Mary on Holy Saturday

This is the text version of a talk I shall give tomorrow, on Holy Saturday, to the Benedictine College students on their Holy Week Retreat.  Enjoy!  --Fr Jay

Mary, Teach us How to Grieve with Hope

Holy Week Retreat: Holy Saturday

April 19, 2014

We take a moment and pause at this point between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  We do not often consider Holy Saturday, since there is no Mass on this day.  There is not even a communion service today (the Vigil tonight counts for Easter Sunday).  Things are silent today.  I hope you can feel the silence of Holy Saturday.  We know what is happening: Christ descends to the abode of the dead and starting with Adam and Eve, opens the gates of heaven and leads them through.  This is all part of the spiritual warfare going on behind the scenes of the material universe.  And yet all we get in our material world is silence; we don’t even get shadows of that spiritual dimension. There is much I can say about that; but instead I want to focus on what this quiet day should mean for us.

Let’s go back for a moment to Good Friday.  Several weeks ago, at a men’s retreat from St. Michael’s parish, I reflected upon how we can be counted as the “beloved disciple” standing with Mary at the foot of the Cross.  I spoke of how early on in my spiritual life I imagined myself comforting our Blessed Mother, with my arm around her shoulders.  I reflected upon how she had to surrender her beloved Son to the Father and His will, how her fiat from the Annunciation had to be repeated many times throughout her life, culminating at the foot of the Cross.  She had to learn in little ways how to surrender, from accepting God’s will for her to become the Mother of God; from the Magi that offered myrrh, an ointment for burial, to the baby; from fleeing to Egypt and returning; from losing and finding Jesus in the temple; from her interaction with her Son at the wedding feast of Cana; from seemingly being snubbed so often when she went to see Him during His ministry; and many, many other small ways, all in preparation for that horrible Friday afternoon in a rock quarry just outside the jeering walls of Jerusalem.  And as the beloved disciple took her into his home, she may have taught him how to surrender himself, all the way to being exiled on Patmos and writing a Gospel, letters, and the book of Revelation.  Mary teaches us her lessons on surrender because she spent so much time pondering and reflecting in her pierced heart.  And we must do the same.  So I concluded with the image that I had started with, reversed: Mary’s arm is around my shoulders, comforting me, for every difficult surrender I do is mini-death and a grief, preparing me for that final surrender of my death.  Note the Hail Mary: “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”  We need her prayers so that we can surrender to the will of the Father at that moment.”

Now Mary has surrendered, she has held the body of her Son (note the Pieta), she has been taken into the home of the Beloved Disciple.  I believe she also took her Son seriously whenever He said that on the third day He must rise.  She must have heard this through the apostles, if she weren’t told of it directly from the lips of the Savior Himself.  So what was her posture on that Holy Saturday?  What was she feeling?  I think she was feeling something that may sound contradictory: grief and hope.

I think God may be asking us to peer into the heart of grief in the silence of this Holy Saturday. Some of you may not have experienced deep grief yet in your young lives, and that is fortunate. But some of you may have experienced deep grief, and it seems perhaps that we are being asked to relate our grief to the pierced heart of Mary today.  Earlier in these conferences we had been cautioned that something may bubble up within us, something the Lord wants us to face.  Revisiting a place of grief, especially a dark place in your soul in which the Lord desires to enter, may not be something you want to do right now.  In fact, as soon as you heard me relate grief to Holy Saturday, you may have had the thought, “I want to leave the room right now.”  But I ask that you persevere through to the end of this meditation, for it is about grief and hope.  “Put one blistered foot in front of the other,” as Fr. Jeremy related about a pilgrim on the Camino.  Do so with courage!  The Lord will give you His strength today. 

The loss of a loved one is heart wrenching, surreal, unnatural, sorrowful, an agony, confusing, angering, an amputation, ... the list goes on.  It is a tectonic shift in your life.  It is a horrible reality; you walk around numb for a few days or a few weeks, surprised that everyone else’s life is going on while yours just came to a screeching halt.  You want to yell at everyone and say, “My loved one just died! How could you go on?  I can’t!”  It is a strange thing that we all will experience deep grief sometime in our lives, and we human beings are still so tragically poor at handling it!  There are a meager few books written on it, and writings from the Christian faith are few, and from the Catholic faith are even fewer.  We dare to put up crucifixes on our walls and around our necks, blind to the grief that Mary and the disciples experienced just prior to the Resurrection. 

C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent little book titled A Grief Observed after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, of only four years.  He was extremely grief-stricken, even though he knew when he married her she was dying of cancer.  “Where is God?” he writes.  “Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face” (p. 5-6).  His faith is shaken.  He does not doubt that God exists, but he wonders rather that God is some kind of cosmic sadist, a spiteful imbecile (cf. p. 30).  “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer” (p. 7). (This is the great CS Lewis talking here!  This book was written after all the other books he wrote on the Christian faith!)  He sees his faith as a house of cards that had to be knocked down: “the sooner it was knocked down the better.  And only suffering could do it.  But then the Cosmic Sadist ... becomes an unnecessary hypothesis” (p. 38), because:

[t]he more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.  A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety.  But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good.  The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting.  If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.  But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us?  Well, take your choice.  The tortures occur.  If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one.  If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary.  For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.  (p. 43)

Did Mary say similar things on Holy Saturday?  Did she realize that God is a surgeon who needs to do this operation because humanity is sick?  Does surrender have to be this rough?  “Yes, I know, my Son will rise on the third day, but I want Him alive in my arms now!”  Photographs and images of loved ones are great, but they are not the real thing.  I think of this when I look at the photograph of my beloved mother who died two years ago; I well up with tears not so much because I miss her—I do!—but because the photograph just aren’t enough.  One arrives at this bitter point in the spiritual life when pictures of Jesus, stories of Jesus, statues of Jesus, and even the very matter of the Blessed Sacrament itself that we perceive isn’t enough!  Jesus, I want no more impressions of You; I simply want You!  (Lewis makes the same point on p. 65)

But I can’t have You right now.  So other things draw me in the material world.  I get tired of longing for You and not getting You right now.  I distract myself with sin.  But there, I digress.  This talk is about grief and what God does with grief in our soul, and Mary becomes our model for how to handle things when a sword pierces our own souls too.

Throughout the life of Mary we hear a refrain: “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.”  This occurred at the birth of Jesus when the shepherds came and after the finding of the child Jesus at the Temple.  I assume she continued this throughout her life.  Perhaps she did so after the wedding feast of Cana.  She surrendered the problem of the lack of wine to her Son and simply walked away.  She didn’t worry about the solution.  Perhaps she kept this incident, pondering about it in her heart, along with the mysterious words of Old Simeon and other things her Son had said throughout his life. 

Perhaps Holy Saturday for her was a time of a pondering grief.  Perhaps she reflected upon all the things Jesus said from the Cross.  Perhaps she called to mind his words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  And she continued the Twenty-second Psalm, which she knew by heart: “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”  That sounds a lot like C.S. Lewis in his grief.  “O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”  O Mary, did you sleep last night?  I doubt if you did.  I certainly didn’t the night after my mom died.  “Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.  In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them.  In you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not disappointed.”  All right, Lord God, I shall persevere in my trust, even if I should not understand what you are up to!

There is a similar movement worth noting in the Liturgy of the Hours for Holy Saturday.  The psalms start to speak of death, but then hint at the resurrection; from mourning, to pleading with God for rescue, to the victory of eternal life over death.  Hope enters the picture, pierces through the darkness of grief, and settles in the soul like a seed, ready to sprout at the proper time.  The ground is watered with our tears, or differently expressed in Psalm 126, as the Liturgy of the Hours relates it: “They go out, they go out, full of tears, carrying seed for the sowing; they come back, they come back, full of song, carrying their sheaves.” 

Hope is a wonderful thing!  And the seed of Hope lies within grief, for grief should not be what it is if hope were not there.  It would become a different animal, more like depression or even its distant cousin, despair.  Hope is not “I hope I have a good meal tonight” or “I hope my favorite team wins the Superbowl or the World Series next time.”  Rather, the theological virtue of Hope involves keeping your eyes fixed firmly at our eternal destination, focusing on the world to come where we shall be with Jesus and—God willing—our loved ones for all eternity, no matter what happens in the world around us right now.  This kind of Hope ends up guiding us in our daily life and gives us the courage to keep pressing forward.

Can grief and hope coexist?  St Paul seems to think so.  He exhorts us that we may “not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess 4:13).  I take that to mean that it is okay to grieve, but as long as you do so with the theological virtue of Hope. 

I think this is the kind of godly grief that Mary had between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  She grieved tremendously, no doubt about that.  But as she pondered the mystery of salvation and surrender to the Father’s will, which she had to do when the sword pierced her heart on that Friday afternoon, her grief was imbued with a sudden hope.  One weeps, simply because one misses a loved one, knowing that death is something terrible, something that simply should not be.  Each death of another is also a mini-death of the self.  The word “amputation” seems to fit.  For the tears of grief have been always described as kind of selfish, and rightly so, and it is not a bad thing to be selfish here.  Mary and Jesus were so very close; her Son was ripped out from her life and made to suffer the ugly death on the Cross.  But before we could get to the glory of the Resurrection, she had many tears to shed.  Did it have to take this much?  Did the cost have to be this steep?  Yes, for this God-made-man had to save not only His Blessed Mother but also all of humanity.  Not only did Mary have to weep, but all of creation did too.  How far we had fallen, but how far He had to come to get us back!  How could we not weep over such a prodigal God who did all that to reclaim us?

So how do we find Hope in the midst of a tremendous grief?  We do something we tremble at doing: we give it all to God.  And how do we do something that sounds so cliché?  We pray in the midst of our grief.  Most of us do not like the idea of bringing up negative things in prayer.  Most of us cringe, thinking God will be angry with us, if we bring up negative feelings in prayer, especially feelings of intense anger.  Nothing could be further from the truth!  God desires our brutal honesty, not our silence, when it comes to these “negative emotions.”  We may protest and think that God is offended by the ugliness that we harbor in our souls, yet the One who descended to the abode of the dead could easily descend to the ugliness within our souls and set us free!  I recall praying to the Lord—an honest prayer—that I didn’t want to share with him the ugly things in my soul, and I felt Him respond, “Jay, I descended to the abode of the dead; nothing could be uglier than that!”  So I began to share with Him all the ugly things in my soul, and I felt His peace come over me.  My advice to you is to never hold back in prayer!  He always cherishes and responds to honest prayer.  And especially on this day, during the silence of Holy Saturday, don’t hold back the grief in your own soul!  For when we are able to speak to Him of the ugliness of our grief—and not just speak to Him of the ugliness of our grief but also speak to Him from the ugliness of our grief—He responds with giving us enormous Hope.  He lets Hope flourish in our hearts, for He knows that’s what we need the most right now. 

Exercise: consider Mary on the morning of the Resurrection.  What was she feeling?  What was she going through?  Write or journal about it; perhaps write a prayer, a poem or even a song about it.  Let this meditation renew the theological virtue of Hope in your life.

Reference: Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York: Harper One, 1996.

A Holy Week Reflection: Standing with Mary at the Foot of the Cross

I know it's been a long time since I've posted.  Sorry about that!  Things are going well!  Recently I gave a talk to a men's retreat here at the Abbey, and I converted my talk into an article.  I would like to share it with you.  It might help in your mediations for Holy Week! I'll try to post more about life here at the Abbey sometime soon!  God bless!

Standing with Mary at the Foot of the Cross

Father Jay Kythe

April 5, 2014

This reflection is based in part from Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon.  Scripture quotes are from his citations.

The Third Word from the Cross: When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your Son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.

The image of Mary at the foot of the Cross: this is a great opportunity to put ourselves in the sandals of the beloved disciple.  Throughout my life I have had an image of myself at the foot of the Cross, my arm around Mary’s shoulders, me trying to comfort her.  This has nourished me greatly in my spiritual life, as I traced the steps of the Via Dolorosa and applied it to my life.

I often wondered, did she know that this was the way of strange glory by which her Son would conquer sin and death?  We do not know.

Perhaps she remembered old Simeon who was probably dead by that time.  She would certainly remember his words: “Behold, this child is set for the fall and the rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against, and a sword will pierce your own soul also, that the thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed.”  How often had she wondered about this, pondered these words for all those years, and realizing that this is happening at that moment?  How she had to endure the piercing sword of grief at the foot of the Cross!

We know she did this from the beginning.  When the shepherds came to worship the baby and told her what the angels had said, “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.”  She would look down at the babe and wonder many things.  From her He received His Jewish humanity: the color of his eyes, the cut of his nose, that odd way of smiling.  She potty trained Him, taught Him His first words, encouraged His first steps, kissed His scuffed knee and made it all better, ... all as she pondered prophecies about piercing swords and wondered about that King from the East who gave myrrh, an ointment for burial, at the event of a birth.  She and Joseph found Him lost in the temple, she was there for His first miracle.  They could not have been closer.

Recall the Dialogue at Cana: “They have no more wine.”  “O woman, what have you to do with me?  My hour has not yet come.”  “Do whatever he tells you.”—the last recorded words of Mary in the New Testament.  How fitting!

She had to learn an important lesson, which perhaps we get a glimpse at Cana,

a lesson all mothers (and fathers, especially with respect to their daughters) need to learn, to let go, to let their sons go on the way they must go.  The love that lets go is never easy.  Such love has to be learned.  It approaches the truest form of love, an ultimate other-directedness, a total lack of selfishness, agape-love that is willing to let go of the other. 

We see perhaps the first lesson of having to let go in the scene of St. Joseph and Mary searching for Jesus in the Temple.  Jesus says, “How is it that you sought me?  Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”  What a thing for a 12 year old to say!  But we can also note that He returns home, obedient to His earthly parents.  And once again we come upon the line, “And his mother kept all these things in her heart.”  He was back with her, but something was different, something has happened that can never be undone.  Between Jesus and Mary another will came in to separate, an infinitely greater will, the will of the heavenly Father. 

To this will, every other relationship took second place. 

As it should be in the spiritual life of the Christian.

Recall once again the words at Cana: “Woman, what have you to do with me?  My hour has not yet come.”  We do not have evidence that Mary was offended, nor did she question about His hour.  All she did was say to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 

The Synoptics tell the story that the crowds were pressing in on Jesus, and Mary and His brethren came in to speak with Him.  Jesus says, “Who are my mother and my brothers?”  Looking around, He said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.”  What did Mary think?  Yes, I know, she fits the criterion spoken by Jesus very well, but she is still His mother.  Was she disappointed, perhaps at some level? 

And then there was another day when someone in the crowd cries out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!”  Yet Jesus responds, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”  Also here Mary fits this criterion, but how did she feel about that as well? 

I’d like to think it was like at Cana.  I believe that at Cana she simply accepted the words of Christ without question and walked away, happy that God’s will is being done.  She pointed something out and stepped aside, confident that God will act.  This is the quality of great saints, to surrender and leave things in God’s hands.  If water had not changed into wine, if the wedding couple were left humiliated, Mary would still have trusted that somehow this would work for good in their lives.  This is the mark of heroic virtue in the lives of saints, that the entire world could just as well fall apart and yet I shall remain secure with my Lord, trusting that He will bring a greater good out of a great evil.  This is a lesson we all have to learn.

            And Mary had to learn it too.  We can say: oh Mary, it seems He has no more time for you.  Even when it comes to taking care of Him, to doing the big and little things that a mother wants to do, it seems you are excluded.  In Luke 8 we hear about the holy women who followed Jesus and provided for Him, but your name wasn’t on the list.  Was that okay with you?

Mary learned the hard love of letting go, the love that is forged in surrender to a love greater than our own, the love that grows beyond all possessing.  Paradoxically, in this distancing love is a deeper love and discipleship, for Mary is considered the first of the disciples.  All generations shall indeed call her blessed!

Surrender: the Scriptures calls this kenosis, the surrender of all that we hold most dear, and for Mary, it was the surrender of her dearest.  Long before they looked at one another on Golgotha’s place of strangest glory, they had been prepared by many little surrenders for this surrender by which all was restored.  The way of the Cross is the way of broken hearts.

We live in a life of desiring empowerment, fulfillment, self-esteem, and self-actualization.  Yet the Christian message is the opposite:  “The disciple is not above the master.”  “The first shall be last and the last first.”  “He who would find his life must lose his life.”  “Take up your cross and follow me.”  And Mary adds the words “Do whatever He tells you.”  And in her loss, the loss of her Son and the loss of herself, she discovered “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” 

“He who would find his life must lose his life.”  The spiritual life and the Christian moral life are filled with such paradoxes.  And when we try to live this way, we feel like we are going against the grain. 

Or maybe we’re not.  Maybe we’ve been so accustomed to going against the grain of our humanity that we have confused ourselves about which way the grain runs.  Recall the famous words of St Augustine: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”  Recall also the old Catechism question “Why did God make me?”  “To know and love and serve Him in this life and to enjoy Him forever in the next.”  If we get this question wrong, we get everything else wrong.  Perhaps in following our humanity, we will reach God; but man has gotten used to not following his humanity.  Man has gotten used to following things that are contra naturum, against human nature, the way God intended it.  So if we lose ourselves in God, we end up finding ourselves.  If God made us that way, this should make sense. 

At the foot of the Cross, Mary and Jesus were probably eye-to-eye, almost at eye level, at least looking at each other’s faces.  Much later, beginning in the Middle Ages, artists would depict a very tall cross, with Mary and the others far below at its foot.  But historians think that the Cross was probably about seven feet tall.  She would have seen quite clearly the Holy Face in agony.  She would have heard His words, the seven Last Words.  There was nothing else to do but just to be there. 

And so we return back to the image I started with, standing with Mary at the foot of the Cross. 

We are familiar with the beautiful poem Stabat Mater dolorosa: At the Cross her station keeping.  Perhaps it was written by St Bonaventure, and it was set to music by some of the greatest composers.  Antonin Dvorak composed his Stabat Mater in 1878 after losing three children in three years. 

The image of being at the foot of the Cross appeals to us because we shall all face darkness in our lives, and in the heart of darkness are the hearts of Jesus and Mary, for both descended into that darkness in order to provide hope for those whose hope is slipping away. 

Weeping at the cross, Mary is both the mother of sorrows and the mother of hope. 

Here is our lesson: letting God have His way, even when it brings us to the Cross.  Life is at God’s disposal, kept in readiness for what He may desire.  By saying Yes to the angel and agreeing to be mother of God, she had created a situation beyond her control.  This is about the imitation of Mary: surrendering as she did.  By taking Mary into our home as did the beloved disciple, we can give her the opportunity to teach this lesson to us, and in turn teach this lesson to others. 

The first example is of the beloved disciple who surrendered to God through Mary (and learned from her by imitating her virtue of surrender).  We don’t know much about the life of St. John, but it is said that he was exiled to the island of Patmos.  As he surrendered to this will of Divine Providence, he opened himself to everything the Father wanted to do in his life.  So he wrote the Gospels, which reveal Christ as the Son of God in glory; the letters, which are a fantastic exposition of love; and the book of Revelations, which speak of the glory to come.  It is as if he said—when he spoke in his first letter of “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us ....”—in other words, “Mother Mary and I, we saw it!” “...by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”  Humanity is capable of great self-transcendence in surrender to the Other.  We are capable of magnanimous love.  It is worth remembering this when we see people doing bad things.  There are probably more good examples than bad, but in our fallenness we get discouraged and remember that one bad thing out of the one hundred good ones.

The Cross is the axis mundi, the place and the moment upon with all reality turns.  It is the Cross that binds John to Mary, and all beloved disciples to Mary and through Mary to one another in a mutual gift of self.  When St Paul declares, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” Mary ends up having many sons and daughters, her Son living in us.  “Behold, your son!”—meaning, behold your Christ is here too!  Mary, then did not lose her Son on the Cross; she gains sons and daughters beyond number, in all of whom the glory of Christ abides! 

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” Christ utters from the Cross.  Mary heard these words and could herself continue the words of that Psalm 22 along with Jesus, words He did not say from the Cross but were there implicitly: “Yet thou art he who took me from the womb; thou didst keep me safe upon my mother’s breasts.  Upon thee was I cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me thou hast been my God.  Be not far from me, for trouble is near and there is none else to help.” 

How close were Jesus and Mary!  Perhaps she thought of those words and thought of the times of caring for him as a babe, whispering the words of the Archangel Gabriel to him in the second person: “You will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give you the throne of your father David, and you will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of your kingdom there will be no end.”  Mary did not know what it all meant, and the babe smiled at the sound of her voice of the mother for whom the word “you” meant her life and her all.

Yet on the Cross, those words of surrender and calling upon the Lord most High may have helped her to do the same.  Little surrenders throughout her life preparing her for this big one.  And beside her stood the beloved disciple, watching it all.  The mother would come to understand that from the beginning, she was held by the One whom she held.  The beloved disciple would understand this too and would express it in different ways in his writings, writings that came out of his contemplative heart. 

How much of this he learned from Mary and how much of this he learned by being open to the Father’s will is unknown.  But in his surrender, he revealed much about the spiritual life that can only be learned in surrender to the Father’s will.  I daresay he couldn’t have contributed what he did to the Catholic faith without first surrendering to Divine Providence!  All in imitation of Mary, whom he brought into his home.

At the beginning I spoke of myself in the place of the Beloved Disciple at the foot of the Cross.  “And he took her into his home.”  This image has changed for me, especially as I considered myself as a beloved disciple and began bringing everything, especially the ugliness of life, to the foot of the Cross.  With each instance of grief, I began noticing something different.  Now the image is of Mary comforting me at the foot of the Cross. 

Human drama should be lived out at the foot of the Cross.  Why not being there with Mary?  Taking everything there, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

In your prayer, I encourage this meditation: you at the foot of the Cross.  What would you like to bring to Jesus?  What is Mary’s posture?  What is your posture?  What is Mary’s posture towards you and you towards Mary, and both towards Jesus?