By Cordelia Fitzgerald (Rated G)
The Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary can be quite depressing to pray and meditate upon, normally. We tend to want and preserve a nice, clean version of our faith: yes, Christ died to redeem us, but we plaster the risen Christ everywhere and focus on His teachings, not His gruesome death. The Glorious or Joyful Mysteries are much more comfortable to sit with.
Yet when suffering comes, as it will whether we will or not, the landscape changes. Suddenly, we want commiseration; the good humor of others can even put us out of temper. And then we become crankier as we reflect on how selfish we are. Yet our good Lord understands this need of ours for that commiseration, in a way, perhaps, that our fellow men fail to. This God that made us understands us both from a mechanic or inventor’s point of view and from our very experience, since He too was one of us.
He walks with us, suffering, in those Sorrowful Mysteries, as we walk with Him during Holy Week. (For non-Catholic friends, never fear! A brief summary of the Sorrowful Mysteries follows, along with a wee meditation on what appears to be a comprehensive experience of every suffering man can face, all lived by Christ in His Passion.)
The First Sorrowful Mystery – The Agony in the Garden
Mental anguish, so intense that it caused Him to sweat blood, afflicted Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane. That mental agony was complete, deep, wrenching, and piercing. In today’s world, we hear so much of mental health and psychological trauma or problems. We see the results of brokenness around us, the joylessness of secularism, and feel ourselves that deep internal hurt, even to the point of feeling a profound separation from God. Christ prays, with us following, that if it be God’s will, “let this chalice pass,” for the hidden agony is one we cannot bear without help. He finishes, however, with the perfect resignation we must emulate: “Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Mt. 26:39).
The Second Sorrowful Mystery – The Scourging at the Pillar
Here Christ walks with us in the sort of pain most of us associate when suffering is mentioned – physical suffering. Scourging was a form of punishment so brutal that not all sufferers survived, and as Pilate was using it as a way of mollifying the crowd, it is not outside the realm of reason that the job was done thoroughly. At this point, too, Jesus was fasting, dehydrated, and only at the beginning of His physical suffering. Christ is there, in all the pain we can experience, living it with us and before us.
The Third Sorrowful Mystery – The Crowning With Thorns
How unfortunate the relevance of this mystery in modern days! In this age of technology, bullying in all forms rears its ugly head, in mockery, revilement, disgust, shaming, and all forms of vituperation. Of course, this is the experience Christ suffers with us in the Crowning With Thorns: He was mocked. God is not mocked – or so the saying goes – and so He is not; for who could even stand before God in His glory? But Christ is fully divine and fully human, and the mockery of the soldiers was deeply experienced by our God-Become-Man.
The Fourth Sorrowful Mystery – The Carrying of the Cross
Again we see an applicable mystery for our times and our technology, for while we, through social communication, are open to the revilement of others, we also see all the suffering in the world around us. So we, like Christ, suffer by taking the burden of others. According to Catholic (little “t”) tradition, Our Lord’s most painful wound was that upon His shoulder where the cross rested – the literal weight of carrying the world’s sin-burden. While it can be shocking that of His myriad wounds, this would be the worst, many would agree that carrying the suffering or burdens of others is a unique sort of pain, and one that is harder to find solace for.
The Fifth Sorrowful Mystery – The Crucifixion
Here is the final step in the sorrowful journey, the time when the earth heaved up and Christ’s great cry rang out, “Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabacthani?” It is the culmination of suffering. His walk with us is no longer in one particular sort of suffering, but rather all of them all at once. His mental anguish calls on God, “Why have You forsaken Me?” The painful wounds of His Body have depleted His strength and brought Him to a physical breaking point. Those on the ground and one on the cross next to Him mock Him. All of this He suffers for us and with us – there is no place we can go in suffering in which He cannot say “I have been there, and I am with you.”
And so we reach the end of the Sorrowful Mysteries with the ultimate sacrifice of Our Lord. Having suffered this Passion on our behalf, He bows His head and utters His last words:
“It is finished.”
And we all know what comes next – but it would not come had not this painful journey come first.
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