On the Burial of Jesus ~ Fr. Frederick Faber
What can we know of the uttermost territories of possible
sorrow? Only as a mysterious place where the Mother of God has been, and where
she was when she knelt to make her last adoration of the Body in the tomb. We
call it the seventh dolor, and we can call it nothing else. But her seventh dolor is beyond our
intelligence, both in kind and in degree, and therefore was her greatest in
another sense. The circumstances which formed the material of the sorrow were
without parallel on earth. They have happened only once, and the unassisted
science of the wisest Angel would never have dreamed that such things could
have happened at all in the bosom of God’s creation, rife as it is with
unexpected wonders. Mary’s heart also was an instrument unparalleled on earth,
now that the Sacred Heart was cold and motionless in the tomb. … Even when it
lived and beat, its union with the Divine Person took it out of the parallel.
Mary’s state at the close of this vast system of dolor, through which she had
revolved, was also quite without parallel, both in respect of holiness, of
powers of suffering, and of the miraculous holding together of her shattered
life. Thus everything about this dolor is without parallel.
We can but shadow forth in our spirits some nameless
immensity of grief, and say it was the seventh which our Mother bore.
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