La Pieta. “The Pity”

As I enter the hallway where the Pieta will be up ahead, I’m filled with the Holy Spirit. My breath catches in my throat and tears well up in my eyes at the suspense. I am filled with awe that I’m actually here. I just want to see it.  

I shuffle through the crowd, not in a line exactly, but pushed along, some getting ready for picture-taking, some squeezing selfishly closest, some distracted by the next part of the tour or the history or the architecture, but I cannot be involved like that; I have my heart focused fully on the Lord. I am overwhelmed by the blessing of viewing Michelangelo’s famous statue, now almost right before my eyes. I wait as others stop in front of it, looking at it from a distance, seeing its brilliance, its magnificence, but exercising patience until it’s my turn to view it fully. I want to be squarely in front of it. I don’t need my photo taken with it. I need to be near. It feels like I’ve found the purpose in traveling to Rome at all, and I need to speak to the Lord about it. As I take my place before the Carrera marble figure, I take it in: Mary with the fallen Jesus on her lap, in her arms, in her gaze, His full weight on her legs, His adult body cradled like a baby. I see the creative genius of an artist who has chiseled out the pain of losing a child, The Christ Child even. When I see the expression on her face, the lifeless body in her lap, I am overwhelmed with the emotions that my motherhood has taught me, that I could not bear it if my child were lifeless in my arms, that I could not accept the truth of the death of my own child ever. I notice her ‘let it be’ face and I know that she has been prepared by the Holy Spirit, by her years of devotion to God, by her education in her childhood and studying of the scriptures, by her experiences and trials. Her faith is strong. She has been spoken to by angels. She has seen visions. She has lived a life of confidence and trust in God. She knows that even in this moment, when everything is lost, when her heart is broken, when she cannot see how God will fix this, that He will in fact come through. Mary looks like she is both devastated and sure at the exact same time. I don’t know how a marble statue can hold this much emotion, and I cannot contain it. I see the pain in her and I feel it deeply. Unstoppable tears wet my face. I feel the heaviness of the loss of this devoted mom, and the loss of a love for a child, the joy of interacting with Him that has now ceased, the warmth of His body that has left, the sorrow at the pain and suffering she witnessed before He breathed His last. 

As I stand and look at her holding her dead Son, I feel it all. Before now, Mary had experienced horrific pain. Having already watched as her Son was wrongly accused, arrested, tried and sentenced, publicly beaten and mocked, she then walked with the crowd as near to her beloved Child as she could get. She looked on as her brutalized and silent Son carried His instrument of torture uphill with His bruised and bloody body, wearing a painful crown of thorns, leading the way up to the place of His crucifixion. She witnessed Roman soldiers hammering three nails into her Son’s flesh, sealing His fate, affixing Him to a wooden cross where He was meant to suffer until His death. She watched His blood spilling down as He hung there. Imagining His mother right there, sobbing, crying out or silent or however she managed to remain there causes me pain. I feel the sorrow and the anguish. I feel her suffering. 

And then God starts to speak to me. “I see you, Catherine. I see how you are like Mary. I see your problems and what is broken in your hands. I see how you are broken like she was. I see you, and I promise that I have’t left you. I promise that I understand your pain. I know your pain. I see your pain. I know you need healing. I haven’t left you.” I feel the rush of sorrow and the thrill of peace that comes with a moment in the holy presence of the Lord. I don’t answer Him. I don’t pray. I don’t say anything. I keep listening. I keep crying. I keep still in my silent place taking in La Pieta. The Pity. I understand it. I understand a piece of God. “I love you, Catherine. I’m here. I haven’t left you. I know you are suffering like this, but remember…this is Friday.”

And I think about the Lord and His mother, her suffering and His and the day that it happened. He was crucified on a Friday. We call it Good Friday. We know how good it truly is that God sent His Son, that He was sent to suffer for our sins in our place so that we could have eternal life. “But Sunday is coming.” The Lord reminds me of the simple fact that Sunday, as the third day after Friday will soon follow. I know it already. I don’t think I need reminding, but I guess I do. 

“Look at her. She doesn’t know He will rise again. Resurrection is not on her mind in this snapshot of a suffering mother. She is immersed in the sorrow of loss and grief and the torment of the way in which He died, the disbelief that the Son of God named Emmanuel, God with us, is lying in her arms. It’s a moment.” I wonder if she is doubting the words of the angels? Is she confused? Is she thinking of anything besides her own pain? “Don’t forget. You know this story. You know Easter is coming. Resurrection is real.” And I know it is. I feel the reality of God’s promise to raise His Son from the dead on the third day, and I know that His promise was not broken. “ He is risen, as He said.” (Matthew 28:6) And I think of my own pain, my own brokenness. Alone in a foreign country on a pilgrimage at the tail end of a very hard year, I stand in the Vatican thinking about what lays lifeless in my arms, my own problems that God will surely breathe life into. 

“Remember, resurrection is coming. It’s Friday. Don’t get stuck on Friday. Don’t forget that He rises on the third day. Wait for Sunday. Sunday is coming.”

And I wish that there were another statue, one that shows Mary’s exuberance when she beheld the Risen Lord. I want for there to be a different statue not called The Pity, but a statue called The Promise or The Fulfillment or The Reunion. I can imagine how glorious that moment must have been for both mother and Son, to be alive and walking and reunited. What emotions might well up if I stand in front of that statue? 

“Sunday is coming. Sunday is coming. It’s only Friday. Sunday is coming.” And I think about how engrossed in my own pain I have been, how difficult it can be sometimes to imagine a future without it, to remember that Sunday is coming. 

Tears fall as I answer God in this two-way prayer time. “Lord, I can’t imagine how You will change things. I can’t see how You can change my heart and make me able. I don’t see it. I believe You, but I don’t see it. I don’t understand how I will ever feel better.” I pray and know in my heart that Mary could have prayed those exact words. I know that she was horrified by witnessing the events of that last day, that she probably couldn’t see past her own pain all the way to Sunday. She was stuck on Friday, too. She was grieving. Like me, she didn’t know how God would heal her pain and make her able. The pity.

But of course He did. Does that mean God will do this for me? How could He just erase what’s happened and make me forget this painful year?

And then I remember the nail wounds. I think about Jesus’ pain, His blood loss, His broken skin. I think about the sound that driving those nails into His pierced skin must have made. (She heard all of those sounds.) I think about the agony of a man tortured to death, and I realize just then that the Risen Jesus didn’t forget. He had visible marks on His resurrected body as reminders. He had scars. He rose from the dead and was alive and talking and together with His loved ones, able to walk and talk again, but He also had scars. He didn’t get His old body and His old life back. He was forever different. “You will be different. Behold, I make all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)

And I trust that it was God who soothed me with the revelation that tough times don’t need to be forgotten to be healed. He told me that though I am sad about what I have lost, that the loss is indeed a pity, He was making all things new for me, resurrecting my trouble spots starting right then and there on that Friday while I gazed at brokenness in my arms, on my lap. He knew I felt the weight of it, that I believed I couldn’t bear the suffering, that I didn’t want to go on sometimes and that maybe today was one of those times. 

Pity. My situation. It’s a pity. It’s such a pity. And He knows. He just knows. And He loves me enough to share this precious glimpse of His own Son’s sorrowful death with me so I can remember that even this sad scene was not the end of the story. He shows me that He is Creator. He is Author. He is the Main Character in the story, and He ordains that even when suffering lasts through the night, joy comes. His mercies are new every morning. 

The crowd of people behind me deserve a moment with the masterpiece, so I move along, but I am changed. I’m nearer and nearer to the prayer room, the silent and reverent place where the Eucharist is exposed, where the Body of Christ is on display. The Blessed Sacrament is in a place of perpetual prayer, and soon I will be there in the Vatican, it St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, kneeling with others listening for God.

As I enter, I drop to my knees in prayer and sob like a child with the increased understanding of the sacrifice offered up for me in Jesus, how both His parents watched Him suffer under the weight of that agonizing pain, how the very human Mary was strengthened throughout to endure it all. And I love how God uses the example of her life to help me to live mine better, to accept God’s will and to wait with hope for Him to finish what He’s doing in me with Mary-like confidence that His plan is to prosper me and not to harm me. 

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