Meditations for Layfolk - Mother of Mercy

There seems to have been no parable that so much attracted the early Christians as the parable of the Good Shepherd. They have scrawled over the walls of the catacombs the figure of the Divine Master, carrying upon His bowed shoulders the wandering and rescued lamb. Even when they set out to depict the figure of Saint Peter, the vicar of Christ, they show him also as continuing the role of his leader, and in their forceful art have carved the Apostle in the guise and at the work of a shepherd. The child Jesus Himself in their best and most charming statue is the boy David, with a sling, and yet at the same time with the poor and familiar load of a sheep. Then, as though they could not conceive of any more beautiful idea in which to sum up the work of God's Maiden Mother, they have in one case represented her by the side of the Good Shepherd, feeding with her hands a crowd of fluttering birds: she, too, has the high and sacred office that comes to those who the more nearly approach to Christ, of succouring the distressed. We, also, hail her under various titles that so proclaim her kindly privilege: she is Our Lady of Perpetual Succour; above all, the Mother of Mercy. Now mercy, about which the poets have said such beautiful things (especially Shakespeare in several of his plays; The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, both have passages of peculiar and affecting loveliness), implies on the one hand a power of sympathy, and on the other a position to show that mercy to others the fellow-feeling of sorrow and the ability to help.

In the case of Our Lady it must be evident that she has an understanding of all distress. We speak of her as the Queen of Martyrs, the Mother of Sorrows, because we regard her as having touched the depths of all human anguish. The whole progress of her life was a progress in suffering from the moment of the birth of her Son, through the early anxieties that the massacre of the Innocents entailed, the words of Simeon, the losing of the Child and His seemingly upbraiding words about His Father's business. The shadow of the Cross during all the thirty years of intimacy, the leave-taking, the known plottings of the Pharisees, the detailed pains of those last days, and the terrors of His agony and death and burial, have marked out her burden as above the burdens that have fallen to the lot of the Cursed children of Adam. Is there exaggeration in the way that the Church applies to her the words that the prophets spoke of her Son, that there was no other sorrow to be seen like unto hers? Indeed, apart from His sufferings, which more than any other human being she was able to realize, there have never been sufferings such as hers. Desolation, distress, disappointment, bereavement, were the constant attendants of her life: no one, then, can approach her without feeling that she will understand their own woe. And if she understands as none other can, will she not also desire to help as none other can, since she is the mother of Him who was all love? If His saints are distinguished by love, caught from the fire of His heart, certainly she more than them all must have in her nature the wide sympathy of Christ - the sympathy, and also the will to aid.

Not, then, alone as the spring-head whence broke the waters of wisdom, but as also the nearest and most faithful follower of the divine fount of mercy, we come to her in our distress - confident, indeed, we are, that she will understand by the sad experience of her own troubled life on earth, confident also that, understanding, she will desire to help, we turn to her. The love of God, that has worked the great deeds of pity since the world began, cannot exist in her without effect; the kindness that she saw for thirty years on earth cannot have left her outlook on life untouched: Mother of Sorrow, she is also the Mother of the Pitiful Heart. Not merely does she sympathize with sorrow, but she is filled with longing to ease and allay it - the consoler, we say, of the afflicted. Finally, she not only understands and desires to help, but she has far more than any other the power to show that in the fullest way. The Chroniclers tell us that when Edward III had made up his mind to destroy the burghers of Calais because of the harm they had wrought upon his subjects, and had refused to spare their lives, even at the request of his best soldier and his favourite knight, the Queen of England hurried from her court across the sea to add her petitions to the same cause. Wrathful at her arrival and at her demand, he could only answer: "I can deny nothing to the mother of my son." In applying this to Our Lady, is there not in this purely human view of God and His dealings with men, something of comfort? He does not, indeed, repent of His commands, but He may well have willed to spare at the request of the Mother of His Son.

- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.