Patience - December 20

Patience
Thoughts on the Patient Endurance of Sorrows and Sufferings

MATER DOLOROSA

There is a group of statuary called the "Pieta," which reminds us of all the sorrows of the Blessed Virgin, not by representing them all, but by pre­senting to our view that scene in the sacrifice of Calvary wherein the dead body of the Saviour, after having been taken down from the cross, is laid in the arms of the Mother of Sorrows; that moment when Mary gave to Jesus the last sad look and the last loving embrace ere His sacred body was consigned to the tomb. When we be­hold the dead body of Christ pressed to the bo­som of the Virgin Mother, when we behold Mary's searching, agonizing glance into the sight­less eyes, and into the gaping wounds of Jesus, we need not be told what had been, up to this, the Son's sufferings or the Mother's sorrows. Just as the last kiss on the brow of a loved one cold in death brings, in an instant, before the mind, the incidents of his last sickness, even the whole life of the dead, so one look on this group recalls all the incidents of Our Lord's suffering and of Our Lady's sorrow, with the distinctness and viv­idness with which a flash of lightning reveals objects in the darkness....
[Continued tomorrow]
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Compiled and Edited by Rev. F. X. Lasance
Author of "My Prayerbook," etc.
1937, Benziger Brothers
Printers to the Holy Apostolic See