n class="drop-cap">Christian piety and art have often concentrated on the physical pain of Jesus’s torture, trial, and death. Bernard of Clairvaux (or Arnulf of Leuven) wrote a poetic meditation on wounded parts of Jesus’s body, and Dietrich Buxtehude set it to music. Bridget of Sweden composed a cycle of daily prayers to memorialize each of Jesus’s 5480 wounds, and stigmatics like Francis of Assisi are said to have identified so fully with Jesus’s suffering that his wounds were reproduced on their bodies. Grunewald painted a contorted Christ on a rough-hewn cross, and many modern crucifixes portray his excruciating agony. These meditations can turn morbid, but at its best this piety sees the wounds of Jesus, in Pope Francis’s words, as gateways we enter to “contemplate the love in his heart for you, and you, and you, and me, for everyone.”Read Full Article »
