Now is the month of praying - Sorrowful Mysteries
- May 26, 2014
- 4 min read
Now is the month of Praying – The Sorrowful Mysteries By Sr Tamsin Mary
Just before Christmas my father died, and I have been reflecting ever since on grief, on the relationship between grief and Christian joy, and on what it means therefore to ‘rejoice in the Lord always.’ The sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary help us to understand that whatever Christian joy is, it is not a doctrine that flatters the fortunate while rebuking the sorrowful.
‘And being in an agony He prayed the more earnestly and His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground.’ (Luke 22. The intensity of Our Lord’s anguish in Gethsemene is dwelt upon more in two of the Gospel narratives than the actual death on the cross[1]. The sweat of blood, the sleeping friends, the plea for some other way to be found, the arrest in the dark, the violence of strangers, the cowardice of henchmen: all this should a backdrop in our reflections on what you might call the grief of anticipation – when the expected sorrow or pain is rushing towards us like a juggernaut, we should remember that Christ is with us in our Gethsemene, and that just as His grief and sorrow were precursors to joy, so can ours be, if with Him, while legitimately praying for help and escape, we can bring ourselves also to pray to the Father ‘Not my will but Thine be done’.
In praying the mystery of the scourging at the pillar, we should pray in solidarity with all those who are suffering or have suffered abuse. Jesus went through three episodes of being beaten up, the first at the hands of His own people, thoroughly illegally, as we read ‘the men who were holding Jesus mocked Him and beat Him; they also blindfolded him and asked Him ‘Prophesy! Who is it that struck you’ and they spoke many other words against Him, reviling Him’(Luke 22.63-5) , then at the hands of Herod and his soldiers who ‘treated Him with contempt and mocked him, then arraying Him in gorgeous apparel sent Him back to Pilate’ (Luke 23. 11) and finally the ‘judicial’ flogging at the hands of the Romans ‘Pilate took Jesus and scourged Him’ (Jn 19.1). Whether the abuse is official or unofficial, at the hands of friends and intimates, or at the hands of strangers, Christ has suffered with us and for us. A trouble that comes again and again from different quarters, the pain and suffering and mental anguish of injustice, betrayal, mockery and physical humiliation – all this is a path Our Saviour has trod before us, and in Him we can find the strength to endure whatever life throws in our direction.
The Crowning with thorns always seems to me to be emblematic if the kinds of honours which intentionally or accidentally hurt or humiliate the recipient – the ill-chosen gift, the over-enthusiastic embrace that causes a slipped disk, the edge of envy in the voice of a friend, the flattery of those whose opinion we disregard, the silence or lack of enthusiasm of those whom we love, the rebuff of friendship, the casual cruelties that daily we inflict on each other by small-minded criticism – the list is endless, and whether we are on the giving or the receiving end we should always remember the Crown of thorns, either as a way to refrain from giving small wounds, or as a help towards bearing them!
What crosses do we have to bear? I remember vividly a holy person saying about the word of scripture that says ‘my yoke is easy and my burden light’ ‘‘But it is not true. It is heavy!’’ I would hesitate to correct this person, but I think they were not thinking of the fact that the promise for this life is not that there will be no burdens, but that we shall ‘find rest’ for our souls..
Why do we have so many more representations of the Crucifixion than of the Resurrection? I think it is because it is so much easier to understand at one level, and so completely extraordinary at another. We know what suffering and death is, and some of us have seen death face to face, have looked at the face of the beloved friend or relative and known ‘they cannot live’. So crucifixion is something which at the superficial level we can get our heads round, in a way that the Resurrection is not – we are left stumbling for a real understanding of what took place. At another level the equation is the other way about – it is not that surprising that God, having died, should rise again: the truly stupendous and amazing thing, if we could understand aright, is that God died for us.
The Sorrowful mysteries have their terminus in the joy of the Resurrection. The Christian message again and again is that when we go out with tears, we can, in the Risen Lord, return with joy and glory.
[1] Taking the narrative from Jesus going up the mount of Olives to his arrest as the Garden of Gethsemene, on the one hand, and from the soldiers leading him off to be crucified to His death, the correspondence is as follows: Matthew 26 verses as opposed to 22, Mark 26 verse as against 17 (!) Luke 14, as against 21, and John 11 as against 21.
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