On the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, we are invited to stand where Mary stands. Not at the beginning, when the angel has just spoken and everything is still promise, but much later, when the promise seems almost impossible to recognize.
We stand beneath the cross, and I sometimes wonder whether Mary is still saying the Magnificat there. Perhaps not aloud. Perhaps the words that once rose so freely now come in a difficult, broken voice.
She had sung, “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly.” She had proclaimed that God fills the hungry with good things and remembers mercy. Mary believed that God was overturning the world.
But now the mighty appear to have won.
Rome still has the weapons. The authorities have gotten what they wanted, and her son—the one she was told would be great, the one whose kingdom would have no end—is dying the humiliating death of a criminal.
“He has lifted up the lowly,” she had sung. Yet the lowly one before her has been stripped, mocked, beaten, and nailed to wood.
“He has filled the hungry with good things.” And Jesus says, “I thirst.”
How does Mary keep believing her own song? Perhaps this is where Our Lady of Sorrows has something especially important to teach us.
Faith is easier when we can see how everything fits together. It is easier when goodness seems rewarded, prayers seem answered, and justice appears to be winning.
But most of us eventually come to a place where the Magnificat no longer seems to match what is happening in front of us. We pray for peace and watch another war begin. We proclaim the dignity of every human person while migrants are treated as threats, families go hungry, and people are pushed to the margins because of who they are or whom they love.
We believe that God lifts up the lowly, yet again and again we watch the powerful protect themselves. Sometimes we stand before a situation so painful that we cannot understand how God’s promises could possibly still be true.
Mary knows that place.
She does not stand beneath the cross because she understands what God is doing. She stands there because she still trusts the God she has known.
There is a difference between understanding and trust. Understanding wants to know how this will work out; trust says, even when the answer is hidden, that God has not become unfaithful.
Perhaps beneath the cross Mary is saying, in the deepest place of her heart: I do not know how this is a victory. I do not know how the mighty are being cast down or how the lowly are being lifted up, but I still believe You.
There is something extraordinarily courageous about that kind of faith. It is not denial, and it is not pretending the cross is beautiful.
Mary does not call violence good. She does not look away from her son’s suffering or offer an easy explanation for it; she sees the horror clearly and trusts anyway.
Perhaps that is why standing with Mary matters. Prayer does not always give us an explanation for suffering, but sometimes it teaches us how to remain beside it without surrendering our belief that suffering will not have the final word.
Mary’s Magnificat beneath the cross is no longer the song of someone who can see the promise unfolding. It is the song of someone who remembers the promise when everything seems to contradict it.
And maybe that is the Magnificat many of us need to learn.
Not only the Magnificat we sing when life is full of possibility, but the Magnificat we whisper when the diagnosis comes, when the relationship breaks, when someone we love is suffering, when justice seems impossibly far away, or when the Church disappoints us. It is the song we carry when the world feels crueler than we thought it could be.
We stand where Mary stands, and we see what she sees. We do not pretend that the cross is anything other than a cross, and we do not confuse faith with having an explanation.
Still, with Mary, we keep saying that God has not forgotten the lowly. God has not abandoned the suffering, and God has not surrendered the world to the mighty.
We may not yet understand how.
But we trust that love is still at work.
The Magnificat is not silenced at Calvary. In Mary’s broken voice, it becomes an even deeper song of faith.
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