In the Face of Suffering

Quis est homo qui non fleret? Who is the human who would not weep, at the sight of such great suffering? It’s the reverberant question posed by the Stabat Mater, a medieval poem and hymn that’s still perhaps the most famous account of the watching of suffering. In answer to it is an initial modern confusion: Today, we do a lot of affinity weeping. Living as so many do on our social media platforms, we’ve seemingly developed a discomfiting capacity to want to claim the dividends of a tragedy not our own, as our own.