At Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, there is a magnificent statue of the Virgin Mary cradling her dead son, Jesus. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was twenty-three years old when he carved La Pietà from a single, perfect block of Carrara marble. Mary had stood beside Jesus when he was crucified at Mount Golgotha, just outside the walls of Jerusalem. After he was taken from the cross, his lifeless body was placed across his mother’s knees. In her grief, Mary might have remembered holding him when he was a baby in Bethlehem. Michelangelo portrayed her as a young mother gazing at her son with quiet tenderness.
Improbably serene, the embodiment of self-sacrifice, Mary is perceived by Christians as the most obedient and favored of all God’s servants. In religious art, she is sometimes shown as Our Lady of Sorrows with tears in her eyes and swords piercing her heart. When depicted in paintings of the Lamentation, or mourning, of Christ, Mary often appears in a state of anguish. But Michelangelo’s Holy Mother is calm, composed, and eternally youthful, even though she was no longer a young woman when Jesus died.
In response to criticism that his rendering of Mary was unrealistic, Michelangelo said that her youthful appearance was intentional. The beauty of this most blessed of women could never be diminished by the passage of time, he believed.1 There is an otherworldly, transcendent quality to the image of the tranquil mother holding the perfect, polished body of Christ. To stand before the statue at the Pietà Chapel is to enter the iconic moment of mourning as heavenly forces gathered around Mary in the hours after Christ’s death. The mother who just lost her son isn’t falling apart; she sits in equanimity, still trusting that the power of love will overcome evil. Mary doesn’t know what will happen next, but she accepts her fate, knowing something more lies ahead.
The death of a loved one or a life-changing loss will bring most of us to our knees. The Bible, the Pentateuch, and the Qur’an promise an afterlife, and the Sutras offer a path of rebirth through reincarnation, but the assurance of Heaven or Gan Eden or the bliss of nirvana does nothing to allay the searing pain of grief. Even C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), the British writer and Christian apologist, found little comfort in his faith after his wife, Joy Davidman (1915-1960), died of cancer. “[D]on’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion,” Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed, “or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”2 In the wake of immense sorrow, we are left broken.
The departed ones travel onward to destinations unknown—heaven, purgatory, or hell in Michelangelo’s Catholic tradition—while the living are left behind with their amputated limbs to begin journeys of their own. When I was thirty-four years old, I lost my husband of eleven years with hardly a warning. Our son was three months old at the time, and it was the task of caring for him that kept me upright. While he slept, I would slip away with my broken heart to a dark place where I grasped at the phantoms of a previous life that was gone for good. I would never be myself again; the bereaved never are. Something within us withers and falls away in the aftermath. While we lose aspects of our former selves, we gain the opportunity to become entirely new people—to be resurrected.
In the ancient art of alchemy, the cyclical pattern of death and rebirth is symbolized by the ouroboros—a circular dragon or fire-breathing serpent eating its own tail. Known for trying to turn lead into gold, alchemists were equally preoccupied with the mystery of immortality. They were convinced that an elusive potion, the Elixir of Life, contained the power to rejuvenate and to heal. Derived from the spirit of God, the substance is analogous to the Living Water, a metaphor used by Jesus.3 The Elixir is only ever found by passageway through an all-consuming period of grief and misery known by alchemists as the nigredo—a Latin word for “blackness.” Those who undertake the difficult journey suffer nearly to the point of death.
Early on in the process, the bereaved, like the alchemist, can’t see the potentiality hidden within the crisis. There is a sense of being adrift at sea, directionless, far from port. The disorienting voyage deals a blow that shatters the ego’s illusions and false identities. Familiar routines, sense of belonging, and certainty of purpose disappear. But not everything is lost. Dry land returns to view once we shine a light on our innermost selves and begin the work of uncovering who we are at the very core.
In alchemy, the metals and minerals that the alchemist mixed and melted in the crucible have to be purified in an alembic through repeat distillations. The painstaking process is called the albedo, or white phase. In the same way, the murky chaos that took the place of our former lives has to be dealt with and sorted through. Established routines and roles that might have been played for many years are surrendered, like a snake sheds its old skin. With persistent effort, emotional wounds begin to heal and the authentic self is revealed. We begin to recognize that we are more than someone’s spouse, parent, or child, more than our careers and our achievements, more than our physical bodies even. Hidden talents, latent potentials, and deeper identities—spiritual gold—slowly emerge in the rising dawn.
Before I was widowed, I supposed the easy rhythm of my life and marriage would continue on for decades to come. I worked as a registered nurse, my husband had a promising career. He took care of our home, garden, and many other things so quietly that his efforts were nearly invisible to me. I wasn’t prepared to take on all he had carried and to raise our son on my own. Like a casualty of war, I was forced to move on from the broken ruins that surrounded me. Then came the years of wandering through an endless winter and searching for a new tribe. Unseen, still buried below ground, a caring community that would one day flourish was taking root. “It takes a village to raise a child,” is an African proverb I came to understand.
The concept of death giving rise to life is a recurrent theme in the New Testament. “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25), Christ taught. The gospel teaching challenges us to abandon our safe and familiar ways for a deeper, more meaningful existence—in Christian terms, to follow the ways of Jesus. But who would choose to walk away from the security and comforts of home, career, or family? No reasonable person invites a tragedy. And yet a devastating loss or the death of a loved one can be the jolt that comes in like a hurricane, awakens us from sleep, washes away our old lives, and sends us to a remarkable country we would never have visited otherwise.
At first, the foreign land where I came to live after my catastrophe seemed to promise nothing but heartache, reduced means, vanishing friendships, and physical exhaustion, but there was no returning home. We will all undergo, to greater or lesser extents, the trials of faith and testing by fire described by the Apostle Peter.4 The alchemical, fire-breathing dragon has to burn and destroy itself before it can be reborn. If you persevere and keep walking on through the flames of your ordeal, you turn to ashes. The glittering objects and fleeting fortunes of the material world become nothing but ephemera, and at last you are able to discern what is genuine and eternal—the people and the love that remain. You see abundance everywhere in nature, and like the poet William Wordsworth, you find beauty in “the meanest flower that blows”.5 You discover your original source—the divine light that connects you to everyone and everything. You are reborn, a phoenix.
Very early in the morning on the third day after the crucifixion, Mary Magdalene and several others went to the tomb to complete the ritual anointing of the body of Jesus. Mother Mary was likely there, too.6 But when the women arrived, they saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance and the tomb was empty. Two angels, gleaming and white, appeared before them. “Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He is not here, but he has been raised” (Luke 24: 5-6), the angels said. Saint Mary—peaceful, patient, devoid of all self-pity as she held her dead son in her lap—had been right all along. The story was just beginning.
Who would we become if our tragedies never happened? Very different people, I would think. Less resilient, less empathetic. Maybe happier or more comfortable in superficial ways, but forever naïve. I scarcely know the frightened young woman I was a quarter century ago, but her suffering was a precious gift she gave to me. The distillation takes many years, until every hint of darkness within is washed away and the transmutation takes hold. If you are grieving now, if you have lost someone, or if your tears are for the ones crouched in the rubble of war, a part of you has died and something true and beautiful lies within you, waiting, begging, to be born. ◆
This piece is excerpted from the Winter 2024-2025 issue of Parabola, GRIEF & GRATITUDE. You can find the full issue on our online store.
- “St Peter’s – Chapel of the Pieta.” Stpetersbasilica.info, stpetersbasilica.info/Altars/Pieta/Pieta.htm. Accessed 9 July 2024 ↩︎
- Lewis, C.S, A Grief Observed. Google Books, Harper Collins, 9 June 2009, books.google.com/books?id=YrJEJG1lMVwC&newbks=0&printsec=frontcover&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed 9 July 2024. ↩︎
- “Whoever believes in me, as scripture says: ‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him’” (John 7:38 New American Bible). ↩︎
- “so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that is perishable even though tested by fire, may prove to be for praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Peter 1:7 New American Bible). ↩︎
- Woodsworth, William. “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1918, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Clarendon Press, 1939, p. 633. ↩︎
- Arnold, Jen. “The Women at the Resurrection.” Corpus Christi Catholic Church. www.corpuschristiphx.org, 2022, https://corpuschristiphx.org/blog.php?month=202204&id=1775487186&cat=&pg=1&title=The+Women+at+the+Resurrection. Accessed 9 July 2024. ↩︎