• Count what the Gradual leaves out
• Sorrowful and tearful, with no because
• Judith acted, and Mary could not
• Nobody is owed your lesson
• What the Collect does with the fruit

Count what the Gradual leaves out

Read the Gradual again and count the things it does not say.

Sorrowful and tearful art thou, O Virgin Mary, standing by the Cross of the Lord Jesus, thy Son and Redeemer. That is the whole antiphon. There is no purpose clause in it, no so that and no in order that. The Church has the woman’s grief in front of her, at the centre of a second-class feast built entirely around it, and she declines to say what it was for.

Sorrowful and tearful is a description, not a verdict and not a stage on the way to somewhere.

The Roman orations are dense with purpose clauses; that is the characteristic grammar of the Latin collect, which almost always asks for something in order that something else may follow. Here the grammar simply stops. Sorrowful and tearful, standing there, and a full stop where the reason should be.

I think the omission is the teaching. A grief that comes with a reason attached has been converted into something else, into a transaction or a fee. The Gradual looks at a woman who is sorrowful and tearful and does not improve her.

The same Mass does it elsewhere. The Collect a few lines earlier is built on exactly the machinery the Gradual withholds: grant that we, who reverently commemorate her piercing through and her suffering, may obtain the abundant fruit of Thy Passion. The compiler knew how to write a purpose clause. He wrote one. He simply did not attach it to the sorrow itself.

Sorrowful and tearful, with no because

Yesterday was adjacent ground, and I do not want the two run together. On the Exaltation of the Holy Cross the argument was about who ends up in the dock when a court convicts an innocent man, which was a claim about judgment. Today’s is smaller and harder, and it is a claim about grammar: the liturgy names a sorrow and supplies no because.

The consoling move is always available, and the Church does not take it. She could have said that Mary’s sorrow completed something, or purchased something. Instead we get two adjectives and a participle. Sorrowful and tearful, standing by the Cross.

Now hold that against what gets said to people who are sorrowful and tearful. Almost nobody is left alone with a grief. Within a week somebody will have explained it, and the explanations run to a short list: it will make you stronger, it happened for a reason, God does not give you more than you can carry, one day you will see why.

The explanations are for the person doing the explaining. A grief with a reason attached is bearable to stand next to. A grief that is simply grief, sorrowful and tearful and going nowhere, is very hard to sit beside, and the sentence that fixes it fixes it for the visitor rather than for the one who is sorrowful and tearful.

The liturgy is under no such pressure. It can afford to look at somebody who is sorrowful and tearful for as long as the Mass lasts and never once reach for the sentence that would make it easier to look at.

The tradition has often been the one handing out the explanations. The same Church that produced this antiphon has, in other rooms and other centuries, told people their suffering was a correction or a debt. Both are true at once, and the antiphon was in the books the whole time, sung once a year, sorrowful and tearful and refusing to say why.

Judith acted, and Mary could not

Here the Mass does something genuinely strange.

The Epistle is the praise of Judith, and the words are enormous. Blessed above all women upon the earth. Thy praise shall not depart out of the mouth of men for ever.

That citation is earned by an act. Judith did something: she went out and took a risk with her own life, and the Lesson says so in as many words. Thou hast not spared thy life, by reason of the distress and tribulation of thy people, but hast prevented our ruin. She prevented it. That is a verb with an object, and the blessing is pinned to what it did.

Then the Mass hands that citation to a woman who prevented nothing.

Everything in the Gospel happens to Mary. She stands; she is spoken to; she is given away to somebody else’s keeping. She does not intervene, and there is no suggestion anywhere in the pericope that she could have. She is sorrowful and tearful at an execution she has no power over, and the Church reads Judith’s commendation over her anyway.

Judith is blessed for what she prevented. Mary is sorrowful and tearful at the thing that was not prevented, and the same words come down on her.

The praise came loose from the outcome. Judith’s blessing was earned by a result, and it has been transferred, unaltered, to a woman who is sorrowful and tearful with no result at all to show.

The Gospel’s last exchange is the part people reach for, and it will not carry as much as it is usually asked to carry. Woman, behold thy son. Behold thy mother. That is a provision, made late, for a woman who is about to have nobody.

It is practical and it is small. John records it as an arrangement rather than a consolation, and the Douay keeps the Latin’s own blunt ellipsis: the disciple took her to his own. Nothing in the sentence suggests the arrangement repaid her for standing there sorrowful and tearful, and nothing suggests it was meant to.

Nobody is owed your lesson

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who sat with her father in a hospital for eleven months, most days, in a relatives’ room with four vinyl chairs and a radiator and a window onto a car park. She was not nursing him; the nurses did that. She was there so that he would not be on his own, and the work consisted almost entirely of sitting down and being sorrowful and tearful in a room with a door in it.

She says that the hardest part came later, when it was over and everyone she knew wanted to know what it had taught her. They asked kindly. They asked as though there would obviously be an answer, and she did not have one. She had sat in a room for eleven months, sorrowful and tearful for a good deal of it, and she came out the other side with no curriculum at all.

She has said that she started inventing something to tell people, because the truth embarrassed them. The truth was eleven months of her life, and she would do it again without hesitating, and it had not made her wiser or kinder or stronger. It had made her tired. Everyone wanted the sorrow to have produced something, and the only thing it produced was that her father was not alone.

The detail is the radiator. She sat against it in February because the room was cold, and she can tell you the sound the pipes made at about four in the afternoon, and she cannot tell you a single thing she thought about in eleven months of sitting. There was a woman, sorrowful and tearful on a fair number of those afternoons, and a radiator, and a door she watched.

Set that beside the Gradual. Sorrowful and tearful, standing there, full stop. The liturgy asks her for nothing further than having been sorrowful and tearful in the place where she was needed. It does not ask what she learned.

Survivors of sexual assault are handed the because more insistently than almost anyone, and in a particular form: that it happened for a reason, that there is a purpose they will see in time. Set that against a feast whose central antiphon says sorrowful and tearful and then declines to finish the sentence. The Church, on this one morning, asks nobody to account for what their suffering produced.

Yesterday’s argument ran through a courtroom. Today’s runs through a comma.

Nothing here says a grief is worthless, or that nothing ever grows out of a hard year. People do come out of things changed, sometimes for the better, and when that happens it is theirs to say and nobody else’s to collect.

What the Gradual refuses is the demand made from outside, in advance, that the sorrow justify itself. You are not required to have learned anything. Being called sorrowful and tearful in this Mass is not being called defective.

Saying the sorrow has no assigned purpose is not saying that nothing anybody does matters, or that a person sorrowful and tearful this morning is simply stuck. The woman in the Gospel is not passive because she is weak. She is standing at a Roman execution she has no authority to stop, which is a fact about the soldiers and not a fact about her.

There is a second witness on today’s calendar, and he is easy to walk straight past. St. Nicomedes is commemorated in this morning’s prayers, and almost nothing about him is known: not his century, not who condemned him, not how he died. What survives is a grave on the Via Nomentana and a set of Mass prayers old enough to stand in the Gregorian Sacramentary. Rome kept the name and never filled in the story. It is the same instinct as the Gradual’s, worked on a man instead of a woman.

What the Collect does with the fruit

One more piece of grammar.

The Collect asks that we may obtain the abundant fruit of Thy Passion. Read that possessive slowly. Not the fruit of her sorrow. Not the fruit of ours.

Mary’s part in the sentence is that she is commemorated, not that she contributed, and the prayer routes everything accomplished away from the woman who is sorrowful and tearful and back to the man on the Cross. A liturgy that wanted to make her grief productive had the sentence in hand and wrote the opposite one.

That is the difference between honouring a sorrow and employing one. Sorrowful and tearful is commemorated here, not commissioned.

If you have no faith to bring to this, the point survives the translation. A person sitting with somebody who is dying is doing something worth doing, and the worth does not depend on their extracting a lesson from it afterwards. The demand for meaning is made by the people standing further back, not by anyone sorrowful and tearful in the chair, and you are entitled to refuse it.

The practical thing today is a sentence to stop saying. When somebody you know is sorrowful and tearful this week, do not tell them what it is for.

Sit where the Gradual sits. Name the thing plainly if it needs naming, say that you are sorry, and then let the sentence end without the clause you were about to add. The silence will feel to you like a failure to help.

↑ The order resumes below.