The sacredness of agony

By Mia Pohlman

I don't love cathedrals. I appreciate their effort and ability to withstand, but give me humble origins any day.

The Dom of St. Peter in Regensburg, Germany, is different.

I walked into it a couple weeks ago. Inside, it was dark. I was struck by the artwork: this was a cathedral about human suffering and what it means to be human. It was fascinating and encouraging to me that people had chosen this artwork for a cathedral.

The first thing I saw as I walked in was a stone statue of two people with their arms around each other, kissing. One of them was holding a book. I had never seen this physical aspect of being human acknowledged in a cathedral before. Here, being both body and soul was acceptable.

Farther into the church, on a main pillar of the cathedral, was a statue of Mary. This Mary, though, was doing something I had never seen depicted before in religious art: she was holding a book. It struck me I had never realized women do not hold books in religious art. Here, though, in this cathedral, women were allowed to be intellectual.

To the right, on the wall, was a picture of Christ experiencing agony. His eyes were wide; his mouth was open in horror. It was agony we associate with people we assume have created their own problems and, therefore, somehow deserve the awful consequences. It was the agony of the lowest of people, the agony of those who are unforgivable, the agony that is too horrible for a perfect savior to experience. It was the agony of hell. The artist of this painting knew agony in a terrible and terrifying way, and knew Christ also came to experience this to save those who suffer in this way, too. It reminded me of Dorothy Day and her belief we must see Christ in people who are not trying to help themselves: Christ is even those whose suffering is socially unacceptable.

Next to this picture, carved into the stone, were men supporting the columns of the cathedral on their backs. They were unable to get away from this burden, from this suffering. In the ironwork leading up to the pulpit, too, were details of heads trapped as part of the decoration.

This is what Jesus came to redeem. All of this is not hopeless, all of it is not in vain. Especially the most hopeless. Because this is is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Who takes sin away. If this kind of suffering is welcome in a cathedral, it must have purpose. It must be legitimate. It must not be the full of the story; there must be something more.

This cathedral said what the Church in all her truth teaches, but what, perhaps, we as members do not always do so well at living out. It is a church of inclusion of all complexity and duality: the body and soul are compatible. Womanhood, motherhood and intellectualism are compatible within the Church. Agony and holiness are compatible. One does not need to pretend or choose certain aspects of one's humanity; the Church is a place for body, soul and mind. We need not be afraid of these aspects of ourselves or our members.