Harry Clarke’s window into Our Lady of Sorrows
In Harry Clarke’s stained glass masterpiece Mother of Sorrows, a sallow-eyed, anguished Mary holds Jesus in her arms. She stares, not at her son’s lifeless body, but at the viewer. “Look,” her intense gaze seems to say, “at what’s happened to my baby.” In fact, it’s so difficult to turn away from Mary’s haunting eyes that it’s easy to miss the window’s most startling detail: Mary is not in her normal place at the foot of the cross. She’s sitting on the cross with Jesus, cradling his lifeless body in her arms.
Seeing Mary on the cross with her son feels startling—maybe even scandalous. But Clarke wasn’t trying to create a scandal or rewrite the narrative. By envisioning Mary on the cross, her legs on each side of Jesus, her arms around his torso as if propping her son in her lap, Clarke’s Mother of Sorrows is, instead, providing a window into the meaning of Our Lady of Sorrows and helping viewers contemplate the role of Mary in the story of salvation.
As one of the world’s best stained glass artists, Harry Clarke is renowned for his vivid colors, intricate details, expressive figures, and symbolic details. Through his ability to layer colors, Clarke’s windows often explode with color. Through his layers of symbolism, they are also saturated with meaning. Clarke’s windows are not, then, just beautiful decorations, but rich, theological meditations.
Clarke’s ability to combine beauty with theological reflection is especially on display in his Mother of Sorrows window, which casts a vision of Mary not only as a suffering mother, but also as the first to obey Jesus’s command to take up the cross and follow him.
The Mother of Sorrows window was originally commissioned as a WWI memorial. Sister Superior Mary of Saint Wilfrid asked Clarke for a window featuring the pieta, a traditional depiction of Mary holding Jesus’s dead body. Comforting us and sharing in our sorrows is one of Our Lady of Sorrows’s most recognizable roles, and seeing a mourning mother would especially resonate with the mothers who had lost their sons during the war.
But Clarke’s window shows us there are layers of meaning in Our Lady of Sorrows. By combining a traditional pieta with another traditional scene, the stabat mater, Clarke does something new. Stabat mater means “the mother stands,” and describes art that depicts Mary at the foot of the cross. In the stabat mater, Mary must look on as her son hangs, bleeding and dying, on the cross. Like the pieta, the stabat mater invites viewers to see through the perspective of a woman suffering from watching her son suffer.
Combining the pieta with the stabat mater is already a surprise, but Clarke adds an additional twist by moving Mary from standing at the foot of the cross to sitting on the cross. This startling choice is not just to add drama, but to highlight Mary’s role in redemption. Clarke helps viewers visualize what it means to say, along with the second-century church faither Irenaeus, that in saying yes to the Incarnation, Mary became “the cause of salvation for herself and the whole human race.”
Traditional pietas link Jesus’s birth and death, but once again, Clarke takes this symbolism a step further to highlight how the story of salvation began with Mary’s consent. In the pieta, Mary cradles her dead son in her arms, a pose reminiscent of how she also held Jesus in her lap when he was a child. In Clarke’s window, Mary’s cloak and dress, rendered in beautifully vivid blues, drape over her knees and act as a backdrop to Jesus’s lifeless body. Mary’s legs straddle the crossbeams, holding Jesus’ body between them in a pose that evokes childbirth. With Mary’s legs on either side of him, Jesus looks as if he emerges from her womb. Her hands, too, cradle his body as if he were an infant once more.
Circling back to the beginning of Jesus’s life calls attention to Mary’s “fiat.” By resting Jesus’s body on Mary’s, Clarke positions Mary as a foundation for Christ’s salvific work. Mary, we are reminded, had to give her consent to participate in God’s plan: it needed her yes. And when she said yes to bearing a child, she also said yes to bearing the sorrow of that child’s death. Clarke’s Mary is thus embracing her son lovingly, yet also holding him out slightly, as if in offering.
Having Mary sit on the cross with her son highlights her compassion. Mary’s robes are inscribed with two crosses, one near her heart, the other by her womb, as a symbol of Simeon’s prophecy to Mary that “a sword will pierce your soul as well” (Luke 2:35). Jesus may have received the physical wound in his side, but Mary also feels the pain of the blow. The passion of the cross is named from the Latin passio, which means to suffer, to endure. Compassion, then, comes from com-passio, which literally means to suffer with. Mary endured labor pains to bring Christ into the world, and in doing so, she also endured the labor pains of seeing that son die on the cross in order to bring new life to the world.
In following Christ to the cross—and in Clarke’s vision, climbing up with him—Our Lady of Sorrows acts both as Queen of the Martyrs and Queen of the Apostles. Mary was not, according to church tradition, physically martyred like so many of Jesus’s apostles were, but she was still the first to bear wounds and “die” for Christ’s sake. Christ “died in body through a love greater than anyone had known,” Bernard of Clairvaux said, while “Mary died in spirit through a love unlike any other since his.” Mary’s body may not have died with Christ, but her deep compassion and love for her son led to her spiritual martyrdom.
As the first apostle and martyr, Our Lady of Sorrows was the first to model Galatians 2:20, in having “been crucified with Christ.” Bernard’s disciple, Arnold of Chartres, describes Mary as offering up “the blood of her heart” while Jesus offered “the blood of the flesh,” and so was “co-crucified” with her son.
Mary has even been called, in her role of Our Lady of Sorrows, a “co-redemptrix.” During Clarke’s lifetime, Pope Benedict XV said that Mary’s “yes” and her co-suffering with Christ means that “we may rightly say that she together with Christ redeemed the human race.” Piux XI followed his predecessor in calling Mary co-redemptrix, as have Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Mother Theresa, and a long line of Catholic saints and leaders. Even Benedict XVI, who expressed concern that the phrase co-redemptrix was confusing, still noted that Mary, “in loving and sorrowful participation in the death and Resurrection of her Son,” played a role in salvation.
Clarke’s vivid colors erupt around the scene of the cross, as if communicating in color how new life radiates from this scene of sorrow and death. Mary is thus seen as the new Eve, who instead of plucking the fruit of sin from the tree in the Garden, becomes the tree who bears the fruit of redemption through her son and who waters it with her tears. Eve took from the tree that led to death, but Mary sits on the wood that, through her Son, will defeat death. Though we are in the moment of death, the window’s heavenly angels and ethereal colors tell us that resurrection and the renewal of all creation will emerge out of Mary’s sorrow. Mary’s womb gave life to the Savior, and now, her tears help water the new life made possible through that son’s death.
By rendering a sorrowful scene in such splendid, joyful shades, Clarke’s Mother of Sorrows clearly links death and life, loss and renewal, grief and gratitude. Our Lady of Sorrows teaches us that mourning and tears are part of the story of salvation, that we will be wounded in body and soul. But those wounds are the way to wholeness.
This message is reinforced by the figures standing at the side of Mary and Jesus. They are Catherine of Genoa and Saint Francis. Catherine shares her feast day with Our Lady of Sorrows, and she imitated Mary’s compassion by serving most of her life in a hospital. Catherine also wrote a treatise on purgatory that describes suffering as part of our joyful redemption, a view that mirrors how Our Lady of Sorrows teaches us that grief and tears are part of the story of salvation. Saint Francis, who frequently meditated on Mary, was the first person to receive the stigmata. In bearing Jesus’s wounds and taking on his suffering, Francis followed Mary’s compassionate example and shows us how Christians are still called to imitate Mary’s example and to co-suffer with Christ.
Clarke’s Mother of Sorrows shows a vision of Our Lady of Sorrows that helps recast how we envision our own suffering. Her example teaches us that suffering need not be pointless, but can find meaning when it is offered up as a co-suffering with Christ. Our tears and sorrows are not excluded from the story, nor should they be suppressed, for there are times and places where we must mourn. But in following Christ and dying with him, Our Lady of Sorrows sees her tears become the wellspring of life. If we follow her in following Christ to the cross, our sorrows, too, may be transformed from blood, tears, and death into a kaleidoscopic panoply of life.
