Seven Sorrows of Mary

On Monday myself and another sister who is also transferring into the Marinaites of Holy Cross, were welcomed by the congregation in a beautiful simple prayer service held at a nursing facility where many of the older Marianite sisters live.  In addition to the congregation's constitutions, and spirituality handbook, we were each given a set of Seven Dolor beads.  At first glance they look like rosary beads however there are seven beads in each of the seven sections and when praying with them one reflects on the Seven Sorrows of Mary.  These are situations which during Jesus' life and at his death, like a sword pierced the heart of his mother.    The seven sorrows are: The prophecy of Simeon, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the child Jesus, Mary meets Jesus carrying his cross, the crucifixion, Jesus is taken down from the cross and the body of Jesus is placed in the tomb. (for more information on the seven sorrows go to: http://www.marianites.org/spirituality/seven-sorrows-of-mary/ )

When I used these beads for my prayer, my mind wandered frequently to Haiti.  It seems to me that the suffering many people experience regularly in Haiti, which I witnessed during my 14 months there, is much like the seven sorrows Mary experienced.

My mind goes to the mother of Kevin (name changed to protect confidentiality) the child who was sent to the United States for open heart surgery but died about ten months later.  A couple of weeks before his death, when I went to visit him at St. Damien Hospital, she was so concerned for her son.  She took my hand in hers and held it to Kevin's chest, so that I could feel that his heart was beating too quickly and too hard.  Like Mary hearing the prophecy of Simeon, I think this mother was confused and concerned for the well being of her son. The previous November she had been told that his heart was fixed and he could be expected to now live a normal life.  Now his rapid heart beat spoke of a different reality.

It was just about this time last year, when I spent a week working in the Cholera tents.  People who lived a distance quickly needed to get to re-hydration centers quickly once someone became ill.  I remember a mother who had come with her three children all of whom had Cholera; one of whom took a long time to recover.  Fr. Rick would sometimes tell stories of people dying as they arrived because they came from such distances by the time they arrived they were too dehydrated to recover.  Like Mary and Joseph fleeing into Egypt, for many people the difficult journey to a cholera hospital is an urgent a matter of life and death. During the days I volunteered in the cholera tents, I did so, because it was not safe to travel even the short distance to the baby house because of political unrest in the country, which greatly complicated the situation for the deathly ill people needing to make such a dangerous trip.             

People lose their children in Haiti.  Sometimes, extreme poverty leads a loving parent to place their children in an orphanage, abandon them in a hospital, or even send them to work at a young age with a family that is a little better off, certainly too I heard stories of children and parents unable to find one another in the immediate after math of the earthquake, and death rates among children are quite high as well.  I remember the pained expression on the face of a father as he left his three young children at Kay Ste. Anne; with the understanding that the program would work to eventually reunite him with his children (by this point this was the decided mission.)  I never knew his whole story, but I believe the mother of the children had died, probably in the earthquake.  As he walked out of the house, he appeared to me to be on the verge of tears, something I rarely saw among Haitian men.  The loss of his children from his care must have pierced his heart, as it had Mary's when she and Joseph were separated from young Jesus as they searched and eventually found him in the temple.   In this particular unique situation, the father decided after only a couple of weeks to take his children back home, that struggling to support them in extreme poverty was better for him and his children then leaving them in the care of the program.

The face of an older child comes to my mind, a young person who grieved the death of both of his parents, and then experienced physical abuse, neglect, and rejection at the hands of the relatives who were supposed to care for him.  Even though he is in a safe place where he is cared for now, he like many in our world continues to carry a heavy cross created by grief, loss, poverty, rejection and abuse.

The images of little babies I met one Saturday when I helped in a clinic come to me.  One baby was being cared for by her aunt because the baby's mother had died.  The aunt did not have money for formula to feed the baby, who was tiny, undernourished and suffering.  Another baby in the clinic that day was even smaller and the sister/nurse I was with predicted that the baby would soon die.  So many loving care givers feel so helpless as they watch their children suffer and die, because they lack of basic necessities 

So often morning liturgy was a funeral and sometimes for very small children.  I remember one mother who attended morning liturgy the morning following the death of her child.  Her little girl lay in a body bag there on the floor of the chapel.  As is common in the culture, the mother wept and wailed.  At one point she pulled out a cute little dress that had belonged to her little girl and held it up for all of us to see.  As this mother held her dead child's dress up, her grief was not unlike the grief Mary experienced when holding the body of her dead son in her arms.

This week it will be a year since we buried Katiana, laid her body in the ground just outside the chapel on the grounds of St. Damien hospital.  Cholera quickly killed this four year old who had a wonderful giggle and eyes that suggested to me she had seen pain and suffering beyond my imagining.  I think often of her surviving twin sister and think that the pain of such a loss in my mind is like Mary's pain when the body of Jesus was laid in the tomb.