Why Do You Weep, Our Lady of Sorrows?
Why do you weep, our lady of sorrows?
Your name is of a solitary-dual relationship. You are the virgin for you had not sacrificed your purity, and you are Mary for you are a virgin. The absence of something is the presence of the other; you are both solitary and attached. This solitude is false for it is bound by your attachment to something else. Your virginity suggests a sort of independence from any being, yet it is because of that exactly that you are shackled. In order to assert virginity, the adverse of it is to be taken into account.
This confined identity leaves no space for the sound of the man in the choir I attend, intonating you. The sound of storm rebelled through his voice, and once again, the continuous emphasis on your purity, painted the man as violating for he dared to sing of you, to know you in a circle of chanting women of dedication to you. Does this false painted portrait ever benefit you? Who are you, Mary, if not a virgin in a cold, deserted bed?
A mother, an entity that asserts motherhood yet contradicts the essence of a mother. For conception cannot take place without the active sin, and its absence paints you still as the opposition of the blame taken upon you. You are the sacred and the unholy.
The sacred, for you have carried the king in your womb, and you remain untouched, but your womb is but a predecessor of the walls clogging Christ’s flesh from coming back in and then out. You are his first creator and his first grave. The womb and the tomb.
Is it enough, however, to be untouched by a mortal man yet possessed by the creator’s hands that will leave you childless once again? Does God’s interference with your body not object that renowned sacredness?
You weep, Mary, for you have witnessed the taunting, the torture, the death of your first-born. The same eyes that moved their way under a date tree in Bethlehem whilst in labor, the same eyes that met with their newborn’s still closed ones. The same eyes that, with the first sunrise and the second sunset, attested to the lashes, to the cross descended from the same wood you used for igniting the fire that kept you out of the darkness of the world.
Yet, would your name be of mention had you not been a mere vessel? That this vessel that is your womb could not find pleasure in your son’s company, for he tended to forget the mother that birthed him, that had her world quivering from the feet to the covered head, yet did not stop him from attending to his disciples, the angels, the scriptures, and the sinners instead.
Mary, have you companions of angels to better understand the son they watch over when you were propelled aside? To what extent did your hands stretch in favor of catching a glimpse of the man you thought was still stuck in the warmth and familiarity of infancy? When he was publicly surrounded by neighbors, was he still the same boy you knew? Did he dedicate his sight for you in those moments of perception and praise? Did he preach too hard, aiming his words at you? Which of the apostles had you warned him about before his untimely demise? Did he listen to you? Were your words of accompanied attention when you spoke?
Mary, your virginity is not treated as the absence of conception escorted by the miracle of the birth of Jesus. Mary, your virginity precedes your name for it is an identity latched onto you- the purest form a woman can remain. The virgin that is the gate to the heavenly throne, the mother of all mothers. The mother that the son surely cannot think of impurely, the mother that has attained motherhood- the miracle being the absence of sex with sex being the reminder of a hidden perversion. You are what is expected of a woman, though biologically impossible. With you transcending that, I fear we are still stuck in the same loop, if not in a more convoluted one.
Mary, if you are not a mother, then who are you? And how are you to be defined by your motherhood? Your son, which you carried unwillingly, is not a testament to your maternal feelings. You did not choose to be chosen. This forceful relationship is not to be placed in the highest praises of the desperate prayers of faithful mothers, for you, unlike them, went in labor secretly, yet were humiliated publicly as you witnessed your son’s dripping blood as it became thicker than your body’s aftermath of birth.
Mary, who are you when the eyes of God are not inspecting your every move?
Have you any sickness from the hefty gravity you held when you carried him in your arms for the first time? Do your tears shed for your fate or your son’s? If both are intertwined, then which occurrence took place firstly?
As you knelt to the ground, witnessing your boy’s blood-filled hair, did you reminisce the time you bathed him for the first time, back when his cross was brittle and unable to nail him still? What feelings did you cultivate for God for leaving you stranded?
Loss can only take place when it was once of deep occupation. Were you granted a son so that you can feel the ache of losing him? Did you curse the creator before blaming Judas?
Our lady of sorrows, your heart penetrated seven times. On the 15th of September each year, your sorrow is to be commemorated. What can one feel, knowing they are to be used as an advantageous, hopeful inspiration? An example of the existence of God, the validity of ancient and modern trauma, the relatability of the pain of childbirth and child-raising. How are we humanizing the divine yet breaching their most agonizing memories?
Mary, you are to be mentioned when suffering is at the tip of the tongue. Mary, your death remains ambiguous, yet your son’s wasn’t. Didn’t you come first? Would he be of existence had you not been created? Why is the vagueness of your death present when you are the bearer of his blood? It is because your story ultimately begins and ends with Christ.
The mother in you seeks unwanted identity within the child she chose not to willingly conceive had God not been in play. That identity of permanence paints you of prominence only because you fulfilled one of God’s many plans. The truth of your death, whose cause was never determined, demeans your rejoiced identity. The man is to be announced, his fate spoken, the woman to be hidden, her pain untold.
Perhaps, Mary, the imposed, conflicting identity led to your dearth. The creator of Christ, whom without you, he would not have been birthed, your own blood flows in his, not God’s. Yet, you are the subordinate, no matter how many times you are hailed.
Our lady of sorrows? Whose lady? Why are you to be of a constant belonging to someone else? First, God, then the opposition of virginity, then virginity, then Christ, then us? When do we start and stop at Mary?
And if it were to be said that Mary opened her arms once Gabriel came bearing annunciation, then it is only natural for her to do so. Has she the power to shoot arrows from those arms to the sky that occupies God?
