The Stabat Mater is a Catholic hymn written in the 13th Century that grew in popularity until it was officially incorporated into the liturgy during the 18th Century as part of the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. The title translates to “The Standing Mother” and tells the story of Mary’s grief as she stands at the foot of the cross bearing her crucified son.

The Stabat Mater stands out from other Marian poems, which typically depict Mary as a vessel celebrating her womb, or are assuming her holiness because of the nature of her child, or are prayers seeking her help as an intercessor who sits in Heaven at the right hand of Christ. This poem, however, sees her as a person, a mother, one who suffers the way we might suffer, not at the death of the messiah or a political martyr or a worker of miracles, but over her child. 

This is a relatable human moment, a depiction of every parent’s greatest fear – that they will outlive their children. The poem says:

Can the human heart refrain

From partaking in her pain,

In that Mother's pain untold?

The prayer continues, asking Mary to “make us feel as you have felt”, both the love of a mother for her child, and the pain of separation. There is a holiness to suffering; every angst ridden teenager knows this. Suffering is transformative, transcendent, alchemical. Religious practices from across the world are filled with self-mortification rituals, denial practices, reenactments of martyric suffering, and various forms of sacrifice. Such pain is an expression of a deeper yearning for reconciliation, and our hearts leap towards such completeness.

The mystery of motherhood begins with the infinite completeness of the womb, a secret we all keep embedded in our subconscious. Motherhood is a relationship you willingly enter knowing the physical intimacy – the complete and total, most extreme and perfect intimacy between two human bodies, will end. 

Mothers have the embodied understanding of both this Mystery’s halves, the sharing of one body and the pain of separation, the paradox of how two can be one and how one becomes two.

I am not trying to take away the experience of fathers or those who have adopted or don’t have children; we are trying to touch mystery and working in elaborate metaphors.

As the sufi poet Rumi says in his most famous poem, the Masnavi:

Listen to the song of the reed flute

The song of separation.

“Ever since I was cut from the reedbed

I have made this cry.

Anyone separated from the one they love understands,

Anyone pulled from their source longs to return.”

Such longing for union is at the center of the mystical experience and resides inside all of us. This analogy is one facet of the mystery the Stabat Mater explores.

The metaphor embedded in Mary’s story, the pact every mother makes with life itself, is that you will give everything as a mother, and this relationship will be lost. Why? Because the world needs them more than you do.

The Stabat Mater calls on us to remember not just the suffering of Mary, but of all mothers. This intimate loss is not just the story of how motherhood ends, but how it begins. And yet, we stand at the intersection of this truth in both directions. Every one of our mothers has experienced this separation, because we were needed in the world. We belong to more than our mothers, our parents, or our families; we belong to the world. The same has been true for those who came before us and will be true for those who come after.

I don’t know how much of this was on Pergolesi’s mind as he wrote the Stabat Mater, his final work as a composer, while dying of tuberculosis at the age of 26. Perhaps he was thinking of his own mother who had lived through the death of three children. Perhaps he was angry and consumed with thoughts of what he wouldn’t be able to do as his time came to an end. Or, perhaps he was content to fulfill his purpose, his reason for being separated, before returning to the source.