My mother and father had strong faith. They prayed every day and had us, as a family, pray with them. One of the prayers they said daily was the SALVE REGINA, an old, classic prayer which asks Mary to intercede for us. Many of us, I suspect, are familiar with it. At one point it describes our state in this life as “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Is this a healthy way to describe ourselves? They never gave it a thought. For them, it made eminent sense to pray like that. For many of us today, it would seem, it doesn’t make sense any more. To describe ourselves as “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears” seems for many of us to be morbid, bad theology, an affront to the spirit of wholeness, celebration, and joy that should permeate our lives. There can be a lot of value in praying in exactly this way. What a prayer like this does is give us permission to not feel abnormal precisely when we aren’t bubbling with happiness. What it tells us is that it’s okay to have a bad day, a lonely season, a life that somehow never fully gets free of tension and restlessness. To accept that we live in an habitual state of incompleteness is to not let an unrealistic ideal crucify what’s good in our lives. Karl Rahner, in his unique Germanic phraseology, has his own take on this. Rahner: In the torrent of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. My parents understood that and for them this was expressed precisely in lines like: “We pray, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Praying like this gave them permission to accept the inevitable limitations that life imposes. It gave them permission too to not have to demand from this life something it can never give, clear-cut pure joy. They didn’t have to do violence to life because it couldn’t give them everything they wanted. They accepted the unfinished symphony of their lives – and of all lives – and, because of that, were able to enjoy the beauty and joy that was there. They were equipped, in ways that we aren’t, to handle frustration. For all of our emphasis on health, holism, and positive theology, and for all of our attempts to exorcize everything that suggests limits, how equipped are we really to deal with life’s inevitable frustrations?[1]
[1] Excerpt from Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s reflection, “Weeping in a Valley of Tears,” November 2000.