(Excerpt from FOLAMGFS.html - Background Reference/Index for Teachers)

The Sorrowful Mysteries

In praying the Aves of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary,
students learn to reflect and meditate on Christ's sufferings as
seen through Mary's eyes of motherly compassion.

This view is quickened with an imaginative vividness by Flowers of
Our Lady such as "Mary's Sword" (Iris spear foliage, recalling
Simeon's prophecy of sword of sorrow to pierce Mary's soul);
"Mary's Tears" (Lily-of-the-Valley and many other tear-like
flowers, reputed by imaginative legends to have sprung up from the
ground where Mary's tears fell beneath the Cross); and "Mary's 
Tresses" (Maidenhair fern and other plants imaginatively resembling
purported relics brought back by pilgrims from the Holy 
Land of Mary's tresses, torn from her head in the anguish of her
sorrow at the foot of the Cross, and saved by St. John).

In Ireland, Elegant St. Johnswort (Hypericum pulchrum) - known
elsewhere as "Christ's Sweat" from the red dots on its flower
petals - was known in Gaelic as "Allus Mhuire" ("Mary's Sweat"),
suggesting that Mary shared physically in Christ's bloody sweat of
the Agony in the Garden.

Other sorrowful Flowers of Our Lady include "Our Lord's (bloody)

Lash" (Polyganum persicaria); "Our Lord's (bloody) Back" (Achillea
millefolia); "Crown of Thorns" (Euphorbia splendens); "Christ's
(bloody) Knee"(Tigridia pavonia); "Tree of the Cross" (Cornus
florida); "Our Lord's Nails" (Geranium pratense); "The Five Wounds"
(Sedum acre); "Christ's Blood Drops (Lythrum saliceria) and
(Saxifraga umbrosa ); "Christ's Lance" (Ophioglossum vulgatum);
"Heart of Jesus" (Dicentra spectabilis); and the multiple Cross
symbolism of the "Passion Flower" (Passiflora caerulea).

Through the division of the Rosary meditations on Christ's Passion
and Death into the five Sorrowful Mysteries, we are assisted in
meditating and acting upon them as experienced through his several
faculties, and then his life itself:

     - Will      - The Agony in the Garden - "Not my will but
                   yours be done".

     - Flesh     - The Scourging at the Pillar

     - Intellect - The Crowning With Thorns - The Mocking of Christ

     - Emotions  - The Redemptive embrace of suffering - The
                   Carrying of the Cross -

     - Death     - The Crucifixion


In thus meditating on the five Sorrowful Mysteries, drawing on the
experience of their own sufferings, students come to comprehend
that Christ takes on their individual sufferings, together with
those of all the world, as his own in his redemptive sacrifice.
With this, they understand that they are thereby enabled to offer
their own sufferings sacrificially in union with Christ's offering
of them - "making up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ"
(Col., i, 24) - daily as they occur and not just when meditating on
them while praying the Rosary, or when viewing their flower
symbols.

In this students come to reflect that in God's original creation of a
perfect world, sins and effects of sin were absent, and that in the
Peaceable Kingdom to come, they will be absent again, through
Christ's sacrificial satisfaction and the fullness of our sacrificial
sharing in his reparation.  Therefore, even the slightest irritation
or inconvenience today is contrary to God's will, which is why at
Fatima Mary called not only for our prayers for the graces of peace
but for "the sacrifice of every person (of) the fulfillment of his
duties in life".

The Church's specification of indulgences for some prayers serves to
remind us of the reparational efficacy of all prayer, in the world of
spiritual cause and effect.  We are to pray and sacrifice for
reparation of the effects of sin circulating the world with the same
fervor that we pray for the reparational repose of the souls of the
faithful departed in purgatory.

Those students undertaking the ascetic/mystical path of spiritual
perfection (purgative, illuminative, unitive) of Saints Teresa of
Avila, John of the Cross and Francis de Sales can make recourse to
the Sorrowful Mysteries and their flower symbols for
self-examination of their faculties for confession of their faults.

In Lent students are to intensify their meditations on Christ's
Passion and Death through the flower symbols of the Garden Way of
the Cross.

We envisage that the communion of Mary and Jesus, beginning in
Nazareth, reached a sorrowful intensity when their eyes met on
Jesus' Way of the Cross.  Students can envisage this through
paintings of the relic, Veronica's Veil, which reputedly retained
the image of Christ's face as, during a pause in the carrying of
the Cross, Veronica ("true image") used it to wipe the perspiration
from his brow.  Dominating the veil image are Christ's
penetratingly imploring eyes - an image impressed so vividly in the
minds of the medieval pilgrims by the relic that it was recalled
not only by the many flowers known as "Christ's Eye", but also by
the characteristic two unique white dots on the blue flower,
"Veronica" - a naming retained as both the botanical and the common
name of this flower today (and corroborated by the Oxford English
Dictionary as being of medieval origin).

Theologically, students are instructed to meditate on the Sorrowful
Mysteries of Christ's taking upon himself all the human suffering
of the world in his Passion and Death on Calvary, and continued
daily in all the masses of the world, such that:

     - with Christ's divine/human sacrificial immolation and
       death, the world's sins are banished into the
       nothingness of the outer darkness, in satisfaction
       for their offense to the Father, with accompanying
       redemptive restoration to the world of the original
       graces of Creation, for resumption of the building
       of the earthly Peaceable Kingdom

and

     - through meditation on the sacrificial immolation of
       Christ's faculties - will, body, intellect and
       feelings - each individual is able experience the
       sufferings of his own faculties as taken on also by
       Christ, and thus to offer them sacrificially with
       Christ in reparation for the effects of sins still
       continuing in the cause and effect of the world
       after Christ's redemption satisfaction for the sins
       themselves.