The image is startling: Mary’s heart is pierced with seven swords, symbolizing her “Seven Sorrows.” She is the Mater Dolorosa, our “Mother of Sorrows,” whose feast day is September 15.

When I became a contemplative monk decades ago, I took a new name to symbolize the beginning of a new life. I became “Tessa of the Incarnation.”  (This is still my name, although I have left formal monastic life.) After some years and a growing number of sorrows, I changed the name to “Tessa of the Incarnation and Our Mother of Sorrows.” An old Catholic devotion to Our Sorrowful Mother became an integral part of my life. But I expanded and enriched my understanding of this practice, which traces its history to a story in the Gospel of Luke.

Mary presents Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem on the eighth day after his birth, according to Jewish custom: “Every first-born male must be consecrated to the Lord.” An old man named Simeon arrives and tells Mary that her child is “destined to be a sign that is rejected, and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”

The Seven Sorrows

Not all of us are mothers in the physical sense, bearing seeds in our womb and giving birth to flesh and blood children. We may be “spiritual” mothers instead, bearing the seeds of creativity and generating new life in other ways through art, teaching, writing, gardening, nursing, serving in non-profits, “companioning” or soul-friending. So I’ve universalized the traditional Seven Sorrows of Mary, with the originals in italics:

1. A sword of sorrow pierces your heart and you understand that life is full of sorrows. (Mary hears Simeon’s prophecy.)

2. You must leave your beloved home and journey to a new and unfamiliar land. (Mary flees into Egypt with her endangered infant.)

3. You lose your child or something precious to you. (Mary loses the boy Jesus in the Temple for three days.)

4. Your child (or your creation) begins to suffer. (Mary meets Jesus carrying the cross.)

5. You witness the death agony of your child (or creation). (Mary stands at the foot of the cross.)

6. You hold your dead child (or your creation) in your arms or in your heart. (Mary cradles the dead Jesus.)

7. You bury your dead child (or creation). (Mary helps lay Jesus in the tomb.)

Soulmaking and a New Story

We call these sorrows and others like them tragedies, and they are tragic. St. Teresa says that our pain “breaks and grinds the soul into pieces.” But she also says that the soul comes out of the crucible of suffering “like gold, more refined and purified.”

Contemporary psychologist Jean Houston describes how suffering “cracks the boundaries” of what we think we can bear. She calls our wounds sacred because they invite us into “soulmaking” and a rebirth into a new and larger story. “Soulmaking requires that you die to one story,” she writes in the best chapter of The Search for the Beloved. “The breaching of your soul [is] an invitation to your renaissance…. old forms are ready to die… and hitherto unsuspected new forms are ready to flower.”

These sacred wounds come in terrible ways. Physical woundings through accidents, illnesses, and war. Acts of violence: rape, incest, child abuse, robbery. Losses: deep relationships, a marriage, a job, reputation or financial security. Global woundings: famine, fire and flood, drought, viruses, pollution of the environment, pillaging of the planet. How do we bear our pain? How do we discover the transformational power in both the wounding and the healing?

In her meditations on the Sorrowful Mother, Clarissa Pinkola Estés refers to the seven swords not as wounds but as “mighty swords of Strength… earned by [our] struggles through hard times.” She defines strength as “pierced but fierce” and names the swords Surrender, Veils, Healing, New Life, Courage, Life Force, and Love.

The “use” of the seven swords through the heart, our own broken-heartedness, include withstanding this “time of learning,” piercing “the hidden meaning of this time,” lancing our agony and planting anew. The old women in her family insisted that the hilts of the swords would burst into seven fragrant roses because “suffering brings the rain of tears” and tears “take you somewhere… somewhere good.”

Rain of Tears and the Weeping Tree

In Rain of Gold, one of my favorite stories, Victor Villaseñor introduces us to Dona Guadalupe, who has lost her daughter. Guadalupe disappears for a whole day. Her family finally finds her under an oak tree whose limbs have been broken by fire and lightning. Tender new growth has sprouted. “This is my crying tree,” she says. “I come up here when I feel sad or lonely or just too tired to go on. This tree listens to me, giving me strength, breathing new hope and power into my… my very soul.”

Finding your weeping tree may mean holding a touchstone from some sacred place or fingering the beads of a rosary. (I confess that I don’t turn to the rosary often, but I did earlier in my life whenever I was frightened or in pain.) It may mean clinging tightly to a small cross that fits into your hand, as I often hold one now in the night.

I’ve wept beneath a tree or two over the years. And beneath many a saguaro cactus “tree.” My “weeping tree” is often my pillow. There was a time in my life when I took what I called “grief days.” I stayed in bed almost all day, staring my sorrows in the face and grieving them in floods of tears. (One of the many gifts the mystics treasure is called the “gift of tears.”)

For me the ultimate weeping tree is the tree of the cross, where I most often weep and pray and come to healing. The cross is not only the symbol of crucifixion but also of resurrection. It represents the whole “Paschal Mystery,” the Passover from suffering into glory, from dying into new life, rebirth, “the larger story.” We celebrate the feast of the “Triumph of the Cross” on September 14, the day before Our Mother of Sorrows.

Where do you find your own “weeping tree?” As crucial as this tree may be, we must do more than weep. As St. Teresa insists, “Let’s not think that everything is accomplished through much weeping but set our hands to the task of hard work and virtue.” Andrew Harvey calls this “sacred activism.” And that is another story for another time.