Given at St Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, Archway, on 15th September, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, at a Mass to celebrate the unveiling of a new painting of Our Lady of Sorrows, gifted to the parish from Cardinal Vincent Nichols.
We have Cardinal Vincent to thank for this beautiful picture, as well as, of course, Alexander Talbot-Rice, its inspired creator. Alexander offered it to the Cardinal as a gift; and the Cardinal was clear it should reside here in this beautiful church. As soon as I discussed it with the priests, we knew where it must hang, right here above the shrine of your great patron, the holy St Gabriel. Because no one has ever had a greater devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows.
It’s good, on this occasion, I think, to recall a little of Gabriel’s life. It’s interesting to know he learnt his devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows from within his own family. They were a large family. Born in 1838, more than 180 years ago, he came from a huge family, in fact: he was the 11th of 13 children. They were reasonably well-off; and pious. He was baptized on the day of his birth, in the same font as St Francis, in Assisi; and there they lived, in Assisi, till his father’s work took him to Spoleto. But when he was only 4, they suffered the tragedy of his mother dying.
Still this didn’t prevent him from being an outgoing child. We’re told that, as a teenager, he loved the theatre; he loved to dance and to hunt. Cheerful and good-looking, he was such a favourite with the girls that they called him il Damerino, the ladies’ man! Even so, he felt, even as a teenager, that there was something lacking in all of this, though he didn’t know what.
It was when he contracted Tuberculosis in his last year at school that he got an inkling of his calling: he promised God that, if he recovered, he would enter religious life. He got better but didn’t act on his promise. He witnessed a procession carrying an icon of Our Lady to Spoleto Cathedral and felt the call to join the Passionists. But still he didn’t do anything about it. He fell ill again and renewed his promise. This time he applied to join the Jesuits but then didn’t persevere with the application process. It was when his sister died of cholera that it brought home to him the precariousness of life. He decided at last to join the Passionists.
But, after just four years in the Order, he contracted TB again. He had to live as an invalid. He was deepening all the time in his prayer life and he received many spiritual favours from God and Our Lady. But he wanted to keep these secret; and succeeded in destroying all the notes he’d written about this before he died. What we do know is that he derived enormous strength, comfort and inspiration from meditating on all that Jesus’s mother suffered at the foot of the cross, as he prayed to Our Lady of Sorrows. He died just two days before his 24th birthday on 27th February 1862. He died in great peace. He was proclaimed in due course the patron saint of many different groups: the patron of the young, especially young married couples, also students and clerics. What joy it must give him, does give him, as he looks down on us tonight, to see Our Lady honoured here at his shrine with such a remarkable painting.
The painting is truly eloquent. It shows us Mary clearly in distress at what she sees. The sorrow is palpable in her face. We think we see a halo above her. Or is it a halo? Is it not rather the earth eclipsing the sun? Here Alex has captured magnificently what we find written in the Passion of Luke, how ‘the sun’s light failed, so that darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour’. More striking still is the way the darkness and light above her head actually seem to divide, as if to recapture what Luke then goes on to say, how ‘the veil of the sanctuary was torn right down the middle’. And, of course, this is the moment Mary hears her Son cry out, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’
Part of the genius, I think, of this work is that, as we look at her, we begin to look with her.
In Jerusalem, you can stand at the place where it’s believed Mary stood to behold her Son. We imagine Mary and John standing right beneath the cross. But, in Jerusalem, they show you how she and the Beloved Disciple probably stood at a distance: within earshot, yes, but at a little bit of a remove. As you stand on that spot, you begin to look with Mary. And it occurs to you that, very soon now, they will place in her arms the body of her child, lifeless and limp after he’s been taken from the cross. It’s a scene Gabriel will have meditated on so often: the sixth Sorrow of Mary, The Taking Down of the Body of Jesus from the Cross.
Gabriel’s devotion to Our lady of Sorrows must have prepared him for the suffering he would experience in his own illness, just as Mary found strength in her own hour of need through pondering on all that she saw happening to her Son. This was brought home to me when I saw the film The Passion of the Christ. Many of you will have seen that film yourselves. I don’t know what you made of it. I found many of the scenes a little stilted but then I have to admit their power remained with me, rather like tableaux whose beauty I can’t deny.
I found particularly moving the scene where Jesus is making his way to Calvary; and his mother Mary wishes to meet him. Do you remember it? It’s a portrayal, of course, of the fourth Sorrow of Mary: The Meeting of Jesus and Mary on the Way of the Cross. In the film, Mary finds her way down a narrow alley knowing Jesus will soon pass that way. He stumbles under the weight of the cross; and looks up to see her. They gaze into the eyes of each other. And she has a flashback, back to the time when Jesus was a little boy of three and fell while playing in the backyard. He cut his knees badly, and she took him up into her arms to console him. She remembers all of this as she contemplates his knees now, gashed from falling under the weight of the cross, wishing she could hold him again in his moment of agony.
I’ve reflected on the meaning of that scene ever since I first set eyes on Michelangelo’s Pieta in Rome at the age of 17. I’ve had the privilege of being able often to go back to it. And the more I’ve pondered it, the more it’s made me think that when Mary set out 33 years earlier with joy to greet her cousin Elizabeth to share the news which had been brought her by another Gabriel, she can have had no inkling that this was how it would all end; or then, I wonder, did she? Because, just eight days after the birth, she was told by Simeon that a sword would pierce her heart. The full impact of that warning came when she heard that Herod had put out an order for all boys under the age of two to be killed. Now, some 32 years later, the impact is all the greater, as she contemplates the gashed knees of her Son, his body now lifeless in her arms.
Luke tells us often that Mary pondered all these things in her heart. And it was surely pondering the whole mystery of her Son’s living and dying that gave her the strength to bear his death and also the strength to believe that he would rise as he had promised. This strength she communicated to the Twelve, helping them believe, as they gathered in the Upper Room, that all was not yet completed, that there was life on the other side of death. I believe all of this is suggested, in this painting, and it’s the last observation I’ll make about it, by her hands. Her hands are extremely eloquent, aren’t they? Her right hand she holds to her breast, as if to convey the pain, the sorrow she feels deep within. But the left hand? What is that doing? We think at first it’s pointing, or perhaps indicating they must cease what they’re doing to her Son. Till we realize it’s actually explaining. It’s a teaching hand, echoing what Luke reports Jesus telling Cleopas and the other disciple in two days’ time, ‘Do you not understand that it was necessary the Christ should suffer?’
Mary knew. She understood; because she had pondered all these things in her heart. This painting is nothing if not an invitation to us to ponder also. What does it mean for Gabriel to be called St Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows if it’s not that he, too, pondered, profoundly, the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord through the eyes of Mary? This picture is an invitation for us to join him in that journey; and experience, as often as we can or care to, in contemplating the suffering of Our Lord through the eyes of his dear Mother and ours, Our Lady Queen of Sorrows, peace, consolation, insight and, above all, trust, in the Lord’s saving power.