Mary’s tears for the lonely and sad

CRY ME A RIVER: Mary’s Tender Tears, by John O’Brien OFM. Children First, Athlone, Ireland. 2008.114pp

Reviewed by Michail Rassool

The playwright Oscar Wilde, that enfant terrible of Anglo-Irish letters, articulated the true essence of Christianity when he said: “How else but through a broken heart my Lord Christ enters in.”

Irish Franciscan Father John O’Brien attempts to capture this essence in Cry Me A River: Mary’s Tender Tears, a series of meditations aimed especially at those who know loneliness, pain and loss. It aims to show how Jesus’ mother reveals God’s compassion and love to them.

Fr O’Brien reflects on how the suffering Jesus and his mother have always been symbols of life to the lonely, although people so often lose sight of them or are distracted from them.

Fr O’Brien points out that to be Mary is to be prayer and in union with God, which he identifies as “the Marian principle” which captures the essence of the life of the Church.

To explain the book’s subtitle, Fr O’Brien has a special devotion to the “Our Lady of Tears” icon in Syracuse, Sicily, the “weeping Madonna” Immaculate Heart figurine through which Mary is reported to have sent her tears in sorrow over a female devotee’s suffering from a toxaemic pregnancy in the 1950s. “[B]ut the Madonna cried with her and through her prayer returned her [and her endangered unborn baby] to health,” the priest writes.

Cry Me A River uses Our Lady’s tears as a central motif of compassion for the suffering, the forgotten, desperate as well as victims of every form of violence. It is a devotion the late Pope John Paul II officially recognised when he consecrated the Shrine of Our Lady of Tears in 1994.

Fr O’Brien, who was in South Africa a few months ago as chaplain to the British and Irish Lions rugby team, said at the time he was involved in a writing ministry, particularly as a form of mental healing.

Having suffered various illnesses, including depression, he has a special interest in healing techniques, particularly of writers such as John Ryder, who promoted Buddhist prayer and meditational techniques as healer.

The Lions’ defence coach, former English rugby league star and devout Catholic Shaun Edwards, and others have financed the 2009 reprinting of Cry Me A River, which was first published in 2008, to raise funds for Children First, an Irish charity. Edwards contributes with a foreword.

Each meditation shows a deep and rounded knowledge of theology and scripture, of Church teaching and Catholic tradition, aside from history, literature and culture. But in the attempts to integrate all the elements, which does make for interesting reading, the effect often feels too cluttered and saturated for a text for purposes of comfort and solace.

The well-illustrated book often reads like a catechism for adults; in parts it all seems somewhat stream-of-consciousness. It may be argued that the meditations have more than one purpose — to educate and comfort, or maybe even to impress?

Nevertheless, the book is a useful extra to have on one’s bookshelf, an addition to other theological and catechetical texts. It draws heavily on examples of suffering and sublime healing experiences in scripture, literature and history (ecclesiastical and otherwise), distilling insights from these.

Some readers may even regard Cry Me a River as a one-stop place for these different elements.

The book concludes with the idea that love is the key factor in one’s own healing process, for which the loving hearts of Jesus and Mary are the central motifs.  These motifs see hurt and pain as inseparable from love and reaching wholeness. They once again hearken back to Oscar Wilde : “How else but through a broken heart my Lord Christ enters in.”