Sunday
Prophets and mystics recognize what most of us do not—that all things have tears and all things deserve tears. 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.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
What new levels of grieving, feeling, healing, and awakening to deeper individual and collective purposes will be required to make the kinds of shifts you want to see in the world? What waters can you honor and protect as sacred? What kind of world do you want for all our grandchildren?
—Pixie Lighthorse
Tuesday
We must learn how to grieve prophetically, seeing our world, even at its darkest, with the spirit and energy of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Those ancient teachers warned that the world was out of balance and that its repair requires our help. Grieving with them, we weep sometimes, yes, but without giving in to cynicism, hatred, and violence.
—Otis Moss III
Wednesday
My belief is that tears, although they look like a mere emotive reaction, are much more: a deeply free action that many do not enjoy. They proceed from deep inside, where we are most truly ourselves. Tears reveal the depths at which and from which we care.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
A heart of stone cannot recognize the empires it builds and the empires it worships. Lamentation does. It moves us through anger and sadness, empowering us to truly hear and respond to the always-tragic now.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
A prophet cannot know that all will be well, that those in power will wake up and mend the damage they have caused, and that peace will prevail. They must rest in unknowing. Unknowing is not always comfortable. In fact, it can feel a lot like grief.
—Mirabai Starr
Week Ten Practice
Tears and Contemplation
Anglican mystic and writer Maggie Ross reminds us that tears are a divine gift and a sign of God’s presence and grace:
The gift of tears is often a sign of the presence of God when we feel most abandoned, forgotten, and alone.… It cannot be emphasized enough that the gift of tears is a gift. Like any other gift, it can be accepted or rejected. While it cannot be forced or manipulated it can, like unceasing prayer of which it is a part, be nurtured. It is an “ambient” grace. It is not the special possession of a spiritual elite but always available, waiting to find us receptive. It is an ineffable gift, and one of its distinguishing marks is that it always points us away from our selves even as it illuminates our selves.
Tears and contemplation (the two are synonymous) are gifts, and both gifts of a deep encounter with Fire that tears ignite and salt through our whole being. The gift of tears frees and is a sign of being freed both from control and from the fear from which control springs, and the desire for the safety our fears offer us and the desire to try to control in order to feel secure. It is to the love of God and an initially terrifying freedom that this gift opens us, the freedom to become part of the all-holy I AM, to be poured-out-through.…
Lacrimae rerum: the tears in things; the creation that bursts with the potency of transfiguration bleeds also with the tears of its redemptive Creator. Deep calls to deep; not some sentimental “might have been” but a divine call to a reality whose density of holiness can be seen only through the veil of tears.
Reference:
Maggie Ross, The Fountain and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire (Paulist Press, 1987), 148, 149, 151.
Image credit and inspiration: Noé Barnett, Untitled (detail), 2024, oil paint, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. A painted image from art by Noé Barnett, inspired by Richard Rohr’s book The Tears of Things, a hand holds a single tear gently and with great care.
