“And a sword will pierce through your own soul also…”
— Luke 2:35, ESV
The Sorrowful Mother stands at thresholds.
I am beginning to understand that.
She stands where most people cannot stand for long.
At the Cross.
At the tomb.
At the hospital bed.
At the grave.
At the locked door.
At the place where breath becomes silence and the body becomes too honest for polite religion.
She does not flee from sorrow.
She does not explain it away.
She does not decorate it until it becomes acceptable.
She stays.
That may be the first lesson she has been teaching me.
Stay.
Not fix.
Not control.
Not panic.
Not make the wound prettier than it is.
Stay.
For a long time, I thought the Mother of Sorrows was only a devotion. A holy image. A title of Mary that belonged to statues, candles, rosaries, and old prayers whispered by people who knew grief better than I did.
But now I think she is more than that.
She is a teacher.
A matron.
A guide through the veil.
A mother who knows how to stand between death and resurrection without lying about either one.
She has been with me from the beginning of this calling. From the water. From the roses. From the warm honey. From the first moment I understood, however imperfectly, that God had not forgotten me.
And through this dark night, she has not disappeared.
Christ felt hidden at times.
Prayer felt locked.
The altar felt behind glass.
The Eucharist felt like a boat on the horizon, always approaching, always distant, always almost.
But she remained near.
Quiet.
Steady.
Sorrowful.
Not as a replacement for Christ.
Never that.
She does not take me away from Him.
She leads me to Him by a road I did not know how to walk alone.
That road is sorrow.
Not despair.
Not self-pity.
Not darkness for darkness’ sake.
Sorrow.
Holy sorrow.
The kind that does not turn away from the wounded body.
The kind that remembers the dead.
The kind that sees the lonely.
The kind that notices the person dying alone.
The kind that stands beside the grieving without needing to say something clever.
The kind that knows love does not end when breath does.
Mary stood at the Cross.
That matters to me more now than it ever has.
She did not understand everything.
How could she?
She had been told her Son was holy. Promised. Given by God. She had watched Him grow, speak, heal, suffer, and be hated by people who should have recognized the mercy standing in front of them.
Then she watched Him die.
There are no easy words for that.
The Mother of God stood before the dying body of God.
She could not stop it.
She could not bargain it away.
She could not save Him from the nails.
She could only stay.
That is not weakness.
That is strength beyond language.
And maybe that is why she has become so important to me now.
Because I am beginning to understand that my ministry may live near the places people avoid.
The dying.
The dead.
The grieving.
The forgotten.
The wounded.
The souls at the veil.
The bodies returning to earth.
The names no one speaks anymore.
The lonely hospital room.
The grave no one visits.
The person afraid to die.
The family that does not know how to pray.
The queer soul who still fears God because Christians made Him sound cruel.
The spiritually homeless one who wants mercy but cannot enter a church without flinching.
The Sorrowful Mother stands there.
Not above it.
Not away from it.
There.
At the threshold.
And I think she is teaching me how to stand there too.
I used to think ministry had to be more visible.
A building.
A congregation.
A community.
A full altar.
A public work that other people could recognize and understand.
Maybe some of that will come.
Maybe not.
But the more I pray, the more I see that the ministry Christ is forming in me is quieter and stranger than the one I tried to force.
It is not built first from noise.
It is built from attention.
It is built from staying.
It is built from prayer for those who cannot ask.
It is built from reverence for bodies.
It is built from mercy for souls.
It is built from refusing to let death become only medical, practical, bureaucratic, or forgotten.
Death is a threshold.
The body is holy.
The soul is not trash.
Grief is not inconvenience.
And the dead still deserve prayer.
The Sorrowful Mother knows this.
She held the body of Christ.
She knows that a body is not disposable just because breath has left it.
She knows that flesh can be wounded and still beloved.
She knows that love must sometimes kneel before what it cannot change.
She knows that silence is not always absence.
Sometimes silence is the space between crucifixion and resurrection.
That is a terrible space.
Holy Saturday is not comfortable.
It is not pretty.
It is the day when everything looks lost and no one yet knows that the stone will move.
I think much of my dark night has been a kind of Holy Saturday.
Christ hidden.
The altar locked.
Prayer dry.
Identity stripped.
Vocation confused.
The old self dying.
The new self not yet risen.
And the Sorrowful Mother standing beside me, not explaining the mystery, but keeping me from leaving the tomb too early.
That is important.
Sometimes we want resurrection so badly that we refuse to sit with what has died.
But Mary teaches another way.
She teaches that love stays long enough to tell the truth.
This died.
This hurt.
This was real.
This cannot be rushed.
This body mattered.
This grief matters.
This silence matters.
And still, God is not finished.
That is the threshold.
Not denial.
Not despair.
The place between.
The place where sorrow and hope stand close enough to breathe the same air.
I think that is where I am now.
At the threshold.
Not fully out of the dark night.
Not lost the way I was.
Not healed in some clean, easy, shiny way.
But steadier.
Clearer.
More willing to listen.
More willing to let the Sorrowful Mother teach me how to be a priest near sorrow without being swallowed by it.
That may be one of the hardest lessons.
To care without drowning.
To stand near pain without becoming pain.
To pray for the dying without becoming dead inside.
To honor the departed without living only among graves.
To grieve the world without trying to carry the whole world in my ribs.
Mary stood at the Cross.
But she did not climb onto every cross.
That distinction matters.
She stayed.
She loved.
She surrendered.
She trusted what she could not understand.
And she let God be God.
Maybe that is what she is teaching me now.
Stay near the wounded.
Pray for the dead.
Honor the body.
Comfort the grieving.
Listen at the veil.
But do not confuse compassion with control.
Do not confuse ministry with self-erasure.
Do not confuse sorrow with despair.
Do not confuse the threshold with the end.
The Mother of Sorrows is not leading me into death as a place of darkness.
She is leading me into death as a place where Christ has already gone.
That changes everything.
Christ entered the tomb.
Christ sanctified the grave.
Christ descended into the depths.
Christ rose with wounds still visible.
So if I am called to the dying and the departed, I am not being called away from resurrection.
I am being called to stand where resurrection is most needed.
At the bedside.
At the grave.
At the silence after the last breath.
At the place where the family does not know what to do with their hands.
At the cemetery where the wind says more than any sermon.
At the hidden altar where names are lifted into mercy.
The Sorrowful Mother stands there.
And I think she has been waiting for me to stop forcing other doors long enough to see her at this one.
Maybe this is why she has been with me all along.
Not only to comfort me.
To form me.
To teach me the ministry of staying.
To show me that sorrow can become vocation when it is given to Christ.
To help me understand that the veil is not empty.
To remind me that the dead are not forgotten.
To teach me that a priest does not always begin with a crowd.
Sometimes a priest begins with one name.
One grave.
One prayer.
One body treated with reverence.
One soul commended to mercy.
One grieving person who is not left alone.
One candle in the dark.
That is not failure.
That is ministry.
And perhaps this is the door that has been opening all along.
Not the door of success.
Not the door of performance.
Not the door of the priest I thought I had to be.
The threshold.
The place where sorrow stands watch.
The place where Mary waits.
The place where Christ has already passed through death and made even the grave answer to mercy.
So I stand there now.
Not bravely every day.
Not perfectly.
Not without fear.
But with more peace than I had before.
Under her mantle.
Near the veil.
With Christ ahead of me.
With the dead and wounded pressing gently on my heart.
With the old darkness behind me, not gone exactly, but no longer the only voice.
The Sorrowful Mother is at the threshold.
And I think, at last, she is teaching me how to stand there too.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2025.