Quotes Worth Contemplating for September 15
Upon receiving the command of the Most High to offer his only son as a holocaust, Abraham rose up in the night, saddled his donkey, took two servants and Isaac, and set out for Mount Moria (cf. Gen. 22:1–3). He probably said nothing to his wife, and we can guess why.
“The endurance of sorrow is perhaps,” Fr. Frederick Faber tells us, “the highest and most arduous work we have to do, and it is for the most part God’s ordinance that the amount of sorrow to be endured should increase with the amount of holiness enabling us to endure it.” Holy as she was, Sara could hardly have been expected to understand let alone comply tranquilly with the deliberate destruction of her only child, that boy who had been the light and life of her existence since his miraculous conception many years prior.
Not so with our Blessed Mother. Knowing all that was to come upon Her Beloved, watching all the brutality of Christ’s Passion unfold before Her maternal eyes, She accepted all.
“Nothing discloses to us more astonishingly Her union with God than this unbroken calm,” says Fr. Faber. He continues:
Where God is, there can be no trouble; and there was not a recess in Our Lady’s nature where God was not, and which He did not possess with undivided sovereignty. Hence, while horror followed horror, there was no amazement in her soul no bewilderment…. In what an abiding presence of God must Her soul have dwelt! How trained must each faculty of the mind have been to fall in with the ways of God as it met them, and with such unquestioning promptitude, such unstartled dignity! …There was no effort, no struggle, no pause, no token that Her inward life felt the pressure of outward circumstances. The creature kept step with the Creator, and the angels marveled at the divine repose of Her beautiful dependence. (The Foot of the Cross, 281–282)
As there was no holiness like to this Woman’s holiness, so there was no sorrow like unto Her sorrow and — what moves us in particular on this feast of the Dolors of Mary — no peace like unto Her peace. This peace, according to Fr. Faber, is
by far the most wonderful thing about the interior life of Her soul, so far at least as we are allowed to see into it. There seems to be no height of holiness which may not be predicated of such a marvelous tranquility. It is a token, not so much of a process of sanctification still going on, as of the deification of a human soul completed. It comes nearest of all graces to the denial of created imperfections. Inequality, surprise, mutability, inconsistency, hesitation, doubt, vacillation, failure, astonishment — these are all what might be called in geological language the faults in created sanctity. They are the imprints which human infirmity has left upon the work, before it was set and hardened. They are the marks of catastrophe which is itself a mark of feebleness. From all these, so far as we can see, Our Lady’s incomparable tranquility preserved Her. To Her there seems to have been communicated some portion of that peace of God, which Scripture says “surpassed all understanding,” and whose special office towards ourselves is “to keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” No one thing explains so much of our Blessed Lady’s grandeur as this heavenly calm…. The heart of Jesus alone can read the riddle of Mary aright; but this dovelike peace, this almost divinely pacific spirit, is the nearest reading of the riddle of Her immense holiness to which we can attain. It is as if God had clothed Her with His attribute of mercy for our sakes, and with His attribute of peace for Her own. (ibid., 325–326)
Virgin most tranquil, pray for us!
