Our Lady of Sorrows and Religious Strangeness
Hi friends,
It feels like it’s been a long time! I didn’t send out an email in August because we were so busy getting settled in here in Austin, but we’re mostly settled now. I keep telling people that it feels so good to be back, but really it feels more than good. There’s a quote in Brideshead Revisited about New York: “. . .for in that city there is a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.” I don’t think everyone feels that way about New York--I think it is energizing for some people, and it was for me too for a while. But it wasn’t until I left that I realized how much the energy had started to feel like anxiety for me. It’s been lovely to be back in Austin, where things move more slowly. I can feel myself unwinding and I like it. September is going to be for taking deep breaths and praying that my kids stay covid-free at school (I wouldn’t say no to your prayers either!) and putting the finishing touches on the book that’ll be going to my editor soon. It’s due on All Saint’s Day, which feels fitting.
In the Catholic Church, every month is devoted to a particular tradition, usually matching a feast of that month. September is dedicated to Our Lady of Sorrows, whose feast day is September 15th. Our Lady of Sorrows is a reference to the sorrows of Mary’s life. Traditionally, there are seven of them: the prophecy of Simeon in which Mary is told her heart will be pierced by a sword, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the child Jesus in the Temple, meeting Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, the crucifixion, Jesus being taken down from the cross, and Jesus’ burial. Devotion to these particular seven sorrows, and Our Lady of Sorrows more broadly, is popular in the Catholic Church. There’s achaplet of the Seven Sorrows. There’s alitany to Our Lady of Seven Sorrows. There’s anovenaand ascapularand yearlyprocessions. She is beloved all over, the patron saint of Slovakia and Hungary, Malta and Mississippi, a handful of municipalities in the Philippines.
If you’re not Catholic, you might not know the history of Our Lady of Sorrows, you might not be able to name her seven sorrows, and you might not know about all of her particular little folk devotions, but you almost certainly knowwhat she looks like. I guarantee you’d be able to pick her out of a lineup of kitschy Catholic art. Anguished eyes cast to heaven, rosy cheeks dotted with crystalline tears, an oft-bleeding heart pierced with swords. This is quintessential high Catholic drama. It’s brutal and messy and charged with emotion and I love it.
I spend a lot of time on the internet talking and writing about religious feeling. I do this because I find it fascinating, but not because I’m particularly gifted at it. For all my waxing poetic about feelings, I don’t actually feel terribly comfortable expressing my feelings. It doesn’t come naturally to me. In my own relationship with faith, my instinct is to make theology abstract and therefore easier to hold in my mind without letting it change my soul. What I like so much about Catholic devotions like Our Lady of Sorrows is that they push back against the instinct to keep faith at a comfortable distance. There is nothing comfortable about Our Lady of Sorrows. Indeed, I find her to be particularly uncomfortable, but I also think that this deep sense of feeling is an integral part of the faith.
I also don’t dislike that she makes me uncomfortable. I think that the discomfort is sometimes the point. Religion is not here to make us comfortable, and one of my great pet peeves is folks who try to sanitize Christianity. You can try all you like to make Christianity seem nice and clean and normal and respectable, but there’s nothing respectable about it, not really. I understand the impulse to put a polite veneer on Christianity, to attempt to make it socially palatable so as not to scare people away. But the weirdness is the best part! To be a Christian is to believe in a wounded God risen from the literal dead. That’s strange, and the Christianity I love is the Christianity that leans deeply into the strangeness and makes its people strange too.
When I let myself lean into the strangeness of Christianity--when I really let myself try to feel what Our Lady of Sorrows feels--I am reminded that faith is housed in the body and that to encounter faith is to feel something, to be moved by it, and to let it change me. This Christianity of feeling is the Christianity I love and aspire to, because that’s the Christianity that baptizes itself in the visceral strangeness of faith. It’s what causespilgrims to crawl on their knees to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It’s the seed of the Good Friday processions of thepenitentes. From it comesJulian of Norwich’s brutal visions of ChristandCatherine of Siena living on the Eucharistand amother weeping for her dying son. Religion like this isn’t easy or palatable, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, and Our Lady of Sorrows keeps me honest about it.