Lessons in Crying

Recently some young friends of mine asked me to give the readings at their wedding. As they chatted happily about the ceremony, I weighed other matters. How much crying was I apt to do? Would I clutch tissues, resort to shirtsleeves, or just let the tears run in front of everybody?

Such speculations are new, for it used to be I rarely cried. Strong emotions have tended to manifest rather as anger than tears, yet I’ve always been fascinated with crying, not so much for its pathos as its physics – tears are a fluid in motion, after all.

In the summer of my twelfth year, I was reunited with a dear friend, a Jersey boy named Gregory. Our friendship had been nurtured in infancy by our mothers and continued until we were three years old, when I moved away. As soon as we learned to write, Gregory and I became devoted pen pals. His family came to visit, and over four idyllic days, we played at the beach and ate dumplings in Portland’s Chinatown. When he left, I was overcome with crying that lasted several days. This surprised and alarmed me. I couldn’t make myself stop. Just when the tears subsided, the poignancy of our parting revived, and my crying began afresh.

Years later, I was in a prayer group with a woman who cried without ceasing. She’d had a rocky childhood and was estranged from her parents. She alluded to these experiences without elaborating, and when she spoke of God’s love or the kindness of others, a silvery thread of tears ran demurely down the side of her nose. You almost couldn’t tell she was crying. It was just the way she prayed.

Crying entered my life when my child, aged thirteen, developed a serious psychological disorder that affected our whole family.

My daughter had suffered irrecoverable losses in early childhood – losses that culminated in her entering foster care and coming to our home. Sometimes when this happens, despite the therapies and medication and attachment-focused parenting, psychiatry and neuropsychiatric evaluations, educational accommodations and even residential treatment, the child’s distress endures. A decade of caregiving seemed to be making no difference. Household emergencies became routine.

I remember when the crying arrived. I had called my friend Annie one morning after my daughter had left for school in a flurry of shouting, swearing, and slamming. I did not readily share my emotions even with close friends, but in a moment of desperate clarity, told my shameful secret: my efforts were worthless, and my child would never be well.

Annie listened attentively and said something remarkable. “It is painful when your suffering seems to be for nothing,” she said. “But it is beautiful. It is beautiful to God. Sometimes he brings people to see it, and I see it.”

I started crying then, both in the instant, as well as constitutionally, as a person.

My tears, when they came, were not a slim thread but drippers and splashers. Unchecked, they splattered down my front. If I tilted my head back, they streamed rather than dropped, wetting my collar and drying on my neck in an ashen coat.

I have not stopped crying since then.

Perhaps the crying is not mine to stop. It may be a gift of the Spirit, come to rest like a divided flame, an utterance over which I have little control and which conveys things I do not author.

I prefer the term “crying” to denote the accumulation and fall of moisture from the eyes. “Weeping” is used throughout the Scriptures and may certainly be a more spiritual form of crying, but I find “weeping” hard to say with a straight face. It connotes noisiness and sentimentality that I don’t believe belong to true crying. Similarly, “sobbing” is an intensely cardiovascular form of crying that often includes gusty heaves and sighs.

The trajectory of tears has its own vocabulary. Your eyes “well with” and sometimes “spill” or “shed” tears. “Bursting into tears” indicates sudden onset and is more akin to sobbing. Some people talk of “tearing up,” as in, tears pool without spilling over, but I tend not to use this phrase. It is very rare that my tears, once gathered, ebb short of the flood stage. My tears are on or off with no in-between.

I learned about the biophysics of crying from a college professor who was a new widower. His wife had died from a sudden illness, leaving him a single father. The professor never mentioned his grief, but it seemed to adorn him, draped across his shoulders like an ecclesial vestment.

He taught us that all life requires large, complex molecular structures that are stable only within narrow environmental parameters. The macromolecules of our bodies are knit through strong, atom-to-atom covalent bonds. Covalent bonding, however, accounts for only a small part of biological complexity. Much weaker interactions, dictated by the unique properties of water, are responsible for the elegance of our cellular architecture. Dust we are and to dust we shall return, yet we are also 70 percent water.

Caitlin Connolly, Woman Holding Her Sorrows, mixed mediums on canvas, 2018. Used by permission from the artist.

Our cells are soaked with water, and crying reflects the myriad weak forces that rule aqueous environments, including the miracle of surface tension. Overfilling your coffee cup is a common way to observe surface tension, the liquid doming in a convex meniscus, quivering and threatening to break over the side. Except for quicksilver, water has the highest surface tension of any liquid on earth. Surface tension is the quality that allows our tears to “brim,” to “drop,” and to form crystal beads that tumble from our lashes.

Sometimes people avoid crying because they think it is unattractive, but I have the opposite view. Our watery tears show forth the same natural beauty as fog-flecked spider webs and green grass tipped with dewy diamonds. Without surface tension, our crying would be a smearing and a spreading, an oily slick. Water is the “universal solvent,” a remarkable carrier of soluble ions from the lacrimal glands into the eyes and onto the flags of our faces, ions that as pure elements are destructive. Sodium, a dangerously reactive metal, and the poisonous gas chlorine which, after a barter of electrons, are rendered sufficiently tamed to comprise the saline that gives tang to a baby’s tears.

In addition to having very high surface tension, water also has the highest known enthalpy of vaporization, and when it evaporates off your face, it has a pronounced cooling effect. The salt deposits and inevitable abrasion easily damage facial skin, which is thinner than elsewhere on your body, and give rise to “cryburn” – irritated, inflamed, and flaking skin similar to windburn. The way to deal with this is to rinse gently with cool water then apply copious balms.

Crying is bodily loss of fluids. “Harvested” tears in one study measured 0.9 to 1.6 milliliters per episode, approximately a quarter teaspoon, but quantitative measurement is very difficult. Crying is dehydrating and causes headaches. In this respect, crying resembles the steam room at the Y, which a weightlifter recently described to my husband as “super healthy but you gotta drink a shit-ton of water.”

In fact, the steam room at the Y is a wonderful place to cry. The humidity disguises and soothes your tears. No one notices, and your skin chaps much less. The theater is another decent place to cry, although movie-length crying is exhausting. I mostly opt out of movie nights for this reason, despite the occasional fussing of my family.

Crying on buses is usually fine; your fellow riders tend not to be in your personal space enough to be bothered and usually have their own problems to deal with. Airplanes are trickier. The air is drier, and the close quarters create a dilemma for others: give you privacy, or ask if you are OK? Both are awkward. On the plus side, flight attendants sometimes offer tender looks, extra snacks, and even a free beer to passengers whose crying strikes at 30,000 feet.

Some people are apologetic about crying in public. For myself, I have few qualms about crying in public and do not feel the need to protect other people from grief, which touches every life. However, since public crying is still generally rare, I often give mild, normalizing explanations about crying, such as, “I am feeling tender right now, but nothing out of the ordinary.” Additionally, by “tearcasting” – announcing imminent crying – I can give sufficient notice of my crying so that no one is unduly alarmed. The phrase, “This might make me cry,” usually suffices.

Church is a fairly safe place to cry, though I seldom come prepared. My friend Lucy has appointed herself as my crying caddy, and regularly slips me handfuls of tissues under the pew and supplies me with moisturizer. Drawing from her experience as a preschool director, she exhorts best practices: tears should be “dabbed” and “blotted,” never “wiped.”

Sermons and prayers, indeed, often prompt crying. At the church my husband and I attended as newlyweds, our pastor frequently paused his sermon due to sudden tears. His voice would garble, he would quietly grin – perhaps to himself, perhaps to the Lord – then reach under his glasses to press away his tears and resume preaching. Crying would out even through his Calvinist theology and expository style.

And why not? The Word of God is eminently cry-able. Scripture is full of bawlers and weepers who cry for many different reasons, including despair (Hagar), bereavement (Abraham), true love (Jacob), reunion (Joseph), longing (Hannah), war (Israelites), partings (Naomi), friendship (David), remorse (David again), broken heart (Paltiel), suffering (Job), intense prayer (Hezekiah), exile (Ezra), and seeking the Lord (Jeremiah). Crying is common in the New Testament as well. Mary wept. Martha wept. Peter wept. Paul wept. Jesus wept, and the salvation of the world is traced in the tracks of his tears.

What does crying mean? Crying is unfortunately dismissed as a culpably irrational and self-indulgent act, allowable in response to acute loss, perhaps, but not for very long or very hard. I find this kind of thinking narrow.

To be sure, crying can occur apart from a “good” reason to do so, like when a toddler cries because he can’t have something he wants even though it would hurt him if he got it. But the occurrence of crying does not in itself indicate an error in principle or rationality. Even in the case of the toddler, he cries because in his limited way he senses that all is not right with the world. His tears pertain to the longing with which the whole creation groans for God to make all things new. This is a perfectly inspired reason to cry.

I have learned two lessons from crying. The first is that crying is a public good. In a world that often chooses cruelty over compassion, crying brings our common humanity to the forefront of even street-level encounters and increases the amount of free empathy. Many times in my crying my heart has been laid open to exchange tiny jewels of mutual sympathy with people bearing the imago Dei all around me. Perhaps I too wear my grief like a vestment, because people come to me with their sacred griefs. In ministering to others, I try not register any surprise at all, but to take their crying as a complete matter of course. When I ask, “what is behind your tears?” people are relieved to unburden the sorrows that have risen to the surface. Now I am ever aware that the Spirit may grant me such beauty among strangers and in the most unlikely places.

The second lesson is of the nature of hope. I won’t go so far as to say that all crying is virtuous, but on the whole, crying signals God’s immanence.

When I first started crying, it was not because I was sad or grieving or exhausted or defeated. I was all those things, but that’s not what I was crying about. It was that, in a fleeting flash of impossible insight, I sensed that human flourishing, something I had lost any way of coming up with on my own, was real. I was crying, like Tolkien’s Sam, because I both wished and feared to believe that someday everything sad would come untrue.

My child’s story is not yet finished. When Lazarus was dying, the Lord waited two more days before heading over. The gospel writers note not only that Jesus wept, but that witnesses took it as a powerful sign of actionable concern. “See how he loved him!” they exclaimed. The Lord’s silence is the beginning of hope.

Crying presages a time when those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. I cannot give it up now.