The meeting of Mary with Jesus bearing His cross as He climbed to Calvary, the meeting which is given as the fourth dolor of Our Lady, is neither mentioned nor described by the Evangelists. Countless traditions speak of it. How sacred was this out-of-the-way turn in the road where a mother came to meet her Son. What a Son! What a mother! What a meeting of united suffering. A towering mountain: Magna velut mare. One sea of sorrow meets another. Their billows surge as high as the world.
Special memorial stones mark the battlefields of France where, in 1918, the opposing forces advanced upon each other as wave met wave and the fate of the armies was determined. What monument could commemorate worthily that spot where the suffering of the one described in Scripture as strong as an army set in array, comes to meet in a supreme attack the suffering of the Savior ascending to the Cross, not for the sake of combatting it but to unite with this suffering and to share its redemptive power.
In the one hundred and fifty verses of the Lamentations, Jeremiah describes the meeting of the Sorrowful Mother with the solitary, silent Man who already in His youth bore the yoke, turned His cheek to the strikers, was loaded down with opprobrium, and lay prostrate in the dust, awaiting - all too vainly, alas! - for a little consolation.
"Eli, Eli lamma, sabactani! My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
In company with Mary I wish to follow You, O Jesus, even to Calvary.
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)
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