A Lenten reflection from Jenny Kraska, Executive Director of the Maryland Catholic Conference.
By Jenny Kraska
Lent invites us to listen more deeply. It is a season when the Church grows quieter, when alleluias fall silent and we are asked to attend to the low, persistent music of repentance and hope. Two unlikely companions can guide us in this Lenten listening: Antonio Vivaldi and Rosamund Young.
Vivaldi is often remembered for brilliance and motion — for the brightness of The Four Seasons, for violins that shimmer like sunlight on Venetian canals. Yet in his setting of the ancient hymn Stabat Mater, he gives us something altogether different: restraint, gravity, and a sorrow that does not shout. This work lingers in a minor key, moving slowly, almost circling its own grief. The music does not rush toward resolution. It remains.
“Stabat mater dolorosa/Juxta crucem lacrimosa…” — “The sorrowful Mother stood weeping beside the Cross.” The hymn contemplates Mary not as a distant icon, but as a mother who remains at the foot of her Son’s suffering. Vivaldi’s music mirrors this steadfastness. The repeated phrases, the deliberate pacing, the suspended harmonies — these create a soundscape of watchfulness. One has the impression of time stretched thin, as if heaven itself holds its breath.
Lent asks of us something similar: to stand still before the mystery of suffering. In a culture that flees discomfort and anesthetizes pain, the Church bids us to stay. Stay with Christ in the desert. Stay with Him in the Garden at Gethsemane, Stay at the Cross.
But how do we learn to stay?
Here, the quiet observations of Rosamund Young in The Wisdom of Sheep offer help. Writing from her family farm in Worcestershire, Young reflects on the distinct personalities and inner lives of the animals she tends. Sheep are not an indistinguishable mass, she insists. They recognize faces. They form friendships. They notice when something is wrong. They respond to gentleness — and to harshness — with memory.
Young’s patient attention to her animals reveals something about ourselves. We are often less attentive than the creatures we presume to manage. We rush past one another. We fail to notice subtle suffering. We forget that every person before us carries an interior world as complex as our own.
Lent is a school of attention. It trains the eyes and the heart.
Consider the image of sheep in Scripture. The Lord is my shepherd. We are His flock. The prophet Isaiah tells us, “We had all gone astray like sheep” (Is. 53:6). And yet Christ, the Good Shepherd, knows His sheep by name. The Gospels show Him moved with pity because the crowds are “like sheep without a shepherd.”
To watch sheep closely, as Young does, is to glimpse a parable. They are vulnerable, easily scattered, yet capable of recognition and loyalty. They flourish under steady care. They suffer under neglect. Is this also not true of each of us?
Mary, standing beneath the Cross, embodies that steady care. She does not fixate on the horror. She cannot halt the nails or silence the mockery. She remains. In her remaining, she becomes Mother not only of Jesus, but of us all. Her sorrow is not sentimental; it is attentive. She sees what is happening. She consents to stand within it.
Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater gives us the sound of that consent. Its austerity refuses easy consolation. There are no triumphant flourishes, no rushing toward Easter morning. Instead, there is a kind of holy endurance. The music teaches us to inhabit sorrow without despair, to allow lament to become prayer.
Young’s sheep teach a parallel lesson. When one sheep is ill or distressed, others often gather nearby. They do not possess theological language. They cannot explain suffering. But they draw close. Presence itself becomes response.
In Lent, we are called to something similar: to draw close — to Christ in the Eucharist, to the poor, to the wounded, to those whose grief we would rather avoid. Fasting sharpens our awareness of hunger; almsgiving attunes us to need; prayer stills the noise so that we may hear the quieter cries around us.
There is also a humbling in this season. Sheep do not pretend to be self-sufficient. They depend on the shepherd. Our Lenten disciplines remind us that we, too, are dependent upon grace, upon mercy, upon the love poured out from the Cross.
If we allow it, Lent reshapes our perception. We begin to see as Mary sees — not turning away from suffering, but holding it in the light of God’s fidelity. In our attentive standing — at the Cross, beside one another, under the gaze of the Good Shepherd — we discover that sorrow is not the final word. The Mother who stood weeping will also stand in hope. The minor key will give way to alleluia. The flock, once scattered, will be gathered again.
For now, Lent teaches us to remain. To listen. To watch. To love with a steadiness that does not flee the Cross.
