Recently I read an article about the Devotion to the Tears of Our Blessed Mother. I had never heard about such devotion, obviously is linked to Our Lady of Sorrows. What really amazed me is that I have been preaching in quite a few retreats about the fact that I never noticed anybody mentioning or having any devotion to the tears of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly as Scriptures tell us Jesus wept. When I went to the Holy Land many years ago, I had the opportunity to visit a chapel that is shaped in the form of a tear in the Mount of Olives, Dominus Flevit, where our Lord wept at the sight of Jerusalem and the hardness of hearts of its inhabitants. Certainly we can also think that if our Lord perspired drops of blood in Gethsemani during His agony, then it is also very likely that He also wept at that moment. Oh precious tears, who could collect those tears. We have a tremendous devotion to the Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and rightly so, since it continues to be the source of the efficacy of our redemption. But why not a devotion to the tears of our Lord, He who wept out of sorrow and compassion for each one of us. If He shed His blood for us we can certainly be sure that through His passion and crucifixion He also shed His tears to the last drop, in sorrow and pain. If only we could understand how precious those tears are, they are symbols of the Merciful heart of Jesus and His tremendous love for each one of us, and they are also a reminder of the pain that our sins have truly inflicted upon the fullness of the humanity of Christ. Certainly a devotion has to speak to a person, and where that person is at in his/her spiritual journey, I am just surprised that I have never read anywhere about such devotion, in fact I never heard of such a thing from any priest or religious throughout my whole seminary formation. Perhaps such devotion already exists, I am simply unaware of it.
Posts
