Tears ... An All Saints' Day Meditation

Reflections on Psalm 56:8, John 11:32-44, Isaiah 25:6-9, Revelation 21:1-6a,

"You kept count of my tossing; 

put my tears in your bottle. 

Are they not in your record?"

Psalm 56:8

Recently, I officiated a funeral at an area funeral home and I noticed on my way into the room where the deceased was laid out in an open casket that there was a framed poem set up on a table clearly noticeable to those arriving to pay their respects. It was placed there, I assume, by the funeral home.

The poem may be familiar to you. It may even be special or meaningful to you. It begins … DO NOT CRY. And then it goes on to speak in the voice of the deceased, urging loved ones not to cry, because though he or she may be absent in body, they are present in spirit always. When I noticed the poem on my way in to officiate the service, I thought what a load of crap. I apologize it this poem speaks to you. I am not denying the truth that those we love remain close to us in memory and perhaps even in spirit, but DO NOT CRY … seriously? 

Tears are sacred. They are in some way both human and holy. Tears shed at the loss of a loved one are a tangible sign of inexplicable grief, loss, and love. They speak when words fail. Tears come in our darkest moments and as result of our greatest joys. We cry when we are hurt, and we cry when joy overwhelms us. We cry when we are moved … deeply moved. Our tears connect us to the pain of others when we feel their hurt in a shared moment of common humanity. Our tears are our truth. They are vulnerable and honest … and we should not stop them from coming.

How many of you have read or watched the Harry Potter series? There is a scene in the very last movie where Professor Snape, a character who throughout the series has been dark and suspicious, who lurks the halls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with a scowl permanently attached to his face. He has, for all of Harry’s seven years at Hogwarts, been hard on Harry. At times it seems sure that he is part of the villain Voldermort’s plan to rule the wizarding world and destroy Harry. But in the last book it is Snape who is destroyed by Voldermort. I will not go into all the details. But there is a moment, as Snape is dying, when Harry Potter and his friends stumble a upon him, where he motions to Harry and forces out the these last words … “Take them.” … as he points to his own tears.

Harry looks to his friend Hermione for something to collect Snape’s tears, and of course she produces a small empty bottle from her pint-sized purse, a purse that could give Mary Poppin’s bag a run for its money. Harry collects Snape’s tears as he takes his last breath. Harry then takes the bottle with the tears to a large magic bowl found inside Dumbledore’s office. Harry empties the bottle containing the tears into the bowl, a bowl which already contains some sort of magical steaming concoction. Then Harry plunges his face into the bowl, and there Harry sees, and so do we, the story behind Snape’s tears. We learn Snape’s truth from those tears, a truth that changes everything we thought we knew about Snape. (And that’s all I am going to tell you, so read the book or watch the movie!)

There is something so very true, and very biblical about this scene. JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series out of her own grief at the loss of her mother. Harry, the orphaned boy who lost his parents as an infant, is faced throughout the series with the challenge of dealing with grief, and so, it turns out, is Snape. We learn this from his tears. 

Our tears are our truth.  They tell our story ... and they are sacred.  And yet we encourage each other … DO NOT CRY. We are encouraged to hide our tears, or to hold them back.  Especially prone to this nonsense are young boys and adult men. We have made crying a sign of weakness, when in fact it is the most raw and purest form of courage, the courage to share our deepest truth.

Jesus wept, in today’s lesson.  He cried. Unashamed, he cried at the loss of his friend, Lazarus. He cried in the company of Mary, the sister of Lazarus, who also wept. He cried in the company of other mourners, who mourned with tear-streaked faces. Jesus did not hold back or hide his tears or his truth.

According to the psalmist, God keeps track of our tossings. I love the language of that. God is aware, intentionally aware, of our struggles, and we are told God collects our tears in a bottle.  The psalmist then goes on to ask “are they (our tears) not in your record?” and we are to understand that the implied answer is of course, YES. Our stories, our truths are recorded. God acknowledges our tears and collects our stories … not for judgment sake, but out of love, respect and honor. Our losses, our pains, our struggles matter to God.

And yet they are NOT the end of our story. That is the lesson found in our readings from Isaiah and Revelation. There is reason to hope. God is aware. And in some divine, cosmic plan that is just beyond our reach, our sufferings are but a means to the end of eternal glory. God is working beauty from tragedy, good from evil, light from dark, life from death. And so we have been told that God will "swallow up death forever" and wipe away the tears from our eyes.  That God will make her divine home with us, and among us, and “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things (will) have passed away."

Like Lazarus coming out of the tomb after four days of death and decay, we will shake off all the hurt and pain, confusion and death that has wrapped round us in this life, and the only tears that will be shed will be tears of joy.

Recently my family has been involved with an organization called Project ALS. My spouse, Laura, lost her brother three years ago to the disease. Tom lived thirteen years with ALS … losing the ability to walk, talk, eat and breath on his own. Eventually the muscle, which was his heart, gave out and he died in the early hours of the day Katy, Laura’s daughter, was to graduate from high school. As strange as it might sound, given that Tom had been sick for all those years and was completely paralyzed by ALS, we didn’t see his death coming. There was no indicator that it was immanent. 

Recently, Laura has been working with Project ALS to raise awareness about the disease and to raise funds to further research for a cure. She had been working with the students at Watchung Hills Regional High where she teaches English. Her involvement has stirred up memories of Tom’s passing. A couple of week’s ago I heard her mother share a piece of the story of which I was unaware.

Tom lived with his parents for the duration of his battle with ALS. For most of that time he required round the clock nursing care. On the night that he passed, Sally, his mother, came into say goodnight, as she always did. Tom had long ago lost the ability to speak, but he could communicate through a letter board, which required spelling words by fixing his gaze on letters, one at a time. At that point even eye movement was becoming difficult. It was a painfully slow process for Tom to communicate. That night he spelled CD number 6, track 10. Sally knew what he wanted. He wanted to hear a song as he went to sleep. That night the song was Eric Clapton’s Tears in Heaven.  

Eric Clapton wrote the song as he was grieving the loss of his own four-year-old son from a tragic accident. The song asks the questions we all have about what reunion in heaven will be like … Will you know my name? Will you hold my hand when I see you in heaven?  the song recognizes how hard life and loss can be … Time can bring down. Time can bend your knees. Time can break your heart, have you begging please, begging please. But in the end Clapton knows there is reason to hope … beyond the door, he sings, there's peace I'm sure. And I know there'll be no more tears in heaven.

It was, was a pretty interesting pick for your last song before crossing the threshold from life to death and beyond. Tom died that night in his sleep.

There were lots of tears shed throughout Tom’s illness, from the moment he was diagnosed through every loss of muscle function. And when he passed at age 44 there where plenty of tears shed by family, friends and the community of nurses who cared for him. Those tears told many stories. They expressed sadness, grief, anger and frustration. They were, each and every one of them honest, because they came from the heart of those who shed them. And they were not wasted. I believe that God still has them … in bottle or bowl, perhaps cupped in divine hands. God has recorded them … committed them to memory, so that one day, in some way that is beyond my ability to fully imagine or anticipate, God will give those tears their do. God will dry them, healing the hurt, easing the suffering, answering our questions, drawing together with those we have lost in grand reunion. Oh what a day!

But for now, in the present, we ought not to hold back our tears. No need to feel ashamed or in some sense weakened by them. They are our truth. They tell our story. And not a single one is lost to God. We have not been forsaken, or forgotten, or ignored. Our stories are far from over, our losses are not forever, our hurts temporary, our questions will be answered, our fears relieved. There is a time and plan in place for all of that … for the bible tells us so. So take courage. Move forward. Live fully. Love deeply. Allow yourself to be moved ... even to tears.

Amen.  

*It is not only our tears God collects, yours and mine, it is also the tears of refugees and immigrants, victims of poverty, injustice and terrorism, the lost and the lonely, angry and the sad, the confused and the self-righteous. God collects the tears all people. Their stories matter as much as ours.

We Don't Know What We Are Doing

Reflections on Luke 23:34

Then Jesus said, “Father forgive them; 

for they do not know what they are doing.” 

There are occasionally moments in life that transcend time. Moments when the boundaries of past, present and future melt away and all that was and all that is and all that will be, come together on equal footing, without the advantage of hindsight or the excuse of ignorance. In those moments, even if only for a moment, truth is revealed.  The truths that these events reveal are often of the bittersweet variety. The type of truth that strips humanity of pretense as if everything we have spent our lives hiding and denying has been laid bare for all to see. These moments are deeply personal and yet fully communal for the truths that they reveal speak to every human heart and every human community.

The cross is such a moment.   

It doesn’t matter the year or the place, the culture or the creed, Good Friday takes us to a place, to a moment when time, as we understand it, is put on hold … suspended … transcended. The cross takes us to a time when ultimate goodness is brutally executed by the misguided good intentions of every human heart … yours, mine, theirs. 

When Jesus speaks these words from the cross they hang in the air over every generation.  It is as if Jesus, in the midst of unthinkable personal suffering, sees all of history, past, present and future laid out before him and speaks words of mercy and of judgment.

“Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

Isn’t that the God-awful truth that we all long to deny … we don’t know what we are doing.

************************

There is a powerful scene in a movie that was released in the 1992 entitled, The Power of One. It is the story of a white English boy growing up in South Africa during WWII.  It is a long and complex story, far too complex for me to recount. But there is a scene midway through the movie that takes place in a South African prison camp. There native blacks, African men of various tribes, all prisoners are brought together to perform a concert for a visiting British official.  It is to be an impressive display of the jail master’s ability to tame the so-called savages, the oppressor lording over the oppressed. It is a scene that that has been played out over and over again over the course of human history every time one person or one group seeks to dominate another.

In this scene the concert is conducted by the young English boy who is moved with compassion for the plight of these native African prisoners, men who have been treated like animals … beaten … spat upon … starved … ridiculed … tortured emotionally and physically. The young boy, inspired by the observation of one of the prisoners, a man by the name of Geel Pete, uses his words as the lyric to a song to be performed, a song sung in their native language. It is a song that cuts to the heart of the awful truth about their captors. 

They run this way.  They run that way.  They are confused.  They are afraid.  They are cowards.

It is a simple lyric, sung as a round. The South African harmonies of men’s voices rise from the bare ground on which they sit, huddled under torn woolen blankets, enclosed behind barbed wire fences, with the guns of Afrikaner guards pointed at them. They run this way.  They run that way.  They are confused.  They are afraid.  They are cowards. It is beautiful.  It is awful.  It is true.  But the truth of their words is lost on an audience that refuses to hear.  An audience who in fact cannot hear a language their do not understand, a language they never deemed worthy of study or acknowledgment, a language of savages.  And even as the music fills the night air, the truth of its message is being lived out just yards away as in the shadows a prison guard beats Geel Pete to death.

************************

We do not know what we are doing.  We run this way.  We run that way.  We are confused.  We are afraid.  We are cowards.

We say we want peace … so we start wars. We do not know what we are doing.

We say that money isn’t everything, but then we pour our energy in to the making and squandering of more and more money. We do not know what we are doing.

We long to be loved, but we keep all those closest to us at a distance. We do not know what we are doing.

We break our promises and blame others for our failings. We do not know what we are doing.

We condemn what we fear and hate what we do not understand. We do not know what we are doing.

We seek to major in the minors, holding on to petty grievances and neglect the major joys and blessings that hold us together as the human family. We do not know what we are doing.

We chase after what we have yet to attain and we ignore what we already posses. We do not know what we are doing.

Jesus’ first words from the cross reach far beyond a hillside outside of Jerusalem. They reach back to the Garden of Eden when Eve and then Adam reached for equality with God. Jesus’ words extend forward to slavery in the United States and apartheid in South Africa, to the Jewish Holocaust, and modern-day fanatical terrorism both religious and otherwise. At the same time Jesus’ words reach out to grade school classrooms where one student, singled out by his classmates, is teased and bullied without mercy, and to American college campuses where rapists return to class and victims are shamed. Jesus words’ reach out to our nation’s invisible poor and those whose who refuse to see them, and to victims of racism and those infected by its hatred. Jesus’ words condemn American Christianity and its obsession with who we can and who we can't love. Jesus’ words expose all our frantic and misguided attempts to claim purity and orthodoxy while sitting in judgment of our Christian brothers and sisters who are seeking more truth and more light. Jesus looks at the whole of human history, start to finish, and sees us as truly are. He sees us as we run this way and that way. He sees us in our confusion. He sees the fear that motivates us.  He sees that we are cowards. And he passes this judgment … “they do not know what they are doing.”

What is to be the sentence for our crime? An eye for an eye? A taste of our own medicine? A turning of the tables. No. 

“Father forgive them.”   

*************************

There are occasionally in life moments that transcend time. In those moments, even if only for a moment, truth is revealed. The cross is such a time. And the truth is that in that moment and in its memory we stand exposed. The truth is that in that moment and in its memory we stand forgiven.