By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I think religious art often touches our souls because it reveals truths about both the divine and the human. The Pieta at St. Peter’s Basilica, for example, always provokes me to contemplate what I call the curse of parenthood.
The Pieta is Michelangelo’s masterpiece marble sculpture completed in 1499. Translated from the Italian as “pity” or “compassion,” it depicts Mary cradling her crucified dead son moments after Roman soldiers removed him from the cross. Mary seems devastated, and sits in silent shock, at the sight of the lifeless Jesus.
I first noticed the Pieta because of the small replica my mother kept in a place of honor in our home. The bronze image of motherhood resonated with her; a compassionate and devoted mother was all she aspired to be. It felt like a personal assault on our household in May of 1972 when a mentally disturbed geologist attacked the real sculpture in Rome with a hammer, damaging part of Mary’s arm, nose, and eyelid.
I saw the Pieta, now safely behind protective glass, in person during three visits to Italy. At the time of these trips, I was not only no longer a child, I also was father to three children. As a result, I saw the sculpture in a new light, as emblematic of the curse of parenthood.
What is this curse? Psalm 127 is right, children are a blessing. I do not regret having children- becoming a father was the best and happiest choice of my life. Yet, choosing parenthood is like reaching for a lovely rose and feeling the bitter pierce of the accompanying thorns. The choice extracts a toll.
The price of parenthood is to be Mary in the Pieta. To have a child, to love a child, is to feel that child’s anguish and pain far more acutely than any injury directly inflicted on you.
When Jesus was flogged, Mary felt the lash on her own back. When the soldiers drove nails into the hands of Jesus, Mary cried out in pain. As Jesus lay dead on Mary’s lap, Mary died too. How do I know all this? I have seen it. I have felt it.
I stood by grim friends as they buried a daughter crucified by a terminal illness. I watched a distraught mother grieve a son mortally nailed to the cross of heroin. I read the disconsolate words of agony written by a former college classmate, in his own form of Calvary, desperately trying to understand the unexpected loss of his own college-age son.
These were real Pietas, in real life and real time. Each parental expression was the anguished face of Mary, chiseled into flesh rather than stone.
I have not had to endure the loss of a child, but the same curse also arrives in numerous other excruciating ways. A good friend of mine once said that we parents are only as happy as our most miserable child. I have had Pieta-like moments listening to children cough uncontrollably through the night or from knowing they suffer from medical symptoms I cannot abate. The curse was there as I watched them endure trouble at school or with friends, or struggle socially, academically, economically, or professionally.
To have and love a child is to suffer as the beloved child suffers. The Pieta reveals to us that not even the most perfect human being who ever lived, Mary the Mother of God, could escape this dreadful fate, for it is the miserable price of opening your heart to love.
Mary endured what must have been the three longest and worst days of her life right after the event depicted in Michelangelo’s 11,000 pounds of elegant Carrara marble. I imagine she was sustained not just by the deep memories of joy she acquired from being a parent, but also by her faith and belief in her son’s words about Easter and resurrection, that life is changed, not ended. Maybe that is why Mary can seem both devastated and serene at the same time in the Pieta.
The irony and the mystery then is that the cause of the curse of parenthood that afflicts us humans may also be its only cure, a form of divine grace. A bond of love so strong that it causes those in the loving relationship to feel each other’s pains must, by its very nature, also be powerful enough to survive anything, even death itself.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
What a powerful and beautiful expression of the devastation and serenity felt by Mary at the same time in the Pieta, to use your words. After the loss of my own son, a French colleague confronted me with a grand expression of congratulations. It took me years to understand what he meant. In part, his joy was for me, one who now resides in the company of Mary.
Lovely thought Marianna!