Of Tears

Endow the Living - with the Tears You squander on the Dead.
(Emily Dickinson, poem, c. 1862)

As the psalmist puts it: 'Those that sow in tears shall reap in joy.' (Psalm
126: 5 6) At its worst, this is merely wishful thinking. At its best, it is the
fruit of hope. In reality, our thoughts vacillate between both these extremes
from

time

to

time,

but

our

feelings

will

emerge

eventually

and

therapeutically through tears. Yesterday's papers were awash with them,

and for good and not so good reasons.
In the first instance, tears would appear to be unwarranted, at least to
this writer at any rate. Perhaps I am being hard-hearted. Steffi Graf was
pictured in floods of tears, having exited all too early from the Wimbledon
Tennis Tournament at the hands of a less well-known player. How little you
have to weep for, I thought to myself. This will teach you, bring you down to
earth, prune your pride and be a good lesson in humility. A little failure is
good for the soul, will strengthen it to face further trials and win. On the
other hand, a lot of failure is soul-destroying and has broken many a strong
man or woman.
The second instance was heart-breaking. A little boy of seven or eight,
crying bitterly at the loss of his father to the bullets of Loyalist hit men at a
bar in Loughinisland, was pictured some few pages further on in the same
paper. The juxtaposition of the two in my mind was incongruous to say the
least. Riddle me that, said the sage. Would we could fathom the sheer lack
of proportion in life and the transparent injustice of it all. Where is the
balance and the fairness in the justice meted out by life?

Many great minds have tried to explore this mystery. Job tried in Old
Testament times. He found but a partial answer, and that was that God's
ways were not man's ways. Who can fathom the mind of the Infinite? says
the writer. St. Paul found his answer in the stark geometry of the Cross
which Martin Luther developed in his theologia crucis. The twentieth century
Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d. 1945) went further than that.
You will remember that he perished for his part in the conspiracy which
ended in Count von Stauffenberg's famous and abortive attempt to kill
Hitler. Bonhoeffer said, and rightly so, only a suffering God can help.
Christians believe that somehow God allowed himself to suffer in the death
of his own Son on the Cross. Ultimate victory, they say, comes through
suffering and death. Jurgen Moltmann (b. 1926), a modern German
Reformed theologian, who is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at
the University of Tbingen, has based his whole theology of suffering on
Jesus' cry on the Cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Since the One who uttered this heart-rending cry was ultimately vindicated,
so will all who put their faith in Christ. This is the argument at any rate.
Can you accept that?
What do others say? Bertrand Russell (d. 1970, aged 98), the famous
English philosopher of the twentieth century, certainly would not accept the
above. He wrote a famous book entitled Why I am not a Christian, in which
he instanced the existence of innocent suffering as his main reason for not
believing in God. Many other philosophers could be numbered in this
particular camp. Arthur Koestler (d. 1983) held that life was so thoroughly
meaningless that he founded a famous organization called 'Exit', because in
the end suicide was the only logical way out of the absurdity with which life
presents us.

He did not quite have the courage of his convictions.

He

waited until he was in his late seventies and in the throes of death when, as
far as I can remember, he committed suicide with his equally elderly spouse.
Others would not be quite so pessimistic, nor would they recommend
suicide as an appropriate remedy. Sartre and Camus et al would argue that

life is absurd, and that's that. I wonder did they count their own efforts to
understand it as absurd. A vicious circle there, I should imagine.
Then, there are those who just do not care one way or the other. They are
not really interested in such questions. Life is for the living, so just do not
bother yourself with such questions because you might be in danger of
depressing yourself or ending up, to quote Bunyan, in the 'slough of
despond.' These are the indifferentists, those who prefer to live at a
superficial level, or what we might adjudge to be so. Perhaps they have not
lived long enough? Or, more to the point, perhaps they have not suffered
enough or, indeed, perhaps they have suffered too much? They might argue
that life is just a question of chance, how the coin falls, where the lotto
wheel stops. Youre either lucky or unlucky, and that's that! As the
ubiquitous wag says: 'When your number's up, your number's up!' They
might even subscribe to the philosophy abjured by St Paul: 'Eat, drink and
be merry, for tomorrow we die.' It would seem to me to require extraordinary
self-sufficiency, doggedness and stubbornness, even selfishness of the
highest order, to maintain such a stance on life.
Maybe even old-fashioned paganism is infinitely superior to such die-hard
self-sufficiency. The pagans of old at least had their pantheon of gods and
goddesses to whom they rendered homage through sacrifice. They lived
infinitely more natural lives. They may have lived, and no doubt many
modern pagans do too, deeply superstitious lives. They may even have gone
to excesses in the form of human sacrifices. Notwithstanding this, I often
ask: 'What's really so bad in paganism?' It would seem that there are as
many evils in indifferentism, and all '-isms', and even sometimes, dare I say
it, in Catholicism itself. Wherever humankind is, there is evil there, too.
Wherever humanity exists, there is good also. There is truth in paganism,
agnosticism, atheism, but not the fullness.

Catholics believe that this

fullness of truth subsists in the Roman Catholic Church, the primary

sacrament of Christ. The Vatican II documents do not say all the truth or the
whole truth. Catholics, or any religion indeed, do not have the monopoly on

God or on the truth. God's action in the world has always got to be wider
than his action through his Church, though his main avenue of acting,
theologians and Christians believe, is through the latter.
However, I have wandered far away from tears, the existence of which in
incongruous juxtaposition occasioned these thoughts. We need to cry,
because it is good for us. The old lie, thankfully, has died at the hands of the
psychologists - that men don't cry. Like truth, grief will out. Unexpressed
grief is lethal in its consequences on the person. The soul atrophies, dries
up, and for all intents and purposes dies. It seems that the Good Lord
himself realised this truth as well - He said: 'Blessed are those who mourn
for they shall be comforted.' (Matt. 5:4) In spirituality, the phenomenon
known as the gift of tears has long been acknowledged as a gift of the Holy
Spirit. It would seem that when we cry we go to the heart of our humanity.
For Christians it would also seem that we can go some little way to the heart
of the Divine. Did not Jesus himself, who we believe to be the God-Man, cry
at hearing of Lazarus' death? In the shortest line of the Bible we read simply
that Jesus wept. We could not weep in better company, could we?