Part Six – The Sword of Suffering
Our Lady’s teaching on prayer has always been the same. It is the same teaching that she taught her son as he grew up. Like everyone else born into this world, there are a hundred and one things to do to keep body and soul together each day. However, there is always time for prayer; not just the formal prayers that Our Lady was taught by her parents and the prayers that she taught her son, but also the deep interior personal prayer that she practised and taught her son to practise too. When his time came to teach others, he would not only teach them to follow his example in practising the more formal daily prayers that his mother had taught him but something further.
Solitary Personal Prayer
Just as she found time daily to be alone before God, and taught her son to do the same, her son did the same for others by both word and example. He told them to go into the ‘Inner room’ alone to pray to God, just as he did. That would of course, not be so easily possible when he was a travelling speaker, so he would disappear for hours at a time ‘onto the mountainside’ or other lonely places when he was in the countryside, or when in Jerusalem into the ‘garden where it was his custom to pray’. These were not just occasional sorties into solitude. They were as regular as his mother had prayed and taught him to pray in Nazareth.
In his Gospel, St Luke put it this way. “His reputation continued to grow, and large crowds would gather to hear him and to have their sickness cured, but he would always go off to some place where he could be alone to pray (Luke 5:15-16). He was taught well by his mother. Despite all her daily chores, in these precious moments when all her work was done, when all the prayers expected of her had been said, she turned to God to be lost in mystical contemplation of his sublime goodness.
Our Lady’s Complete Humility
Compared to the one she contemplated, Mary was overcome with her own utter nothingness. The humility that is only ultimately learnt from experiencing ‘he who is mighty doing great things’, enabled her to be totally open to receive and be replenished with God’s infinite goodness. She received all the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit, filling her and her family with the love of God, and then eventually, all families that would look to her for the motherly love and protection they craved.
Julian of Norwich makes this point so clearly when she uses the example of Our Lady gazing upon God in profound mystical contemplation.
The greatness and the nobility of this contemplation of God filled her full of reverent awe and with this, she saw herself so humble and small, so simple and so poor in comparison with her Lord God that this reverent awe filled her with humility. And so, founded on this she was filled with grace and with every kind of virtue (Long text chapter 7).
A Sword of Suffering
We may think that this may well be wonderful for Our Lady who was immaculately conceived and free from the sin and selfishness that prevents us from turning to God, as she did, to be lost in mystical contemplation. But what about us? We fail to understand what this meant for her spiritual life. It meant as Simeon said in the Temple, that a sword of suffering would pierce her heart and that suffering would be multiplied many times over the sufferings of any other mother. All the great mystics who have arrived at the peak of the spiritual journey know, as Mary came to know and experience, what it means to have her human heart and soul totally possessed by divine love. It made that heart and soul infinitely more open and sensitive to all the pain and suffering that she had to endure. It was bad enough when her motherly love saw and experienced every tiny twist and turn of suffering in her son as he grew to maturity, but thereafter it became all but unbearable.
The Sword Goes Deeper
From the very moment he began to preach, the news of his preaching that was music to her ears was counterpointed by manic crescendos, as the usual rabble of dissenters accused him of everything from heresy and perverting the people, to being possessed by demonic powers. His arrival to speak in his own hometown should have been one of her greatest joys but it turned out to be a nightmare when the rabble that was roused against him took him to the edge of a cliff to do away with him. The joy of his escape was only short-lived because she continued to hear the evil seditious lies that were levied against him. She must have known how it was going to end when, the man described by her son as the most saintly man who had ever lived, St John the Baptist, was beheaded by the dissolute and debauched King Herod, for speaking the same truth that her own son was preaching. When the end did come and she stood at the foot of the Cross, no heart before or since has been so broken. No heart before or since has been so delicate and so sensitive to the ultimate powers of evil that were responsible for the greatest and cruellest crime in human history.
The Mother of Us All
Just before he died, Jesus gave his mother Mary to the loving care and compassion of the apostle of love, St John. This gesture was seen as having universal significance. This divine action enabled her to be the mother to the church over which he presided while she was on earth, but also to be the mother of us all, after her glorious Assumption into heaven. After this had taken place, time and space no longer prevented her from being to all of us, in every time and place, the Mother that she has been ever since, and will continue to be in this world and the next.
To the end of her days, what happened on Calvary would have haunted her both night and day. But it nevertheless continued to do for her what she wants it to do for us. That is why she begged the children of Garabandal, and all who would listen to them, to steep themselves in meditation upon the passion and death of her dearly beloved son.
She knew that the love generated by doing this, would do for them what it continues to do for her, namely deepen their love for God. This is the love that will gradually lead us, with the help of the Holy Spirit, into the profound and transforming prayer of mystical contemplation. This was the joy of Mary’s life here on earth, making her the Queen of all the virtues, and the most perfect exemplification to all who would follow her example.
