Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Sorrows, which focuses on the sufferings of the Virgin Mary. The feast grew out of popular devotion to the Seven Sorrows of Mary in medieval times. There was also a popular devotion to the Seven Joys of Mary, focusing on Jesus’s birth, the arrival of the Magi and the resurrection, but misery won out over happiness, and the upbeat Joys of Mary didn’t get a Church feast. During the day, statues of Mary with seven daggers in her heart (above) are carried through the streets, and congregations sing the Stabat Mater, a 13th century hymn to Mary at the foot of the cross.
At the Cross her station keeping,
stood the mournful Mother weeping,
close to her Son to the last.
Through her heart, His sorrow sharing,
all His bitter anguish bearing,
now at length the sword has passed.
Stabat Mater
Tonight in 1967, the US TV science fiction series Star Trek, which was gathering low ratings at the time, screened the episode ‘Amok Time’. It featured for the first time Spock’s famous Vulcan salute, with the middle fingers parted to form a V shape. Leonard Nimoy, the Jewish actor who played Spock, had seen the gesture as a boy at synagogue, given during the priestly blessing found in the book of Numbers, chapter 6.
St Ewostatewos, a revered monastic leader in Ethiopian Orthodoxy, died today in 1352 in exile in Armenia. He was a big advocate of a two-day sabbath, wanting believers to observe a little sabbath on Saturdays, in honour of the law of Moses, and a big sabbath on Sundays, in celebration of the resurrection of Christ. His view brought him and his followers into conflict with other Church leaders, but 100 years after his death, the two sabbaths were finally adopted as a feature of Ethiopian Church worship.
Arthur Hallam, a close friend of the Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson, died today in 1833. Hallam, 22 years old, suffered a stroke while he was in Vienna, travelling with his father. His death prompted Tennyson’s great outpouring of grief, In Memoriam, one of the greatest poems of the Victorian period, and a personal favourite of Queen Victoria.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam
It is the feast of St Catherine of Genoa, a wealthy woman who was converted in her 20s to a life of caring for the sick in the hospital of Genoa, in north-eastern Italy. She died today in 1510.
September 15th used to be the feast day for a miraculous painting known as Saint Dominic in Soriano, which was kept in a friary in Soriano Calabro in the toe of Italy. The painting, a portrait of St Dominic, was famous for producing healings and casting out demons. According to legend, it was personally delivered to the friary in the early 16th century by three mysterious and beautiful women, who turned out to be none other than the Virgin Mary and her two sidekicks, Mary Magdalene and St Catherine. The painting was probably destroyed in an earthquake in the 1780s.
Image: Lawrence OP