Our Lady of Sorrows

That title for Mary kind of sounds pretentious until you consider the source of it. If Jesus suffered for our sins, she suffered through His suffering. Sure, we all love Jesus, but nobody was closer to Him than she was, and nobody (but Him) suffered as much as she did when He was crucified. This passage from Mark Shea's new book Behold Your Mother explains it in wonderful, awful clarity:

For, of course, there are two kinds of agony: the agony we feel for ourselves and the agony we feel for another. Jesus felt all the terror of mortal flesh when He contemplated the fate that was snaking toward Him as the little trail of torches wended its way across the Kidron Valley and up the slope of the Mount of Olives on Holy Thursday evening. He sweated blood and begged to be spared. Three times He pleaded with His Father to let the cup pass from Him. But it could not pass. In that hour, His disciples slept and He was completely alone.

Except for one kindred spirit. We do not know where Mary was at this time. The Gospels are silent. But we know ordinary human experience. We know the anguish of a mother who begs God that her baby be spared the ravages of cancer and that she suffer in her child's place. We know of parents who drown in the attempt to save their children. We know of parents who push their children out of the way of oncoming cars and are killed or crippled to save them. We know the agonies of parents bereft of their sons and daughters by drunk drivers, or school violence, or the thousand idiot havocs the world wreaks on our lives. We know how powerfully their hearts cry out like David's and say, "Would that I had died instead of you!" And because of this we know that Mary could not have contemplated the terrible agonies Jesus was about to face without wishing with all her heart that she could take the blows rather than Him. Jesus' cup was to endure hanging upon the Cross. Mary's cup was to endure not hanging upon the Cross.

I can't even imagine.