By Chris McDonnell
The insistent crying of a child is hard to ignore. When the time for a feed arrives, an infant makes their demand very clear until the bottle or breast satisfies the hunger and replaces the crying demand.
Yet tears can express opposite emotions. We speak of tears of sorrow and tears of joy. We cry when we are hurt or feel sorrow on behalf of someone else. In his poem “Mid-Term Break”, Seamus Heaney describes returning from school following the death of his younger brother Christopher and being met on the doorstep by his father.
In the porch, I met my father crying- He had always taken funerals in his stride –
The impact of the occasion is made clear. His father cried.
Padraig Daly in his translation from the Irish, “Lament”, describes seeing his friends gravestone in these two lines:
What stood before me, as my tears fell fresh to the ground,
Was a narrow clay bed and a tightly sealed burial mound.
Yet a joyous event can also result in tears, this time tears of joy and elation. The joy of a birth or recovery from illness can also result in the emotional outpouring of tears, of a joy to behold.
An expression of love
The sorrow over loss is recorded in the Gospel account of the death of Lazarus in these three simple words: “And Jesus wept.”
We are sometimes reluctant to show our feelings. The phrase “men don’t cry” epitomizes this position. Yet the shedding of tears can bring relief as well as show compassion towards another or share in a friend’s joy.
Time and again our television newscasts show groups of people weeping after another terrorist outrage as families cry for those who have been killed or injured. Their tear-streaked faces and partly closed eyes challenge us to respond.
During the Biafran War at the end of the 1960s, one very graphic charity appeal poster depicted a crying mother holding her distraught child, her hand outstretched for help. It required few words..
Shedding tears is an expression of love that not only shows our concern for another person’s grief but it is a way of coping with our own.
Chris McDonnell is a retired headteacher from England and a regular contributor to La Croix International
Read more at: https://international.la-croix.com/news/culture/and-jesus-wept/18128
