Our Lady of Sorrows is a devotion that originated 800 years ago with a group of young friars who adopted contemplation of Mary's sorrows as their primary charism. Later, Doctor of the Church St Alphonsus Liguori expanded the devotion in his masterpiece work, The Glories of Mary. Under this title, Mary wears the black of mourning and visibly grieves.
The traditional sorrows of her life are:
Simeon's prophecy that a sword would pierce her heart
The Holy Family's flight into Egypt
The losing of Jesus as a child in the Temple
Mary meeting Jesus on His way to Calvary
The crucifixion of her Son
Jesus being taken from the cross and laid in her arms (the Pietá)
Jesus' burial
Her devotional feast is September 15.
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The other day I felt urged to paint Our Lady of Sorrows at our New Orleans apartment, so I scooped together a few tubes of paint but forgot my usual brushes. I scrounged up a cheap plastic palette knife and, even though I haven’t painted with knives before, gave it a go. Of course I see tons to improve in this first effort, yet I really enjoyed the physicality and how she emerged with so much motion.
But I also started thinking about something I heard a long time ago: Grace must be eaten off a sharp knife.
Painting with that plastic knife was pretty tricky for me, much more so than using brushes. Knives don’t produce something smooth and flat, but something thick and layered. When you get close, too close, all you can see are thick slashes. The meaning becomes clear only when you see the whole.
Grace must be eaten off a sharp knife, and grace isn’t smooth and flat but thick and layered. Grace slashes across our hard hearts until they’re rendered into something beautiful.
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