Mothers are, by nature, meant to die before their children do. So when the opposite occurs, the pain carries a sense of dread disorder – known to Catholics from searing images of Mary at the cross, and from the Stabat Mater, the long, 20-stanza poem that depicts this holiest of mothers standing witness to the execution of her son.
It’s a disturbing text in which the poet – whose identity has never been conclusively established but was probably a 13th-century Franciscan – piles on the agony before asking to share Mary’s pain as a means of access to God’s grace. And at the end, he begs her to assist his path to paradise – which turns the text into a vision of the life of faith with Mary as a source of help and comfort.
