Monday in Holy Week: pieta and readings

This is a stone relief of a pieta on the faro (lighthouse) on Murano, the island city that is part of Venice. A pieta is a form of Christian art depicting Mary the mother of Jesus cradling his dead body, a form to which I've always been particularly drawn.

This particular one (I don't know who the artist is) is obviously set in Venice - at the bottom you can see the water, the pilings, the stone wall with the ring to which a boat is tied, and a boat itself in the lower right corner. A church with a bell tower is faintly visible in the background (Venice is full of churches with bell towers.)

Artists have always found ways to set stories into their own contexts and certainly a city in a lagoon has had its share of young men lost at sea, each with a mother who grieves him.

Below is an audio file of the Eucharistic readings for Monday in Holy Week. We are all fasting from Eucharist in this time of pandemic, and yet I wanted to read them anyway, hoping that next year we will be able to use them in a Eucharistic service in church.