it was an exclusively terrestrial paradise; and if He loved it so, He may well expect that those who love Him shall love it also. Great graces are the mountain-chains thrown up by the subterranean heavings of pain. Martyrdoms have crowns belonging to them of right. Was Mary to be uncrowned? Would not the excess of His love for her be likewise an excess of suffering? But why waste many words, when it is enough to appeal to our own Christian instincts? What would an unsuffering Mary be like? The idea implies nothing less than the disappearance of the Madonna from the Church. An impassible Incarnation would have brought in its train an unsuffering Mother; but the passible Babe of Bethlehem has swathed His Mother in the same bands of suffering which compass Himself. The keenness of her martyrdom is the perfection of His filial piety. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) But these sorrows of hers had some sort of share in the redemption of the world; and this gives them a peculiar immensity of their own. This, however, is a matter to be examined hereafter, and at length. It is sufficient then to say now that by the ordinance of God, Mary was mixed up with the Passion, that her dolors were added to our Lord's sufferings, not without a purpose, but, as is the case with all divine things, with a most real and mysterious purpose, and that as the Mother and the Son can in no wise be separated at any other point in the Thirty-Three Years, least of all can they be separated on Calvary, where God has joined them so markedly, and almost unexpectedly. Of the diversified romance and artistic beauty of Mary’s dolors we need not speak. Such things belong of right to all divine works. Her compassion was part of the great epic of creation, a pathos and a plaintiveness not to be disjoined from the sublimities and terrors and sacred panics of the Passion of the Incarnate Word. But it is not touching poetry of which we are in search. Rather it is plain piety, and a downright increase of love of Mary, and of devotion to her Son. If there be one department of practical religion from which we could desire that a sentence of perpetual banishment were passed upon mere sentiment and feeling, it would be the department of Mary. Mary is a great reality of God, and sentiment is prone to rob us of our reality by turning substance into fancy, solidity into prettiness, and so overclothing the outside that we almost come to doubt whether there be an inside at all. Let then the exceeding beauty of Mary's martyrdom find us out, if it will, and catch us up into the air, and surprise us into sweet tears, and calm the trouble of our sympathies; but do not let us seek it, or go out of our doctrinal, devotional way for it. Yet if artistic things can in any way increase our genuine love of God, let even them be welcome. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) Our Lady's dolors also went in their reality beyond the measure of most human realities, and this both in reason and sense. In our sorrows there is generally a great deal of exaggeration. We fancy almost as much more as we have really to bear. If our suffering comes from others, we dress it up in circumstances of unkindness, which never had any existence. We impute motives, which never crossed the mind to which we impute them. We throw a strong, unequal, and unfair light on little trivial occurrences, which are probably altogether disconnected from the matter. Or if it is some loss we are undergoing, we picture consequences far beyond the sober truth, and bearing about as much proportion to the real inconveniences implied in our loss, as a boy with a lantern bears to the prodigious tall shadows he is all the while unconsciously casting on the opposite wall. The combined weakness and activity of our imaginations envelop our sorrow in a cloud of unreality, which is still further increased by a kind of foolish wilfulness, leading us to refuse comfort, and turn a deaf ear to reason, to give way to culpable indolence and brooding, and to interrupt the continuity of our ordinary duties and responsibilities. Now in all this wilfulness and weakness there is a sort of pleasure, which is a great condescension to endurance. But with our Blessed Lady all was thoroughly true. Her sorrows went up into regions of sublimity, of which we can form only the vaguest conceptions. They went down into profound depths of the soul, which we cannot explore because they have no parallel in ourselves. They were heightened by the unappreciable perfection of her nature, by the exuberant abundance of her grace, by the exceeding beauty of Jesus, and above all by His Divinity. Each of these enhancements of her griefs carries them out of sight of our limited capacities. But to her, in the midst of the most serene self-collection, each was perfectly real, thoroughly comprehended in all its bearings, and heroically embraced with full intelligence of all that was either actual or involved in it. Her physical nature, free from all the ruin of disease, exempt from the disorganization consequent on sin, was full of the keenest vitality, of the most delicate susceptibilities, of the most tender and lively sensitiveness, and endowed with a most fine and amazing capability of suffering. Hence there was nothing, either in reason or sense, to deaden a single blow. Use did not make her sorrows more tolerable. Continuity did not confuse their distinctness. Not one of them was local; they were felt all through, with a swift circulation and a fiery sharpness which exempted no part of her body or soul from its piercing anguish, nor gave so much as a transient dispensation to this or that particular faculty. Tranquil herself with that unutterable tranquility of hers, there was no repose in her sorrows. They never left her. They never slept. They gave her no truce. Day and night was their uproar heard round the walls of the city of her soul. Day and night their flaming shafts fell in showers all over her most sacred shrines. There was not one, a jot of whose malice was lost upon her. She missed none of the bitterness. She knew their full value, and had none of those surprises which sometimes force us suddenly across great trials we hardly know how. There was no succession in them, because they all stuck in her, like Sebastian's arrows, and their poisoned barbs were all rankling there at once. It is terrific, this reality of Mary's sorrows. It is a feature of them which must not be forgotten when we cease to speak of it, else we shall understand but very imperfectly what has yet to follow. Truly this is an immense reality, such as could not be found anywhere out of Jesus and Mary, another participation in the depths of the Passion. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Our Lady of la Salette, Reconciler of sinners, pray without ceasing for us who have recourse to thee. An indulgence of 300 days (S. P. Ap., Nov. 7, 1927, and Dec. 12, 1933). September 19th ~ The FEAST of OUR LADY of la SALETTE Prayer to Our Lady of la Salette Remember, our Lady of la Salette, true Mother of Sorrows, the tears which thou didst shed for me on Calvary; be mindful also of the unceasing care which thou dost exercise to screen me from the Justice of God, and consider whether thou canst now abandon thy child, for whom thou hast done so much. Inspired by this consoling thought, I come to cast myself at thy feet, in spite of my infidelity and ingratitude. Reject not my prayer, O Virgin of reconciliation, convert me, obtain for me the grace to love Jesus Christ above all things and to console thee too by living a holy life, in order that one day I may be able to see thee in Heaven. Amen An indulgence of 500 days (S. P. Ap., Nov. 7, 1927, and Dec. 12, 1933). (The Raccolta, 1957)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) There was also another very true sense in which the sorrows of Mary were immense, in that they were beyond the power of human endurance. They went beyond the measure of the natural strength of life. It is the unanimous verdict of the devout writers on our Blessed Lady, supported by the revelations of the saints, and indeed founded upon those revelations, that she was miraculously kept alive under the pressure of her intolerable sufferings. In this, as in so many other things, she participated in the gifts of our Blessed Lord during His Passion. But this is true of our Lady, not only during the horrors of Calvary, but throughout her whole life. Her prevision of all her sorrows, at least from the moment of St. Simeon's prophecy, was so vivid and real, that, without a peculiar succor from the omnipotence of God, it must have separated her soul and body. She could not have lived under so dense a shadow. She could not have breathed in so thick a darkness. She must have been suffocated in the deep waters in which her soul was continually sinking. It was impossible in so perfect a creature that her reason should be perturbed. It was impossible that peace should ever be dislodged from a heart in such transcendently close union with God. But her beautiful life might have been, nay, would have been, extinguished by excess of sorrow, unless God had worked a perpetual miracle to hinder this effect, just as through her whole life she was always on the point of dying from excess of love, and when His appointed moment came, and He withdrew His extraordinary succor, she did in fact die of simple love. What then must that sorrow have been, which required a standing miracle not to force body and soul asunder; and this, too, in a sinless soul, where remorse could never come, where doubt never harassed the judgment, unless it were once during the Three Days' Loss, and where perpetual peace reigned amid the quietness and subordination of all the passions? ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) Their multitude is equally beyond our powers of measurement. Every look at Jesus drove the swords into her soul. Every sound of His dear voice, while it lifted her far up on the wings of maternal transport, brought with it its own bitterness, which pierced all the deeper and the keener for the joy that went along with it. Every action of His came to her with a multitude of pains, in which past and future blended in one terrible prevision which was always actual to her blessed soul. Every supernatural act which rose up within her heart, and such acts were forever rising there, was a new dolor; for either it taught her something new of Jesus, or it was a response to some fresh love of His, or it was a growth of new love in her, or it drew her into closer union with Him, or it illuminated her mind, or it ravished her affections, or it intensified her worship; and in all these things the dearer and the more precious our blessed Lord became to her, the more unutterable were the heart-rending woes of the cruel and ignominious Passion. Thus, full as her life was of great events, rapidly succeeding each other, the multitude of her sorrows was being swollen every hour by the mere hidden life of grace in her heart. They came together like the streams of people in a huge city, swelling the crowd from every side, and swaying it to and fro. They were independent of external events, whose necessary sequence, with the time and room they occupy, keeps the intolerable fulness of human life within limits. It was more like a perpetual creation. They created themselves, only it was not out of nothing: it was out of her own exceeding holiness, and still more out of the exceeding beauty of her Son. If the number of her woes is beyond our power of counting, what must their pressure have been, when they concentrated themselves as one weight upon one point of her affections, and then ever and anon distractedly dispersed themselves all over her soul with an amazing universality of suffering, which it is not easy to picture to ourselves? We need not fear for her. She who was as tranquil as though she had been divine, in the moment of the Incarnation, can forfeit her peace for nothing else: but, oh, how bitter must her peace have been! In pace amaritudo mea amarissima! ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

September 17th ~ FEAST of St. HILDEGARD of BINGEN (Doctor of the Church) (1098 - 1179) The Holy Spirit animates all, moves all, roots all, forgives all, cleanses all, erases all our past mistakes, and then puts medicine on our wounds. We praise this Spirit of incandescence for awakening and reawakening all creation. ~ St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179) Butcher, Carmen Acevedo, Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader, Paraclete Press, 2007.

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) Neither can we doubt that her sorrows were proportioned to her enlightenment. Knowledge always puts an edge on grief. Sensibility gives it additional acuteness. For the most part, when we suffer we hardly know half our actual misfortune, because we hardly understand more than half of it. Neither are we generally in full possession of ourselves. Some part of us is deadened and dulled by the blow which has been dealt us, and all that portion of our soul is a refuge to us from the sensitiveness and vigilance of the rest. A child weeps when his mother dies; but alas! how many a long year it takes to teach both boy and man what a mother's loss really means! Now, our Lady's whole being was flooded with light. Not only did a reason and intelligence of the most consummate perfection illuminate every faculty, and secure the utmost excellence in the exercise of it, but she lived within herself in a very atmosphere of supernatural air and light. In her dolors this light was a torture to her. We may well suppose that no one, except our Blessed Lord Himself, ever fully understood the Passion, or grasped all its horrors in their terrible and repulsive completeness. Yet Mary's knowledge of it is the only one which came at all near to His, and simply because of the excess of heavenly light which shone unsettingly upon her sinless soul. We have but narrow ideas of the light which God can pour into the spacious intelligences of the angels, much less into the vast amplitude and serene capacity of His Blessed Mother. Hence it is that we find the theology of the Beatific Vision so singularly difficult. What blindness is to the blind, and deafness to the deaf, that is ignorance to us. We cannot comprehend its opposite. We make guesses, and draw the most erroneous pictures. Our way lies through darkness, and the twilight is the utmost our weak sight can bear. Light is painful to us, and puzzles us, and troubles our thoughts, and makes us precipitate. Even with the saints, sudden light let in upon them acts as with us, and partially blinds them, until they learn how to suffer the keen ecstatic operations of grace. It brings to mind what a devout writer on the Passion has said of our Lord, following probably some revelation, that after he had been violently struck by the gauntleted hand of the soldier His eyes were so affected that He could not bear the light, so that the sunshine caused exquisite suffering, and He went about through the streets from shame to shame, from violence to violence, like one dazed, and that can only imperfectly see his way. Ignorance is so completely our atmosphere, that we can conceive less of an excess of spiritual light, an intellectual effulgence, than of anything else. So here again the extent of our Lady's sorrows escapes us, as we have no means of measuring the supernatural enlightenment to which they were proportioned, or which perhaps rendered them coextensive with itself. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) But her dolors must have been proportioned also to her sanctity. The trials of the saints have always an analogy with their holiness, and match it in degree as well as adapt themselves to it in its kind. If Mary's sorrow was the work of God, and was to do work for Him,—if it was meritorious, if it closely resembled our Lord's, if it hung to His, subordinately, yet inseparably, if it was populous with supernatural actions, if it multiplied her graces,—then must it have been suitable to the excellences of her soul, and proportioned to her sanctity. But that arithmetic of Mary's merits has long been a bewildering question; bewildering, not because a shadow of doubt hangs over, but for the want of ciphers to write it down in—of factors whereby to work the gigantic multiplication. The holiness of the Mother of God was not absolutely illimitable; and this is the lowest thing which can be said about it. If then we cast the most cursory glance over the number of her graces, their kinds, and their degrees, if starting at the Immaculate Conception we make a sort of reckoning up to the Incarnation, using angels' figures because mens’ have failed us long ago; and then if we think, however briefly, of the way in which at the moment of the Incarnation our figures fell over into the infinite, or something very like it; and then if we contemplate, stupidly and wildly as we must do, the velocity of indefinable grace during three-and-thirty years, all thickly strewn with infinite mysteries, we may form some idea, not of the amount of sanctity ready to bear its proportionate amount of sorrow at the foot of the Cross, but of the impossibility of our forming any clear idea of such a sanctity at all. So that we go away with a most overwhelming impression, but it is an impression like a faith, of the enormous weight of suffering which such a sanctity required, in order to engross it, to match it, to accelerate it, to complete it, to crown it, and to augment it by another infinity. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)

Chapter I The Martyrdom of Mary (continued) I.—The Immensity of Our Lady's Dolors (continued) Her dolors may also be called immense, because of the proportions which they bore to other things in her; for even immensity must have proportions in its way. If she was to sorrow perfectly,—if after Jesus, and beccause of Jesus, she was to have a pre-eminence of sorrow,—then her sorrows must be proportioned to her greatness. But she was the Mother of God! Who will take the altitude of that greatness? St. Thomas tried to do so, and said that omnipotence itself could not contrive a greater greatness. It had done its utmost, though it has no utmost, when it had imagined and effected the dignity of the Divine Motherhood. What are we to a saint, or a saint to the highest angel, or the highest angel to Mary? Perhaps we are nearer—it is to be suspected that we are much nearer—to Michael or Raphael, than they are to Mary; yet it is weary even for a strong mind to think how far off we are from those tremendous intelligences and uncomprehended sanctities. Yet a sorrow proportioned to our capacities, and even indulgently measured to our grace, can be something so terrific that it makes us dizzy to think of what God might will about us. And then, what can those spirits bear, and yet perish not, who have left the world wrongly, and fallen out of time when there was no root of eternity within them? Their strength is laden now in their hopeless home, yet not overladen; and who thinks of their burden without forthwith hiding his thoughts in God, lest something should happen to him, he knows not what? Yet Mary's soul was as immortal, as indestructible, as their spirits, and stronger far; and her body was miraculously supported by the same omnipotence which confers an imperishable resurrection. Nay, it was perhaps the same blessed Sacrament unconsumed within her, and in all of us the seed of a glorious resurrection, which was the miracle that kept her standing and alive at the foot of the bleeding Cross. What then must that sorrow have been which was proportioned to her greatness, to the greatness of the Mother of God, to her vast strength to bear, to her manifold capability of suffering? If we pause and think, we shall see how little our thinking comes to. ~ Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Foot of the Cross (1857)