To everything turn, turn, turn. We need to turn to our Mother...

Lent is a time of repentance. We pray for a real turning. We ask for a change deeper than any shift on the surface ... we ask for no less than a complete change of heart.

Last week we looked into the icon of "Jesus Christ Redeemer Holy Silence", and Silence has led us to this, Our Lady of Sorrows. This is an icon of infinite com-passion ("suffering with") and it was commissioned with that prayer in mind. In 1993 a friend called with the tragic news that his sister was in the final stages of AIDS, and asked me to "write" an icon as a prayer for her. I plunged into my icon books and finally found this 14th. century image of the Mater Dolorosa from the Monastery of the Transfiguration in Meteora, Greece.

This icon is the left wing of a diptych (two panels) which I later felt compelled to expand into a triptych (three panels) and we will see the other two in the coming weeks.

We see here an image of great solemnity set in a darkness that is deep and wordless. The Mother of God, head bent in obvious exhaustion, pulls her cloak closer to her and leans on that hand. Her eyes are the stricken open eyes of a slaughtered deer. They are half vacant with consuming affliction, half with the shock of having just witnessed the slow torture and murder of her only child. The right hand rises, with or without heart, in a gesture of consent. The Mother who cannot even lift her head lets this hand float up in the dark night of faith. She offers one last "Let it be according to Your will".

The letters to the left of her head MP OY are abbreviations for "Mother of God." The three stars on her blood red maphorion (cloak) always indicate her virginity before, during and after the birth of Christ, one is hidden here behind the left hand.

We believe that Mary is not some symbolic or figurative mother, but in every way, truly our Mother (John 19). She is "there for each of us", inside of each grief, each set-back, each of our toddling steps toward God. A veritable avalanche of real and purported apparitions in this century tell us this over and over again.

Perhaps what makes this so painful to believe is that we see this woman all the time. Not the resplendent Mother of Light, but the Mother of Sorrows. We see her nightly on the television news in Iraq, Bosnia, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Russia, Rwanda, India, New York ... Los Angeles. We feel helpless as we watch her, afraid our prayers as we watch are not enough to touch her grief. We feel like she did beneath the Cross at the time of her child's death and even now as she bears the countless deaths of her other children on earth. We would so love to see her transfigured, healed, as the Queen of Heaven and Earth. But in this icon she comes as every mother, and this is our way to her. This is our way to one another, through the silent and tremendously healing door of compassion.

See the many images Fr. McNichols has written, click "other icons."

William Hart McNichols,SJother icons