Vigils Reading – Our Lady of Sorrows

From a Sermon in Honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Amadeus of Lusanne (CF 18:105-106)

With deep calling to deep, two loves had come together into one and from the two loves was made a single love when the Virgin mother gave to her Son the love she gave to God, and showed her love for her son in loving God. Therefore the more she loved, the more she grieved and the greatness of her love brought the increase of her suffering.

What was she doing when she stood on Calvary and saw the cross, the nails, the wounds of the One who was dying in innocence and the insatiable cruelty of the Pharisee afire with malice? [Jesus] hung there atoning not for his sins but for ours, and the Pharisees with the Scribes, mocking him, struck him on the head and offered to his lips vinegar mingled with gall that there might be fulfilled the prophecy of David, saying in the person of Christ, ‘They added to the pain of my wounds.’ In the midst of this the Mother of God was distressed in mind, and sorrows seized upon her as upon a woman in childbirth. There are groans, sobs, sighs, sorrow, grief, agony, distress of heart, fires, a death more cruel than death. There life is not taken away yet the bitterness of death is suffered. O memory to be revered, full of devotion and tears, to recall how that glorious holy soul suffered, and what anguish she endured in the death of Christ. The pale face of Jesus reflected the bloodless face of his mother. He suffered in the flesh, she in her heart. Finally the insults and scoffing of the wicked came back upon his mother’s head. The Lord’s death was to her more bitter than her own [would have been]. Although, taught by the Spirit, she would not doubt the resurrection, yet she had to drink the Father’s cup and to know the hour of her own passion. Concerning this, the venerable Simeon prophesied to her: ‘A sword shall pierce your soul.’ O Lord Jesus, terrible in your counsels beyond the sons of men, you did not spare your mother from the sword piercing her soul. By this road must we all pass by the fiery sword turning this way and that to the tree of life which is in the midst of paradise.

But to return: Blessed Mary was able to cry out that which was especially appropriate to Christ: ‘O all you who pass by, behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. What a sorrow and how great! And in that sorrow what was Mary like? Alas, as she was then, how different from the girl who had once tended her son amid a choir of angels while shepherds worshiped and Magi adored him with an offering of mystic gifts. Very different, not indeed in virtue but in sadness, not in grace but in grief. For she increased in virtue and grew in grace. For set in the midst of adversity she neither relaxed her modesty nor lost the strength of her constancy.