The impetus to write this book came about from praying the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady and the Joyful Mysteries of her Holy Rosary. While contemplating the Joyful Mysteries one notes that the sorrow of losing the child Jesus in the temple ended with the joy of finding Him there.
In this book Maryâs personal joys and sorrows evolve as a tapestry of the important events in her life. It tells the story of the fulfillment of Godâs promise after the fall, that He would send us a Savior who would save us from our sins and restore us to the Paradise He originally created. The lesson is learned that Jesus never abandoned His Mother to her sorrows. Out of His great love for her, He always brought them to an end with joy. Likewise, we can expect to endure many hardships, sadness, and sorrows in this life, but because of Godâs love for us, He will not leave us alone with them. When we accept to bear our crosses and trust in His love, He will reward us with our greatest joy!
The impetus to write this book came about from praying the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady and the Joyful Mysteries of her Holy Rosary. While contemplating the Joyful Mysteries one notes that the sorrow of losing the child Jesus in the temple ended with the joy of finding Him there.
In this book Maryâs personal joys and sorrows evolve as a tapestry of the important events in her life. It tells the story of the fulfillment of Godâs promise after the fall, that He would send us a Savior who would save us from our sins and restore us to the Paradise He originally created. The lesson is learned that Jesus never abandoned His Mother to her sorrows. Out of His great love for her, He always brought them to an end with joy. Likewise, we can expect to endure many hardships, sadness, and sorrows in this life, but because of Godâs love for us, He will not leave us alone with them. When we accept to bear our crosses and trust in His love, He will reward us with our greatest joy!
Joy and sorrow are both emotions. An emotion is a response to some stimulus. Emotions are felt both physically and mentally. However, mental emotion can also be said to be physical, as it is a natural response of one's body. But there is also another form of emotion which I will define as supernatural â the emotion one feels with and in oneâs heart, the soul. God, our creator, created us in His image and likeness.While this does not mean that we look like Him and that he has human features, it does mean that he endowed us with certain characteristics of His â life, free will, the ability to create (e.g., have an original thought), etc. But of all His attributes, He gave us the ability to "love and be loved." St. Paul tells us that "the greatest of these is love." [I Cor 13:13] The word "love" is very special; it is a verb, a noun, and an adverb â "I love you," "Iâm in love," "I feel love for you." While joy and sorrow are physical and mental emotions, their most profound emotion is what one feels with and within. It acts upon one's soul because of the God-given attribute to love. They are products of love.
To better understand this concept of supernatural emotion, it is important to distinguish it from the physical and mental emotions that animals also feel. The following is a quote from an article by Jennifer Welsh. [1]Â
"Babies as young as six months old can distinguish between friendly dog barks and threatening ones.Animals and humans feel emotions vary differently, so much so that it makes human emotions harder to study, according to a neuroscientist.
"'When we see a cat purring or a dog wagging its tail in joy, we shouldn't expect that it's feeling what we are feeling when we experience joy,' Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, said on Feb. 18 in a talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. 'I'm not saying other animals donât have feelings, just that they are different between different species of animals. However these feelings and emotions are expressed â whether with the wag of a tail or a smile, they come from the same basic survival circuits in the brain, which are the same in all mammals.â
" 'Everyone knows what emotion is until they are asked to define it,' LeDoux said. 'There is in fact little consensus in psychology or neurology about what emotion is, and how it differs from other aspects of mind and behavior.'
" âIn truth, researchers tend to fake their understanding of emotions,â LeDoux said. âThey depend on insights from personal experiences to determine that some mental states have certain feelings associated with them and others do not, which we call emotions.â
"These shaky definitions are problematic even when just studying emotions in humans (who have 37 English words for feelings related to fear); these problems are compounded when we try to study human emotions in animals.
"Instead of trying to compare animals and humans, researchers should study the survival circuits behind behaviors. Studies in animals can find survival circuits universal to mammals, like fear and hunger.
"'Survival phenomena are closely associated with emotions,' LeDoux said. âWe need to focus on a species' independent way of getting at these key functions.'Â Many different animals have very similar survival circuitry: for example, the brain regions that tell an animal to run away from a threat are the same even if that animal runs on two legs, four legs or takes flight.â
" 'These areas are organized similarly in spite of the fact that they control different behavioral responses in different species,' LeDoux said. 'These are more related to motivation. The line between emotion and motivation is very thin: when you are in an emotional state you are motivated.'
"This leads to differences in behavior and how we perceive our own feelings and emotions. 'Feelings are important but they need to be studied in humans,' LeDoux said. 'These survival functions are not about creating feelings. They are about controlling interactions with the environment.' "
So what makes joy and sorrow so different from the emotions to which animals feel and respond?  While joy and sorrow are both physical and mental responses to stimuli, the greatest emotion is what is felt by the soul because we are endowed by our Creator with love. After all, St. Paul tells us that "love is patient, kind, not jealous, not pompous, not inflated, doesn't brood, rejoices, bears all things, hopes, endures, and never fails;" all of which are actions that respond from the nature of love. The joys and sorrows felt by our Blessed Mother, while she felt them mentally and physically, were felt through love by her soul. Unfortunately, the scientific fields of neurology and psychology ignore the importance of the soul in human emotions, where LeDoux remarked, âThere is in fact little consensus in psychology or neurology about what emotion is, and how it differs from other aspects of mind and behavior.â It is truly unfortunate they did not consider the important role of the soul that differentiates humankind from the animals.
[1] How Animal and Human Emotions Are Different, Live Science, March 01, 2012, Jennifer Welsh, https://www.livescience.com/18750-animal-human-emotions-fears.html
"Joys and Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary from Conception to Coronation" by Chuck Elms takes a lens of faithful dedication and Christian devotion to take a look at the entire life of the Blessed Virgin Mary from her birth to death. The book covers each key event from her Immaculate Conception to her Coronation as Queen of Heaven.
The book comes from Chuck Elm's deep meditations on the Virgin Mary's joys and sorrows, particularly during the Rosary. The author highlights how each of Mary's divine sorrows was often converted to divine joy by His Holy Grace.
The author's introduction slowly takes us into the major differences between human emotions (joy and sorrow) and their spiritual dimensions.
Throughout the book, the author generously borrows from Biblical texts, papal messages, major Christian theologies, words of the Saints and his personal interpretations to enrich each event of Mary's life. The inclusion of major paintings that describe the key events in Blessed Virgin Mary's life must be appreciated as it served as a personal favourite to this reader.
The writer covers Her Immaculate Conception and discusses Mary's immaculate birth, how God carefully planned that the Mother of Chirst shall be free from original sin. Then comes the Birth of the Virgin Mary, a joyous gift to Saints Anne and Joachim in their old age. To fulfil her parent's vow to God, Mary is then offered to Live as a Temple Virgin. Then comes her Annunciation where she is faced with both fear and later joy to learn from the Gabriel that she shall conceive the Son of God. Mary heads for the Visitation to Elizabeth, and the joy both women felt during their meeting and the spirit of the Holy Ghost is recounted. The Nativity and Epiphany, reflect on the birth of Jesus and the visit of the Magi. Then Jesus is Presented in the Temple, where Mary and Joseph are burdened with the knowledge of the great sorrows that shall take Jesus. The hardships continue as the Holy Family has their Flight into Egypt. And then comes the sorrow of losing Jesus in the temple and Finding Him in the Temple.
Chuck Elm' takes clear dedication and interprets each event of Mary's life to describe how sorrow and joy turn out to be different sides of the same coin, how one foreshadows the other. The author tries to carefully teach us that to live in His divine providence, is to accept the joys and sorrows of life, like Mary did and live our lives to the fullest.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking forward to a personally grounded and theologically established glimpse into the Blessed Virgin Mary's life to grow in faith.