The Tears of Things

The Tears of Things

Chapter 1

The Tears of Things

In the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid (line 462), the hero Aeneas gazes at a mural that depicts a battle of the Trojan War and the deaths of his friends and countrymen. He is so moved with sorrow at the tragedy of it all that he speaks of “the tears of things” (lacrimae rerum). As Seamus Heaney translates it, “There are tears at the heart of things”—at the heart of our human experience. Only tears can move both Aeneas and us beyond our deserved and paralyzing anger at evil, death, and injustice without losing the deep legitimacy of that anger.

This phrase “the tears of things” has continued to be quoted and requoted in many contexts over the centuries. You can find it on war memorials, in the work of poets, in the music of Franz Liszt, and in Pope Francis’s recent encyclical letter “Fratelli Tutti.” (I myself remember it because of a haggard, bent-over Latin teacher who would often enter the classroom moaning “Lacrimae rerum” several times before he began quizzing us. It might have been comic if it weren’t so tragic!)

Because the phrase has no prepositions in Latin, it allows two meanings at the same time: Virgil seems to be saying that there are both “tears in things” and “tears for things.” And each of these tears leads to the other. Though translators often feel compelled to choose one or the other meaning, I believe the poet implies it is both.

There is an inherent sadness and tragedy in almost all situations: in our relationships, our mistakes, our failures large and small, and even our victories. We must develop a very real empathy for this reality, knowing that we cannot fully fix things, entirely change them, or make them to our liking. This “way of tears,” and the deep vulnerability that it expresses, is opposed to our normal ways of seeking control through willpower, commandment, force, retribution, and violence. Instead, we begin in a state of empathy with and for things and people and events, which just might be the opposite of judgmentalism. It is hard to be on the attack when you are weeping.

Prophets and mystics recognize what most of us do not—that all things have tears and all things deserve tears. They know that grief and sadness are doorways to understanding life in a non-egocentric way. Tears come from both awe and empathy, and they generate even deeper awe and deeper empathy in us. The sympathy that wells up when we weep can be life-changing, too, drawing us out of ourselves and into communion with those around us. This is continuously exemplified in the writings that we have received from the Hebrew prophets.

After a lifetime of counseling and retreat work—not to mention my own spiritual direction—I have become convinced that most anger comes, first of all, from a place of deep sadness. Years ago, when I led male initiation rites at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, I would watch men’s jaws drop open and their faces turn pale when I said this. Life disappoints and hurts all of us, and the majority of people, particularly men, do not know how to react—except as a child does, with anger and rage. It is a defensive, reactionary, and totally understandable posture, but it often goes nowhere, and only creates cycles of bitterness and retaliation.

Over time, the Hebrew prophets came to see this profound connection between sadness and anger. It was what converted them to a level of truth-telling that is deeply and forever true—which is the real sign of a prophet. They first needed to get angry at injustices, oppression, and war. Anger can be deserved and even virtuous, particularly when it motivates us to begin seeking a necessary change. But only until sunset, Paul says (Ephesians 4:26). If we stay with our rage and resentment too long, we will righteously and unthinkingly pass on the hurt in ever new directions, and we injure our own souls in ways we don’t even recognize. This is killing our postmodern world.

In this way, the realization that all things have tears, and most things deserve tears, might even be defined as a form of salvation: from ourselves and from our illusions. The prophets knew and taught and modeled that anger must first be recognized, allowed—even loved!—as an expression of the deep, normally inaccessible sadness that all of us carry. Even Jesus, our enlightened one, “sobbed” over the whole city of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) and at the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). In his final “sadness . . . and great distress” in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:37, jb), “his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood” (Luke 22:44, jb).

Anybody who’s on the edge, disadvantaged in some way, or barred from a position of hegemony or power will naturally understand the tears of the prophets, with their gut-level knowledge of systemic evil, cultural sin, and group illusion. Black Americans might have seen white people act nice or speak of human equality, for example, but they knew we lived behind a collective lie. Collective greed is killing America today. We make everything about money—everything—and injustices like these will naturally leave us exasperated and ultimately sad. How can we look at the suffering taking place in Gaza, or the violence of Hamas, or the people dying in Ukraine and be anything but sad? It’s sad beyond words or concepts. Only the body can know it.

I recently turned eighty. The older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be. This is true of Christianity, the United States, politics in general, and most of all myself. Remember, if you do not transform your pain and egoic anger, you will always transmit it in another form. This transformation is the supreme work of all true spirituality and spiritual communities. Those communities offer us a place where our sadness and rage can be refined into human sympathy and active compassion.

Forgiveness of reality—including tragic reality—is the heart of the matter. All things cry for forgiveness in their imperfection, their incompleteness, their woundedness, their constant movement toward death. Mere rage or resentment will not change any of these realities. Tears often will, though: first by changing the one who weeps, and then by moving any who draw near to the weeping. Somehow, the prophets knew, the soul must weep to be a soul at all.