Listening To Our Lady Of Sorrows

If you read my blog posts and know a bit about me, you’ll know that I am no Catholic traditionalist! I am a true believer that the church must adapt and change to the current moment. What I have to say, however, is that I really love the tradition and always seem to find something in it that speaks so clearly to what is happening now.

Today is no exception.

In Catholic circles, the feast of “Mary, Mother of Sorrows” is celebrated today (also known as Our Lady of Sorrows). The church dedicates the entire month of September to her, in fact, and this title is meant to acknowledge the deep pain that she endured witnessing what her son went through in his life. These moments include Simeon’s prophecy (when she was told that her heart will be pierced by this world), the Flight into Egypt (when they needed to flee political persecution), becoming separated from her son in the temple, the crucifixion and having to bury her child.

I know that many reading this can relate to one or perhaps many of these realities. And there are so many in this world who are living this every day as they watch their children die from malnutrition, as they flee from political violence/domestic terror, as they are separated from their children or loved ones, as they witness state-sanctioned executions or as they bury their children (for so many different reasons).

It is also important to say that today’s feast is not about sadness. It is about the mourning and grief of a mother who must witness and endure the harm done to her child and the harm done in this world. She is the one who remains at the foot of the cross and does not look away from the tragedy and the pain but instead tries to find a way to hold it and transform it (and let it transform her).

So today’s “feast” honors the grief of the world and those who mourn so many losses. Somehow, the ancients knew that we must pause to honor and feel sorrow.

The word grief comes from the Latin word gravis which means “heavy.” And grief is heavy – which is why it is often something that our culture tends to avoid.

Frances Weller has been a great guide for me on attending to the grief we feel – personally and collectively. He has a wonderful article that I quote from below, and I would highy recommend his book “The Wild Edge of Sorrow” (maybe we can do a book study on this sometime).

Weller identifies five “gates” of grief (and some of his colleagues have added a few others) and invites us to explore these as entry points to reclaim a deep connection to our souls and the soul of the world. He says that “without some measure of intimacy with grief, our capacity to be with any other emotion or experience in our life is greatly compromised.” And we can already see how compromised our world is by our inability to feel. Just read the headlines from the last week.

Weller names the gates of grief:

• All that we love we will lose
• The places that did not receive love 
• The sorrows of the world
• What we expected but did not receive
• Ancestral grief
• Trauma
• The harm I have caused to myself and others (from Sophy Banks)
• Anticipatory grief (Sarah Pletts)

Taken together, these gates give us a starting point to enter the pain in our lives and the pain of the world in a way that honors the sacred work of sorrow. In fact, Weller names grief work as “deep activism” because it ultimately brings us back to the fundamental reality that we are all connected – echoing the great words of Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

The feast of Our Lady of Sorrows – as she places herself at the foot of the cross – is something for us just to sit with today. In the face of great pain, Mary keeps her heart open. In a passage that could have been talking about Mary, Weller says that, “It is risky to stay vulnerable in a culture increasingly dedicated to death, but without our willingness to stand witness through the power of our grief, we will not be able to stem the hemorrhaging of our communities, the senseless destruction of ecologies or the basic tyranny of monotonous existence. Each of these moves pushes us closer to the edge of the wasteland, a place where malls and cyberspace become our daily bread and our sensual lives diminish. Grief instead, stirs the heart, is indeed the song of a soul alive.”

I must admit that I always had a hard time understanding what Jesus meant when he said, “Blessed are those who mourn…(Mt 5:4).” But I think I am coming to understand more about it as well as where he might have learned it from. May we, too, lean in to the work of grief and sorrow with Mary at our side as we let the pain register and transform us.

What this will look like in any life will vary widely, but the idea is to let the losses of the world register for us and speak to someone about it (or ideally be part of a ritual related to the grief). It could be ecological. It could be social. It could be political. It could be personal. And while Weller admits that, “it is difficult to resist the temptation to retract and close down the heart to the world…[but] it is our responsibility to source this emotion and offer it back to our struggling world.”

In our capacity to feel the sorrows of the world lies our ability to heal.

Note: If you are holding grief these days – and, honestly, I don’t know anyone who isn’t – I encourage you not to be alone with it. While there are certainly individual practices we can take up to address grief, grief work is meant to be done collectively. Please reach out to someone if you’re personally  feeling overwhelmed or consider being part of some local “grief circles” (some had been offered through the local MK Gandhi Institute) or upcoming public rituals that are helping people to hold their grief. And I will be sure to speak with the staff to try to incorporate more grief work into our weekend services – helping our ritual spaces give voice to all that we bring with us.