There is a very effective way to imitate Jesus when he returns good for evil (Phil 2:5): having recourse to Our Lady of Sorrows.
To make Christianity more attractive and more sellable on the market of religious pluralism, certain well-intentioned souls wish to obscure the suffering dimension of faith in the illusory hope of better attracting men and women to Christ. In their minds, it is a question of breaking with centuries of “doloristic” piety in order to bring Christian “software” up to date. It goes without saying that for these believers in a cool and soft Christianity, devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows is not on their agenda!
Faced with evil, ask for help from the Virgin of Pity
How many misinterpretations and presumptions are hidden behind this bias! Will evil disappear once it no longer appears in our devotions? Breaking the thermometer never brought down the fever. As if we were intact from the venom of evil, from its bites, or had suddenly become capable of recovering from it on our own! Because in our attachment to Our Lady of Sorrows, it is indeed about this: looking evil in the face and finding the means to recover from it with the help of a person over whom it never had any control: the Virgin Mary . Indeed, the mystery of the suffering and compassion of Our Lady at the foot of the Crossis not confined to the past. It continues and will continue until the end of the world because its pains are linked to all the evil that is committed under the sun. Our Lady suffers and cries over all the wickedness of which humanity is guilty as well as over the misfortunes which are its consequence.
Mary was standing at the foot of the Cross, the summit of iniquity, when men put the Innocent to death.
“That’s edifying,” one might say. But how can this compassion of Our Lady help me in life? » Precisely, if the Church remembers Mary’s compassion, it is so that believers turn to her and ask for her assistance in their trials. Evil can engulf us if we are not careful. There is no point in showing off in this matter. Our Lady was standing at the foot of the Cross , the summit of iniquity, when men put the Innocent to death. She is also fully qualified to help us face the Evil which spares no one.
The one who educates us in evangelical gentleness
Concretely, what to ask of the Virgin of Sorrows? First, patience and endurance in trials. Then, the forgiveness of offenses – she who forgave the executioners of her Son on Golgotha . Sweetness. Resist the temptation to take revenge when we are offended. But also the determination to no longer do evil. It will be said that this is a promise that is never kept. Precisely ! To pray to Our Lady is to recognize that we need her intercession with God to remain faithful to our commitments. As we see, there is no shortage of reasons to resort to Notre-Dame!
Contemplation of Our Lady of Sorrows is a powerful means of resisting evil, not through our own strength, but through prayer. The Virgin gives birth to us to the life of Christ. She is the woman who cries out in the birth pains of the Apocalypse ( Rev 12:2 ) because men are too complicit in evil for their birth to divine life to be an easy and routine thing. Returning good for evil is not a native reflex for us. This is why if we want to follow Christ and carry our cross in non-violence and service to our brothers who are not always as lovable as we would like them to be, it is necessary to pray to She who remained standing at the foot of the Cross and who shared in the sufferings of Jesus because her Heart was animated by the same peaceful and charitable sentiments as that of her Son.
