Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Matt. 5:4
Many spiritual traditions place a high value on the role of grief and mourning in facilitating both personal and communal transformation. Ancient Christian monasticism gives particular attention to how tears open up the soul, creating the possibility of a more authentic relationship to God and to others. Douglas E. Christie, in his book, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, speaks, for instance, of the Christian monks of the fourth century who believed that the “gift of tears” helped awaken the soul to the reality of life. He writes.
- Tears, in the ancient Christian monastic world, were believed to express and make possible an honest reckoning with one’s life (especially one’s fragility). They were the catalyst for life-changing transformation; a reorientation to God and to the larger community.
Though we cannot fabricate such tears, we can seek and welcome them as a precious gift from God, given to help us deepen our capacity for seeing, feeling, and responding to the world and to the movements of our own soul. Christie recognizes the personal edification that such tears provide when he writes,
- The early Christian monks spoke of being “pierced” to the depth of their souls, and of tears flowing in a moment of sudden recognition of an aspect of their own moral-spiritual life that was in need of healing or renewal. The tears themselves became the means of that healing, the medium through which a clearer, more honest awareness of oneself, the world and God became possible.
To be moved to tears by a heart-piercing recognition of our bondage to sin and of its consequent effects on those around us was a sign of mature faith for these early Christians. Christie writes of the redemptive effects of such heart-felt responses saying,
- The piercing recognition of one’s helplessness in the face of the debilitating habits of sloth or greed or pride or anger sometimes yielded a sense of release expressed in tears, whose healing power no amount of conscious reflection could ever hope to match. Tears, through the sheer force with which they moved through one’s being, became a primary means through which one could be brought to face our bondage to sin and be adequately motivated to seek release from it.
The early Christian monks welcomed tears as a means of breaking open the soul because they recognized how important it was to feel grief in the face of loss and brokenness. They also recognized the inability to weep as something to be taken very seriously. As Christie writes,
- It is possible to ignore or refuse to acknowledge the truth of our brokenness. But doing so means relinquishing oneself to a kind of moral and spiritual blindness, an existence characterized by little possibility for intimacy or reciprocity with others. Hence the need to ask oneself continuously: am I capable of tears? Am I capable of opening myself to the beauty and pain of my own soul, of the souls of others and of the world itself?
Our hearts do not always respond to life as they should, and to confess such can represent the beginning of genuine hope for the regeneration of this faculty in ourselves. It is the likely prerequisite to our receiving the “gift of tears.”
Rob Des Cotes
Imago Dei Christian Communities
(from April 10, 2014)
QUESTIONS
- What is your experience of genuine remorse in relationship to your sins or to the sins of the world? How deeply do you feel these? Or how resigned have you become to the disorders you see in yourself and in the world?
- How do you see the “gift of tears” as a healing and freeing initiative of the Holy Spirit? How can we welcome a deeper experience of our hearts being pierced?
- What reasons might we have for resisting such a gift of genuine humanity? How might that contribute to what Christie calls a life of “spiritual blindness…characterized by little possibility for intimacy or reciprocity with others?PRAYER: Take time to meditate on a particular sin in your life, or an injustice in the world. Ask God to give you the gift of genuine and appropriate “tears” in relation to these issues of life.