The human instinct is to block suffering and pain. This is especially true in the West where we have been influenced by the \u201crationalism\u201d of the Enlightenment. As anyone who has experienced grief can attest, it isn\u2019t rational. We really don\u2019t know how to hurt! We simply do not know what to do with our pain.<\/p>\n
The great wisdom traditions are trying to teach us that grief isn\u2019t something from which to run. It\u2019s a liminal space, a time of transformation. In fact, we can\u2019t risk getting rid of the pain until we\u2019ve learned what it has to teach us and it\u2014grief, suffering, loss, pain\u2014always has something to teach us! Unfortunately, most of us, men especially, have been taught that grief and sadness are something to repress, deny, or avoid. We would much rather be angry than sad.<\/em><\/p>\n Perhaps the simplest and most inclusive definition of grief is \u201cunfinished hurt.\u201d It feels like a demon spinning around inside of us and it hurts too much, so we immediately look for someone else to blame. We have to learn to remain open to our grief, to wait in patient expectation for what it has to teach us. When we close in too tightly around our sadness or our grief, when we try to fix it, control it, or understand it, we only deny ourselves its lessons.<\/p>\n Saint Ephrem the Syrian (303\u2013373), a Doctor of the Church, considered tears to be sacramental signs of divine mercy. He instructs: \u201cGive God weeping, and increase the tears in your eyes; through your tears and [God\u2019s] goodness the soul which has been dead will be restored.\u201d [1] What a different kind of human being than most of us! In the charismatic circles in which I participated in my early years of ministry, holy tears were a common experience. Saints Francis and Clare of Assisi reportedly wept all the time\u2014for days on end!<\/p>\n The \u201cweeping mode\u201d really is a different way of being in the world. It\u2019s different than the fixing, explaining, or controlling mode. We are finally free to feel the tragedy of things, the sadness of things. Tears cleanse the lens of the eyes so we can begin to see more clearly. Sometimes we have to cry for a very long time because our eyes are so dirty that we\u2019re not seeing truthfully or well at all. Tears only come when we realize we can\u2019t fix it and we can\u2019t change it. The situation is absurd, it\u2019s unjust, it\u2019s wrong, it\u2019s impossible. She should not have died; he should not have died. How could this happen?<\/em> Only when we are led to the edges of our own resources are we finally free to move to the weeping mode.<\/p>\n The way we can tell our tears have cleansed us is that afterwards we don\u2019t need to blame anybody, even ourselves. It\u2019s an utter transformation and cleansing of the soul, and we know it came from God. It is what it is, <\/em>and somehow God is in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Gift of Tears The human instinct is to block suffering and pain. This is especially true in the West where we have been influenced by the \u201crationalism\u201d of the Enlightenment. As anyone who has experienced grief can attest, it isn\u2019t rational. We really don\u2019t know how to hurt! We simply do not know what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}