by Lauren Winner
Psalm Reading: Psalm 80
For Sunday, December 23, 2012: Year C—Advent 4
I once dated a man who did not believe I was upset unless I started crying. I could tell him I was upset, I could rage and yell, I could turn into an icy porcupine; he remained indifferent. But on the rare occasion that I cried—that got his attention. The tears were some sort of proof; I must be well and truly upset, and he’d better attend.
In Psalm 80, the people are suffering; they are petitioning God; God does not appear to be answering their prayers. And how does the psalmist convey the depth of the people’s anguish? The people are eating tears: lechem dimah, the bread of tears, and also tear soup. And they are not just eating these tears; God is feeding them the tears.
On a straightforward level, of course, this means: the people were crying a lot. So much so that the tears fell into every loaf of bread they shaped. It is a measure of how they were suffering, and a measure of God’s refusal. Those people were weeping, and God was not responding.
The Way Home
There is something about church that can invite tears. Thus the centrality of tears in many modern Americans’ discovering- or coming-back-to-church stories, to wit Sara Miles’s, as recounted in her description of her first communion, in Take This Bread:
This disconnect between what I thought was happening—I was eating a piece of bread; what I heard someone else say was happening—the piece of bread was the “body” of Christ,” a patently untrue or at best metaphorical statement; and what I knew was happening—God, named “Christ” or “Jesus,” was real and in my mouth--utterly short-circuited my ability to do anything but cry….Probably my tears were just pent-up sadness, accumulated over a long, hard decade, and spilling out, unsurprisingly, because I was in a place where I could cry anonymously….This went on for a while—me going to St. Gregory’s, taking the bread and bursting into tears, drinking the wine and crying some more. It was inexplicable [58-62].
In many Christian communities through the ages, tears have not just been a sign of the crier’s suffering. They are also, as scholar Kimberley Christine Patton puts it, a sign of metanoia. “Without tears….there can be…no real return to God across the abyss of sin and despair. Tears are more than just symptoms of a changed heart; they are, counter-intuitively, its catalysts.” Tears are “the only way home.” [Kimberley Christine Patton, “How, Weep and Moan, and Bring it Back to God: Holy Tears in Eastern Christianity,” in Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination, 258].
And God sheds tears. At church just this past week, our deacon said that she was sure that the first heart broken and the first tear shed after the shooting in Connecticut was God’s. This was the deacon’s a way of short-handing a bold, elemental theological claim—God suffers with the suffering.
The Gift of Tears
A midrash tells us that tears are a gift from God. When God sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden, God said : “For this reason I give you out of My heavenly treasure this priceless pearl. Look! It is a tear! And when grief overtakes you and your heart aches so that you are not able to endure it, and great anguish grips your soul, then thee will fall from your eyes this tiny tear. Your burden will grow lighter then."
And here again in the psalm, God is visiting the people with tears. The psalmist names this as proof of the people’s suffering, which surely it is.
But even in this suffering, it is also—on the midrash’s terms—testimony to God’s presence, to God’s gift; the very proof that you are in pain is also the God-given place where the succor starts.
And it is Advent. And people are weeping December tears—which, in the visitation of a pair of “Sandy” heartaches, the hurricane and blood-soaked Hook, are steeped in unfathomable loss. We miss our dear departed. Our life does not have the warmth or intimacy we seek. We are lonely. And more. Unspeakably so much more.
The Hardest Question
So maybe it is not the hardest question, but the most apt one: When the “boar from the forest” is ravaging our precious “fields,” how can we see tears—our tears—as priceless pearls? Must we await, we still await, the return of the pearl of great price, who also wept?
Reverend Dr. Lauren Winner writes and lectures widely on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex, a study of household religious practice in 18th-century Virginia, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, published by Yale University Press in the fall of 2010, and, most recently, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. Lauren is also a contributor to sparkhouse’s animate series for adult faith formation. In the midst of lecturing and writing, Lauren serves as a priest associate at St. Luke's Episcopal Church (Durham) and a member of the board of the Episcopal Preaching Foundation.
