“I submitted my entire will to His knowing with certainty that everything had happened according to His will and could not have happened unless He had allowed it.“ (Saint Brigid of Sweden, Book 1, Chapter 87).
Though I have been reflecting on the five spears that pierced the heart of the Blessed Virgin over the last five days, it was the revelation that was made to Saint Brigid of Sweden AFTER those spears that caused me to stop and reflect today… You see, immediately after the revelations of the Blessed Virgin to Saint Brigid of Sweden, which Saint Brigid of Sweden recorded in Book 1, Chapter 87 of the revelations of Saint Brigid, Our Lady revealed her thankfulness…
The Blessed Virgin revealed that following the moment of His death on the Cross…
“Then my hands became numb, my eyes were darkened, and my face became pale as a dead man. My ears could hear nothing, my mouth could not speak, my feet trembled, and my body fell to the ground. When I got up from the ground and saw my Son looking horribly disfigured and more miserable than a leper, I submitted my entire will to His knowing with certainty that everything had happened according to His will and could not have happened unless He had allowed it. I therefore thanked Him for everything, and so there was always some joy mixed with my sadness, because I saw that He, who had never sinned, had, in His great love, wanted to suffer this much for the sins of mankind.”
And there is something so profound to be understood in those words of the Blessed Virgin. For she said, “and so there was always some joy mixed with my sadness”. In the moment after her Holy Son’s death – which she had witnessed in all of its agony and in the entirety of its sorrow and suffering – the Mother of God, indeed, Christ’s Mother, experienced JOY…
And how I can see the beauty of that death through the beauty of he Virgin. What a masterpiece of Creation She really is. For it was HER witness of her Holy Son’s Death that showed us joy.
And I have been reflecting on HOW she experienced any joy after witnessing the suffering of her Son – God Himself – because it occurs to me that there is some comfort to be found in that profound experience of mingled JOY and SORROW. And that comfort is there – right there – in the words of the Blessed Virgin to Saint Brigid. Because it is no secret as to why she could bear that anguish… She told Saint Brigid the reason why. She said, “I therefore thanked Him for everything, and so there was always some joy mixed with my sadness, because I saw that He, who had never sinned, had, in His great love, wanted to suffer this much for the sins of mankind.”
For the Blessed Virgin saw the Holy Will of God in all things. And she trusted Him – even in the extremity of her pain. And there is such love in that trust that I have not the words to describe it. I have not even the words…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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