The seasons of motherhood are manifold and beautiful, filling our days over a lifetime. They stretch from the joyous moment we feel our children’s first movements in the womb to the day we kiss them goodbye for the final time as we depart this earth. Even a single day can move us through a succession of seasons as children run our hearts through the whole gamut of emotional responses: love, all-out and complete, for these bright (or perhaps cranky, colicky) children gifted to us; joy and delight in all the firsts they accomplish; pride as they develop their clearly terrific talents; dismay at the destruction they can achieve in a short half-hour; fatigue from the physical, mental, and spiritual work raising children requires; hope that they will actually learn what we are teaching them and become good, holy people; wonder at the beauty of their souls and the lovely and good things they will do in their lives, and a whole host of other seasons: sadness as we send them off on their own, satisfaction, worry, expectation, completeness, discouragement at our failures, and so many other emotions cascading in our hearts from moment to moment.

And then there is sorrow.

For mothers, sorrow is interwoven throughout our intimate biological and spiritual relationship with our children, beginning with our laboring in pain to bring them into this world. We feel for them, no matter their age, and ache with them in the trials, hurts, and losses they must endure in this crucible of sorrow: when their hopes and expectations fail, when the world seems to be against them, when they make terrible mistakes and stumble badly, when the consequences of their actions are far more difficult than anyone imagined, when their hopes and dreams crumble. We would spare them if we could, but we cannot. We can only suffer with them, weep with and for them, and carry their sorrows in our own hearts.

As the Church asks us this Lent to meditate on sorrow and to be sorrowful in repenting of our sins, we can do no better than to look to Mary, our Blessed Mother, the “Mother of Sorrows,” to plumb the mystery of God’s love for us.

With her “Yes,” Mary accepts every trial in her life-long journey with her son with grace and quiet dignity. Every event—from angels at his birth, hurried exile to Egypt, and Simeon’s troubling prophecy, to Jesus’ ministry, passion, and death—is a matter to be pondered in her heart so that she might better understand God’s promise and do his will.

She humbly accepts all the swords piercing her heart as she walks with her son throughout his life. At the last, she is there to cancel the jeers of the crowd with her loving eyes. She feels every wound of the lash, every thorn in his sacred head. When he breathes his last, she accepts his broken body in her lap with the profoundest sorrow.

Of all the possibilities for our salvation, that God chose a young woman—a young mother—to be the central piece in his divine plan is astounding. That he made her the mother of Jesus Christ, God and man, is a mystery both shocking and wondrous. In so doing, God blessed motherhood for us all and transformed it from Eve’s bitterness into the instrument by which we can participate fully in the all-encompassing mystery of his divine love through all the seasons of motherhood, especially sorrow.

Through Mary, we see that a mother’s sorrow is a true blessing, not a burden. God gifted us with the ability to love our children at the deepest level, the level at which we escape ourselves and enter into a special communion with another. There, we look upon that soul with tenderest love and embrace its burdens. We imitate thereby, not only Mary, as she loves her suffering child, but even deeper, the Lord, as he looks upon his suffering children and takes upon himself their woundedness to ease their burdens.

With such sorrow, God makes us one with him in the great mystery of divine love.