The Call of Sorrow

The first time I met death, it was small enough to fit in my hands.

I was in middle school, playing outside of our house, when I came upon a baby bird on the ground. It was so incredibly small—matchstick bones, feathers as fragile as glass. I searched all around for a nest or a mother but found nothing.

So, I scooped it up and took it home. 

My parents weren’t thrilled. How was I going to feed it? Where would I keep it? Now that I’d handled it, they explained, the mom wouldn’t come near it again. Never mind that I had carried it away from the one place she might have found it.

Determined to prove I could mother the bird, I made a nest out of a shoebox and spent hours digging for worms. When I finally found one, I mashed it up but couldn’t figure out how to get the bird to eat. No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t eat. As the days passed, I became frantic trying to figure out how to stop the death that I could see was coming.

But nothing worked. One afternoon, I opened the garage door, checked the shoebox, and found the bird folded in on itself—sharp angles and stillness. 

Over the years, I’ve said much harder goodbyes. I know you have too. All my grandparents are gone except my sweet grandmother who doesn’t remember my name or how she held me as a baby or that I wear her blue eyes every day. And I know greater goodbyes, deeper sorrows, are still ahead.

But that moment in the garage remains with me—a tiny Pietà, holding in my hands what I could not keep alive. That grief is asked of us again and again. My friend texted me last month, heartbroken, that just weeks after rejoicing in a surprise pregnancy, she lost the baby.

We live in a broken world where love so often places treasures in our arms, only to ask us to surrender them. We are given more to hold, and more to lose. No one knew this better than Our Lady of Sorrows. She teaches us that love and loss are not opposites—they are bound together in the mystery of the Cross.

And it is here, in this tension, that the call of sorrow resounds in our souls like waves in a storm. The Psalmist writes, “My tears have been my food day and night… Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and billows have gone over me.” (Ps. 42:3,7) Sometimes our sorrow is so consuming, so oceanic, that it feels as if wave after wave crashes over us. And yet even there—in the drowning deep—when we cry out, God’s mercy answers.

Deep Calls to Deep

I once saw a video of the Drake Passage, one of the world’s most dangerous bodies of water. Situated between the southern tip of South America and Antarctica, this 600-mile stretch of ocean is really a gauntlet at the edge of the world. Those wishing to cross it face screaming winds and colossal waves that toss cruise liners and research ships around like leaves in a hurricane.

In this particular video, a massive ship was battling against these legendary waves. In one moment the bow of the ship pointed up toward a churning gray sky, the next it plummeted down, down, down until it collided with the seething ocean and a wall of blue-green water swallowed the deck. 

Watching it—all that ferocity and raw power—I thought, Yes, I have felt storms like that inside of me too.

I have felt wild rage that rattled against my ribs and clawed up my throat. I have felt sorrow that hooked its spindly fingers around my shoulders and tugged and pushed until I felt like I was drowning. I have been to the deep. So many of us have walked its depths. 

The deep, in my mind, is the place in your soul that no one else can touch. It is so far away, tucked so deep, that it is penetrable only by the sharpest spears of sorrow. 

The spears of sickness and diagnostic tests. The spears of a mind that will not rest, and emotions that overpower. The spears of “too late” and of the things that cannot be undone. The spear of a flimsy piece of paper that says your marriage is over. The spear of your mamaw who cannot remember your name. The spears of phone calls that never come and cars that cross the center line and little caskets for children who are shot at mass. 

The heaving, grasping, wrecking deep. 

When I read the words of the Psalmist—My tears have been my food day and night… Deep calls to deep—I think that sometimes our suffering is so great, so overwhelming, so impossibly deep that the only thing that could reach us is the equally powerful, unyielding, depthless mercy of God.

Our deep cries out to His, and His deep answers—like the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine, like the father who runs to embrace his prodigal son. He is the God who splits open seas to save His people and plundered Hell to reclaim the ones He loved. He is the God of indefatigable mercy. His deep ransacks, races, and searches until it finds us. And it always finds us. 

This is the mystery of the deep: our grief crashes like waves, but God’s mercy is always deeper still. And when we feel most swallowed by sorrow, we are not alone. Someone has gone before us into those waters and stands within them still—Our Lady of Sorrows, who shows us how to keep faith when the storm does not cease.

The Immaculate Face of Sorrow

If the deep of sorrow has ever worn a face, it was Our Blessed Mother’s on Calvary. Her tears watered the earth as the blood of her Son ran down its rocks. She bears the title Our Lady of Sorrows because she joined fully into her Divine Son’s mission and accepted all the suffering that love demanded.

And the demands—the requirements of redemption—were unimaginable.

She watched her child being whipped and beaten. Watched Him drag the instrument of His death through the streets amid jeers and spit. Watched a crown of thorns sink into His brow. Watched as the little boy she loved so deeply—and the God whose love she knew so intimately—was hoisted up to die.

Her sorrow was a mirror of Jesus’ own suffering. And to understand what she was experiencing, we have to look more closely at Jesus and His suffering. St. Thomas Aquinas says Christ’s pain was the greatest any human could bear: “the pain and sorrow were accepted voluntarily…to the end of men’s deliverance from sin; and consequently He embraced the amount of pain proportionate to the magnitude of the fruit which resulted therefrom.” (Summa Theologiae III, q.46, a.6)

In other words, Jesus’ suffering was greater than anyone else’s because His love was deeper than anyone else’s. 

His body felt pain in full (nothing dulled by sin), and His heart suffered more because He saw with perfect clarity every sinner and every wound He came to redeem. He was the Innocent One who endured the sharp bite of injustice. He was the Faithful Friend who tasted betrayal, abandonment, and mockery. And though a word could have ended it, Love stayed—for the sake of the fruit: our freedom and our life in Him.

After Jesus gave up His spirit, John echoed the words of the prophet Zechariah: “They shall look on him whom they have pierced” (John 19:37; Zech 12:10). And it’s true, like the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness to save Israel, we look to the One lifted up to save us. Yet that day at the foot of the Cross stood another who was pierced. A woman with a sword through her heart. 

In that hour, the Theotokos held not only her own grief, but the grief of generations. She stood in the long line of women who bore Israel’s sorrow, all the mothers before her who wept for what they could not keep.

Eve who lost Eden and her son.

Sarah and Hannah who mourned empty wombs. 

Naomi and Ruth who buried what they loved. 

Rachel who wept for her children and would not be comforted.

Mary stood for them all, watching her Son die so that their sorrows might be ultimately redeemed. In Him, Isaiah’s promise was fulfilled: “He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces” (Is 25:8).

Yet her witness was not only for them, but for us. In her steadfast stance at the Cross, she gathered up the sufferings of our motherhoods and the sorrowful mysteries of our hearts—so that we might learn to stand with her, and through her pierced heart, look with faith on the One who saves.

As her Son endured His Passion, she too felt “the snares of death confront” her (Ps 18:5). Her immaculate heart plunged into incomprehensible depths of sorrow. And when His body lay in the tomb, she bore three days of silence and waiting, while He went deeper still—to the very depths of Hell.

Yet even there, Mary must’ve clung to the ancient songs. Though her soul was in the deepest wells of sorrow, she could still whisper the psalm: “He reached down from on high, He took me; He drew me out of mighty waters” (Ps 18:16).

The Church Fathers tell us that Mary “stood between God and the whole human race.” She co-suffered with her Son, entering His kenosis, His self-emptying, so much so that her own heart was cleaved.

But the cross was not the end. Crowned beside her Risen Son, she pours forth grace and comfort on all who call to her in their own deeps. The waves that rattle our souls, the losses we carry in silence, the shoebox Pietàs of our lives—she has borne the greater storm. She stands for us too. And if we cling to her, we will find that no sorrow is wasted, but taken up into Christ’s redeeming love.

Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows and of deeps, pray for us.

Images: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Pietà, 1876. Public Domain.