Lamentation over the Dead Christ (detail); Sandro Botticelli; c. 1495

GOOD TIMES are good. Fun is very fun. Joy and happiness are necessary.

But so is sorrow. Sorrow is necessary too. He who can not shed tears is lacking in compassion. For sickness, disappointment, loneliness, enmity, and death are always nearby. Sorrow opens our hearts to the truth of the human condition and to the mystical importance of the soul.

Some are chosen to feel more sorrow. This is an undeniable fact. Equality in the department of suffering does not exist. (If you are hanging out with people who cannot give a plausible explanation for this disturbing inequality, you are hanging out with the superficial.)

In this increasingly impersonal, alienated and artificial world, some may feel such intense sorrow, such a heavy load of sadness, that physical heart disease seems minor in comparison to this spiritual heart disease.

Sorrow of this kind is a grace from God, who draws the sorrowful closer to Him. He appoints to them the office of grief for a reason.

At the Foot of the Cross the second Eve fulfilled her destiny. She who had lived in human intimacy with God experienced complete sorrow, greater than any other, sorrow being a counterpart of love. This sorrow is the source of her great compassion, which is why millions of people have found consolation in suffering with her and appealing to her compassion.

But why? Why this inner suffering?

“What is the reason of all this suffering that exists in the world around us?” wrote the Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul in 1893 in commemoration of today’s Feast of the Seven Dolors of Mary, “[It] is a question that has been asked day after day, and year after year, and century after century, since the first human tear fell upon the unconscious earth. And the attempt to solve this enigma of mankind has founded schools of philosophy and philanthropy, systems of religion, and methods of life, from the dawn of human history and before it to the present hour. Yet the reason of sorrow, though it has escaped the search of mankind, is not far to seek–it is sin, and sin is everywhere.”

Sorrow, embraced willingly, can bring the greatest happiness of all because sorrow can be a form of penance and reparation.

When sorrow comes, it is an opportunity. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. They can be comforted by knowing that sorrow embraced repairs this fallen world.

Can the human heart refrain
From partaking in her pain;
In that Mother’s pain untold?
 

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