Sixth Sorrow of the Blessed Virgin Mary ~ Jesus is taken
down from the Cross
There is a
peculiarity of this sorrow, which it is impossible for us fully to understand,
but which must be borne in mind throughout, because it indicates the greatest
depth of sorrow which this mystery reached in the soul of our Blessed Mother.
It was the withdrawal of the life of Jesus. She herself perhaps did not know
till now how much it had supported her, or how many offices it had fulfilled
toward her. For three-and-thirty years she had lived upon His life. It had been
her atmosphere.
There had
been a kind of unity of life between them. Her heart had beaten in His Heart.
She had seen with His eyes, and had heard with His ears, and had almost spoken with
His lips and thought with His thoughts, as she had done when she composed and
sang the Magnificat. Mother and son had never before been so fused into each
other. Two lives had never seemed so inseparably one life as these two had
done. And how shall one of them, and that the weaker and inferior, now stand
alone? The sundering of body and soul looks a less effectual separation than
the dividing of the life of Mary from the life of Jesus. Perhaps it was on this
account, to supply this mysterious want of the Human Life of Jesus, that the
species of the Blessed Sacrament remained incorrupt within her during the
remainder of her life, from one Communion to another.
We have
sometimes seen mothers and sons approximate to this unity of life, especially
when the son has been an only child, and the mother a widow. It has been also
in these cases, as with Our Lady, that it is the mother’s life which is drawn
into the son’s, not the son’s into the mother’s. The sight of such a mother and
son is one of the most pathetic which earth can show— pathetic, because its
roots have always been, not in the palpable sunshine of overflowing happiness,
but in the unwitnessed depth of domestic sorrow. The grandeur of its beauty has
been in proportion to the fiery heat of that furnace of agony in which the two
lives had been melted into one. But, when we looked, we have trembled to think
how the inevitable separation of death would ever be endured. Yet how faint a
shadow of Jesus and Mary are these filial and maternal unities on earth! In
order, then, to understand the intolerable suffering which the withdrawal of
the life of Jesus caused in the heart of Mary, we must know what His life had
been to hers throughout. But this is not within the reach of our comprehension.
We can but guess at it, and calculate it, and then be sure that the reality has
far outrun our boldest calculations.
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