The “Loneliness” Of Our Lady: A Spanish Passiontide Tradition

By JAMES MONTI

In his book, Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven, Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) describes in a most compelling manner the unparalleled sorrow of losing “a beloved person” to death. Visualizing what it is for a husband to lose his beloved wife, von Hildebrand writes:
“Her eyes are closed, motionless. She has ceased to speak. Communication with her has become completely impossible. She cannot hear my voice, nor can I gaze into her eyes or strain to hear her voice. Her body is cold. The very hands that responded to my touch are lifeless. Her body is then committed to the earth, and I am surrounded by a dreadful emptiness, an unspeakable desolation” (Jaws of Death: Gate of Heaven, Manchester, N.H., Sophia Institute Press, 1991, p. 6).
Von Hildebrand observes that the loss of someone we love deeply surpasses all other sorrows. And the deeper the love, the deeper is the sorrow. In the whole course of human history, no one has known a greater sorrow upon the death of a “beloved person” than has the Mother of God. And no one has felt more intensely the wrenching sense of emptiness and desolation, of overwhelming loneliness following such a death, than has Mary when her Lord, her Jesus, died upon the cross.
Apart from what Our Lord Himself suffered supremely on the cross, no one else has suffered a sense of loss, of loneliness, of absence in any way approaching the degree to which the Blessed Virgin experienced them following the death of her Divine Son. His physical death was for her a mystical death. The words of our Lord upon the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46), and the experience of total desolation they express, became following His death our Lady’s own. His desolation passed into her soul.
Even the gift of St. John, given to Mary by our Lord on the cross to be a new son to her in her solitude, could not fill the unfathomable void of losing the Son of her womb who was the Son of the living God.
Of what the Blessed Virgin Mary felt on Good Friday, we have in the Gospels only the prophetic utterance of Simeon, “. . . a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (Luke 2:35), and the bare statement of St. John that she was “standing by the cross of Jesus” (John 19:25) — nothing more. According to the eighteenth-century Spanish Discalced Carmelite Fray Manuel de la Virgen, the four Evangelists, “not having fitting words” to describe the vastness and depth of our Lady’s grief, found that they could do little more than to envelop her sorrow in “a veil of silence” (Threnos o lamentos virginales en nueve pláticas y sermón de los Dolores de Maria Santisima, Salamanca, Nicolas Joseph Viallargordo, 1742, p. 4).
In the Old Testament, however, we do find prophetic words in which we can see foreshadowings of the unfathomable grief of our Lady. These passages moreover bring to the fore that dimension of our Lady’s sorrows that has taken on a singular significance in the Passion piety of Spain — the “soledad” (solitude) of the Blessed Virgin, her utter loneliness following the burial of Christ.
Iconographically, this solitude has been expressed particularly by depicting Mary in the vesture of a widow. Of course, our Lady was already a widow by virtue of the death of St. Joseph. Yet the death of Christ brought upon her a more profound mystical widowhood, for spiritually as Virgin of Virgins and the Exemplar of the Church Mary was the ultimate Bride of Christ. The Lamentations of Jeremiah, in which Jerusalem, beset by its enemies, is personified as a widow, have much to offer for reflection upon this mystical widowhood of the Blessed Virgin:
“How lonely sits the city that was full of people! / How like a widow she has become. . . . She weeps bitterly in the night, / tears are on her cheeks . . . the Lord has trodden as in a wine press / the virgin daughter of Judah. / For these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears; / for a comforter is far from me . . . my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed. / Zion stretches out her hands, / but there is none to comfort her . . . hear all you peoples, / and behold my suffering . . . Behold, O Lord, for I am in distress, / my soul is in tumult, / my heart is wrung within me….Hear how I groan; there is none to comfort me” (Lam. 1:1-2, 16-18, 20-21).
In his essay upon Spanish devotion to our Lady in her solitude, Fr. Fermin Labarga Garcia describes her loneliness as a “moral solitude,” a “mystical solitude” that cannot be diminished even by the company of St. John or of relatives. Following the death and burial of Christ, while others flee and lose faith, Mary is left alone to contemplate what has just taken place. Fr. Labarga explains:
“Mary in her solitude is the concretion of the Church that anxiously awaits the realization of the promises of the Divine Bridegroom. Mary deeply feels her loneliness because she is the only one who continues to believe in Christ” (“La Soledad de Maria,” Scripta de Maria, second series, volume 2, 2005, p. 373).
Fr. Labarga then proceeds to cite several spiritual writers to illustrate further the significance of our Lady’s unique loneliness. In her anguished solitude the Heart of Mary became “a most perfect mirror of the Passion of Christ” and a “perfect image of His death” (St. Lawrence Justinian, De Triumpali Christi Agone, chapter 21). While death finally brought an end to the anguish of our Lord on the cross, His death heightened the sorrow of Mary, for now she suffered from His absence, for her in a sense the worst sorrow of all. In the words of Fray Manuel de la Virgen:
“He [Christ] slept, buried in peace, in accord with the pronouncement of David (Psalm 4:8); but this peace was for Mary more bitter than any other bitterness; for, her Son having been buried, the Mother herself entered upon the baneful threshold of death, in deathly agonies and bitter anguish” (Threnos o lamentos virginales en nueve pláticas y sermón de los Dolores de María Santísima, p. 131).
Another Spanish spiritual writer, the Carmelite Fray Pedro de Padilla (+c. 1595), describes the closure of the Lord’s tomb following His burial as a mystical sunset for Mary that “covered her soul with a sad mantle” and began her “dark night of the soul,” a “dark night” exceeding anything that even the greatest mystics have ever experienced.
Moreover, what took place after the death of our Lord, according to the Jesuit Fr. Francisco Garau (+1701), was for our Lady “a new Passion, from the thrust of the lance to the sepulcher, and from the sepulcher to her solitude, which lasted until the Resurrection” (Declamaciones sacras, politicas y morales sobre los Evangelios todos de la Quaresma, con los assuntos occurentes: De Limosna, San Mathius, Santo Thomas, Encarnacio, Dolores, Soledad, Patrocinio de la Virgen Santissima, y del Mandato, Madrid, Francisco Laso, 1709, Declamacion 35, n. 3, p. 399).

Widow’s Weeds

The distinctively Spanish iconography and representation of our Lady as “el Soledad” can be traced to the commission for a new statue of the Sorrowing Virgin given to the Spanish artist Gaspar de Beccera (+1570) by Queen Isabel de Valois (+1568). There had already been a longstanding custom in Spain to produce religious statues adorned with real clothing, an idea likely inspired at least in part by the universal liturgical tradition of veiling sacred objects, from altars to tabernacles and chalices, so Beccera’s statue consisted of a head and hands exquisitely carved by him and mounted on a frame which was to be clothed in a manner befitting the Mother of God.
The queen’s chambermaid, the Countess of Urena, who was herself a widow, proposed that the Holy Virgin be dressed as a widow in clothes like her own, and donated a set of her “widow’s weeds” to adorn the statue accordingly.
Completed in 1565, this image of Mary, attired in a wide-skirted white dress, a white wimple, and a black mantle, came to be imitated countless times in representations of Our Lady of Sorrows across Spain and in the New World. One additional detail that likewise spread far and wide was the placement of a toalla in the hand of our Lady, a small oblong embroidered towel-like cloth, suggestive of a winding cloth but perhaps intended as a sort of handkerchief for the tears of Mary.
In some Spanish depictions of our Lady as “El Soledad,” she is situated either standing or kneeling before an empty cross from which hangs a winding cloth. In some cases, she holds in her hands the instruments of the Passion, in particular the nails and the crown of thorns. These details convey an understanding of our Lady’s hours of solitude as a time consumed in the silent contemplation of all her Son has suffered, with the instruments of the Passion cherished by her as precious mementos of Him.
These features can be seen in the “Soledad” of the Church of San Lorenzo in Seville. In this case, the Blessed Virgin is dressed entirely in black, but as with many other depictions of “El Soledad” her clothing is embroidered with gold, and she wears a crown-like halo of gold. For just as through His crucifixion our Lord became King of Heaven and Earth, so too, by her deathly sorrow on Good Friday our Lady became our Queen.
Yet all the splendid vesture of these processional figures and the lavish gold and silver-decked platforms upon which they are mounted for the processions of Holy Week are but a setting that lead the eye ultimately to the face of our Lady. In the finest examples of these polychrome wood statues, particularly those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the artists make the human face of our Lady a veritable window into the depths of her soul, with her loneliness and desolation expressed most especially in her eyes.
Processions with the image of Our Lady of Solitude are most often held quite appropriately on the night of Good Friday or on Holy Saturday, often in silence. Yet the underlying message these images convey is one befitting the entire season of Lent — that the best way to prepare our hearts and minds for the celebration of Easter is by seeing the events of the Passion through our Lady’s eyes, to accompany her in her sorrow, to grieve with her, that at the end of our own life’s journey we may rejoice with her forever in Heaven.