September 15

or God's mother, whose love was more intense than that of any other, shared her dying Son's agony so intimately as almost to experience it herself. Her grief was in fact proportionate to the intensity of her love. She loved her Son more than she did herself, and thus she received in her soul, with the keenest sense of spiritual pain, the very wounds he bore upon his body; and in this way Christ's passion was her martyrdom as well.

For Christ's flesh was in a true sense hers too; it was indeed flesh of her flesh, and she loved the flesh Christ had derived from her more than that which constituted her own body. And the greater her love, the more intense her grief; her mental anguish far exceeded the physical torment of any martyr. Wherefore is she noteworthy for her unique privilege of a glorious if bloodless martyrdom. Other martyrs have borne their witness by laying down their lives, but she provided from her body the flesh that was to suffer and to die for the salvation of the world. And the intensity of her grief at and in Christ's passion so engulfed her soul as virtually to identify her with his actual sufferings, so that, next after Christ himself, she is rightly deemed to have attained the very peak of martyrdom.

From John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., Tradition Day by Day: Readings from Church Writers. Augustinian Press. Villanova, PA, 1994.

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