It wasn’t my church, so I didn’t feel I could climb the ladder myself, though perhaps I should have. I watched as each mounted up, and crossed herself, and touched fingers to the tears. Some rubbed them on their foreheads; others crossed themselves again with the holy stuff; one woman touched a handkerchief to the wood, soaking up a bit of the precious fluid in order to carry it home with her, or to bring it to someone. One man kissed the image. Each person looked at it gravely; the entire procession, in fact, was solemn and earnest, without irony, and beautiful in that it was unmediated, uninterpreted, without clergy or hierarchy, merely the two old women softly directing the movement of traffic while they told their beads.

Why am I telling you this?

How can I say what I felt for that weeping mother? I hear they’ve now covered her image in Plexiglas, for protection, and that her tears collect in a dish beneath her, into which the faithful dip their fingers and rosaries. The trunk below the wound has entirely disappeared beneath its freight of prayer and ornament. I love the democracy of the visionary; each person in that line, carrying distinct sorrows like or unlike in scale and nature, finds hope there. Our Mother of Sorrows subsumes all individual griefs. She does not care what the sorrow is; it isn’t the Mother’s to judge or to differentiate or to explain; it’s the Mother’s work to love and therefore to weep for us, to enfold us in her weeping.

It is Her role to stand, where a mother once stood, as our Mother. The human failings—the ordinary desires and limits and lacks—of our real mothers brought them and us to harm, made them incapable of embodying their love for their children as they might have wished to. In this Mother there is no such failing. My mother prayed to the Mother of Sorrows because she could not be that Mother herself, filled as she was with rage and her longing for some other life, with her dislike and distrust of the body and her disappointment in her own children.

You don’t need to be Catholic to love Mary, or even a Christian; I have little traffic with her Son, but the Holy Mother is another story. Through her, through the image emblazoned on the tree and pouring herself out for us, I can come close to—how else to say it?—that maternal wellspring deep in the heart of the world. She is permanent affection; she sits on a donkey with her body bent over her baby and carries him into Egypt, out of danger. She’s pharaoh’s daughter, who bends over the Nile reeds to pluck the basket from the eddies, to bring the babe to the warm light and laughter of her chambers.