A Modern Pieta

Today, I found myself at a 10am Saturday Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary's in Minneapolis, honoring veterans--both living and deceased. Auxilary Bishop Lee Piche presided and delivered an incredibly somber homily about the wounds and trauma of war. He closed with an anecdote about a man whose duty was to accompany the bodies of fallen soldiers back to their hometowns. This entailed meeting with the families. Sometimes it was the mother and father, but mostly, he would just meet with the mothers. And the mothers would always ask one question: “Are you sure this is my son?”

When Bishop Piche announced this question, I caught a glimpse of a stone sculpture of Christ crucified, with Mary Magdalene and the Blessed Mother on either side. I immediately thought of how that question must have crossed Our Lady’s mind when she held the dead God in her arms, “Are you sure this is my Son?” A question which would echo Isaiah’s prochecy, “As many were astonished at Him, His appearance was so marred beyond human semblance” (52:14) God had suffered so terribly He had become unrecognizable. Similarly, the reality of the death of these soliders  presented something almost unrecognizable--the horror of a dead son—of a mother burying her child, that mothers were compelled to ask, "Are you sure?"

Suffering comes to us with manifold faces--faces which provoke this same question. Indeed, despite the external disappointments we all face, the hardest suffering is often what we find within ourselves. This is how we approach our brokenness: We look at ourselves in the existential mirror and ask, “Are you sure this is me?” We see the scars, we see the disfigurements and whatnot. We almost ask in horror—“Are you sure this me?” The question is spat out into a void—waiting to be filled by the one answer we both long for—and yet fear. We wait, like the Blessed Mother, like those mothers of the soldiers, with our poverty cradled in our arms.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

But, the God who answers, "Yes"--is also the God who speaks with infinite compassion, "You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.” (Isaiah 43:4)

Let us remember this truth--the truth of God's all encompassing love--when we consider all of what makes life so terrible and so beautiful--and allow ourselves to offer to the Father that poverty--the unthinkable--which is cradled between our arms.