Our Lady of Sorrows, by Christine Miller
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Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
Long ago now — in the mid-nineteen-eighties — my father, on a whim, bought a used dark-green Saab coupe. I remember it wasn’t expensive. But it was news of a difference. My dad always bought Chryslers, usually a Dodge van or sedan. The Saab was a lark, a fun step sideways for a straight-laced, silent-generation father of seven who sat on the state appellate court and pledged to his Lutheran church and generally did things conventionally.
And one day I foolishly, ridiculously rolled that Saab on its side and into a ditch. I wasn’t even supposed to drive it. I called and asked him if I could, and he said “No, I’ll be home soon, sit tight,” but I went ahead and drove it anyway, to take my friend to a nearby restaurant to apply for a job. She and I walked the rest of the way to the restaurant and I asked to use their phone, and I called my father. I told him what happened.
“Oh damn it, damn it, damn it,” he said. I started to say “I’m sorry” but he cut me off. I think he asked if I was okay, but everything was a miserable blur after his initial outburst. He was a decent man and a good father: he did care that I was okay. If he didn’t ask, well… Oh, he probably asked.
The cute green Saab was totaled. I have a memory that it had cost only three thousand dollars, or something, so it wouldn’t have taken much to total it. In the next scene of the drama, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, tense, defeated, guilty, ridiculous. My father is pacing, maybe muttering, mostly just going about his evening, and going through the motions of scolding me. My dad wasn’t a scold. He didn’t shout. Silent generation, remember? Endurance is their watchword.
But my mother was sitting opposite me at the table. She looked at me. Then she said, “You must have been so scared.” I burst into tears. “I really am sorry,” I wailed. “I know,” she said. “He’ll be alright. You’ll be alright.”
Being my parent was a hardship for my dad that day, and for that, he truly has my empathy. And I’m forever grateful for his lifelong, nonviolent, powerfully ethical management of his anger, and his disappointment. None of us revisited this misery after that day. The world turned. We really were alright.
But I had something more, something precious, something invaluable: I had, for the rest of my life, the memory of my mother’s mercy, my mother’s lovingkindness, her chesed, to borrow the Hebrew word. “You must have been so scared,” she said. Behold the brilliance of this line: It was not a question — questions are stressful when one is in crisis. It was pure empathy, applied like a balm to my open wound. The healing began immediately, on contact. I was a poor banished child of Eve, sitting there at that kitchen table, and my mother was the Blessed Mother. I was not praying to my dad for forgiveness (even then I knew better than to ask for forgiveness when the offense was so fresh). I was not praying to God, either. My soul was just crying this out into the universe: “I want my mommy.”
And my mother heard that.
And now here we all are, here in Seattle, some forty years later, a world — a universe — away from that dumb kid who wrecked his dad’s inexpensive car. Maybe some of us are wrestling with guilt about one thing or another. Certainly many of us are despairing about something. A majority of us, I know, are reeling with grief here at this church, in the wake of the deaths of two companions whose souls magnified the Lord, companions who brought forth beauty in this place, companions who were lightly funny and fiercely kind. There is a stinging, pulsing anguish here, for many of us. And those who never met John or Tom are likely carrying into this room other wounds of the heart.
Yet today, I say with bracing joy, today it is Mother Mary herself who sits opposite the table, not my parents’ kitchen table in suburban St. Paul Minnesota, but this Table. Mother Mary herself gazes at us across this Table, and in my hearing she says, “You must have been so scared.”
And she says more. “You must have been so stunned, so wrecked, so aggrieved, so hurt, so confused, so mad, so horrified, so broken by all of this.”
And she says more. “You must still be reeling, still grieving, still panicking as you try to make sense of this heartbreaking world, as you try to make sense of how small you are and how great the troubles are. You must still be scared.”
She need not ask us even one question. Like my own skillful mother, Mary knows that questions are stressful in a crisis. And I suppose she knows all of the answers anyway.
We craft beautiful prayers to speak — to sing — deep longing to Mother Mary, the Mother of God. We approach Our Lady of Sorrows with solemnity, knowing that she understands our grief; she has felt our fears. She never got over the death of her son. How could she? Our Jewish cousins would call her a shakula, a mother whose child has died. You can only befriend a shakula; you can only draw alongside them; there are no questions; there are no words. Yes, he was resurrected, but he came back different, and he came back belonging to the whole universe.
A shakula may understand the Christian Gospel that Christ trampled death by death, and bestowed life to everyone in the grave; yes, yes, we are Christian: we proclaim this Good News. But we don’t escape the scorching reality of death, even if it’s not the end of our story. We feel the great tear in the fabric of community when someone we adore departs from our immediate midst. Our beloved dead gather with us here, at this table, maybe on either side of Mother Mary herself. But that does not magically ease the pain of their departure from one of these benches, next to you, next to me.
But being with the grieving, being with each other — it can be healing. It is a balm. When we make art of Our Lady of Sorrows, like this icon, or, even more vividly, when we imagine seven swords rending her heart, we begin to find our way to consolation, wholeness, and hope. Sorrowful Mary carries grief right into the heart of God, right into the community of the Holy Three. And there, awash in divine love, that grief is redemptive, transformative, creative. It binds our hearts but also opens them, in mercy, to the grieving person on our right and on our left.
We live in a serendipitous, phenomenal, unpredictable world of shocking accidents and piercing grief, and so we are heartbroken. But our heartbreak is hallowed, it is harrowed, by the Risen One, the Risen One who still bears five grievous wounds on his hands, feet, and heart.
So go ahead and gaze at Sorrowful Mary, as she reaches toward you in mercy. Go ahead and ask her to help, hold, and guide you in these fraught and frantic days, when our hearts ache so badly. As for me, I may say just one thing to the Mother of God, the one robed in stars who stands on the moon, the Queen of Saints herself. But before I tell you my prayer to Mary, I’ll say in my own defense that like most of us here, I have grown to adulthood and grappled with hardship. I am not a child, or a fool. I know well the cost of love. And I know well that the mercies we receive from the Blessed Mother, and from her wounded and risen son — I know that these mercies must be shared by us in acts of liberation that lift up the lowly and send the rich empty away. I know all of this.
But Our Lady of Sorrows understands how young and small we sometimes feel, as the world breaks our hearts. We don’t need to pretend in her presence. And we shouldn’t submit to the weakness and cowardice of cynicism. We should choose instead to be bravely honest, and courageously vulnerable, as people of faith, people of hope, people of love. So I may say just one thing to the Blessed Mother, one thing that will restore my strong heart, focus my good mind, and sustain, for me, a ministry of mercy in my one small life. I know that she will hear me, and respond gracefully, when I pray this to her:
I want my mommy.
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Preached on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin (transferred), August 17, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 61:10-11
Psalm 34:1-9
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 1:46-55