"GOD IN NEED"

The first known depictions of the Pensive Christ occur in northern German sculptures from the latter half of the 14th century, taking a pose already found in paintings of the preparations for the crucifixion, where Jesus sits in thought as the soldiers work to raise the cross.

Before this, the pose had been used for the figure of Job in Distress, according to typology, one of the prefigurements of Christ.  Art historians link its appearance with the Devotio Moderna (Latin for "modern devotion"), which stressed the human nature of Jesus, a model for the faithful to follow.

 The image became especially popular in Silesia and Pomerania, and then Poland and Lithuania, where it became strongly entrenched in folk art wood carvings by dievdirbiai (Lithuanian folk carvers).

 Dating back to the late fourteenth century, this iconographic type shows Jesus sitting on a stone, bent over, supporting his head with one hand while resting the other on his knee. Sometimes he is crowned with thorns, sometimes not, but either way he bears an expression of exhaustion and grief and is thus associated with the Passion.

 Although the image first appeared in northern Germany, it is now most commonly associated with Lithuania, where the figure is called Rūpintojėlis (pronounced roo-pinto-YAY-lis): “the One Who Worries,” or “the Brooding One.” (“The Pensive Christ” is not a strict translation, but that is the name that has gained favor in the English-speaking world; “Christ in Distress” is another.)

As Christianity spread throughout Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so did images of Rūpintojėlis, as the wandering woodcarvers (dievdirbiai) of native folk culture carved him into hollowed-out tree trunks wherever they went. Today he is found not only at crossroads and in forests but in churches, homes, cemeteries, and shops.  

Lithuanians relate the figure to their own passion as a people, especially since having had endured persecution under the Soviet regime, including mass deportations to Siberian labor camps and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in the 1940s and ’50s. About 60 percent of the roughly 130,000 Lithuanian deportees either died in the camps or were never able to return to their homeland—a tragedy still mourned by Lithuanians each year on June 14, the date of the first major deportation (in 1941), which they call the “Day of Sorrow.”