The Tears of Things

( The reflections for July are taken from the last section of Dancing to my Death)

I have cried a lot these late summer days. It may be due to old age. Today David Attenborough has admitted to crying more than ever before – the most recent reason being the plight of the young penguins dying in the Antartic. Apart from being my first reaction to the news and fear of cancer I’m not sure why I cry now. But that response has spread out into other vulnerable dimensions of my life, as though the possibility of losing it soon has opened up a heightened sensitivity to deeper things. A lone seagull swooping across my window can do it. Or a giggling child on her father’s back. Or the first browning of the leaves. Memories of my mother, of Christmas, of my own experiences. I cry at things of pathos, of beauty, of cruelty, of terror. Sometimes it’s more an emotional prayer for those who are marked out for another long day of torture. Mothers who are waking up to their first day, utterly destroyed and longing to die, without the beloved child or husband. There’s been a huge increase in those magic moments when some experience of the senses sends me whirling back to childhood – a stream in a flat field, a tiny tot trying to climb aboard the patient family dog, the lit windows of a house in the distance. Certain words of intimacy in an email, a touch I know that’s full of compassion, the look of love, a lush, descending strain of a Mozart concerto. Above all, almost any photo of my brother Joseph who had Down’s syndrome.

Shortly before his execution for the part he played in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916, I’m sure that mystic-soldier Padraig Pearse was weeping when he wrote his poignant The Wayfarer:

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,

This beauty that will pass;

 Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy

To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,

Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,

Or little rabbits in a field at evening,

Lit by a slanting sun . . .

Or children with bare feet upon the sands

Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets

Of little towns in Connacht;

Things young and happy.

And then my heart hath told me:

These will pass,

Will pass and change, will die and be no more,

Things bright and green, things young and happy;

And I have gone upon my way

Sorrowful.

 I will cry a lot more – of this I’m sure – at our inability to live in, even to notice the wonder of Creation; to be caught up in the graced mystery of Evolution; in the astonishing transformation of going to Mass; in the touch and smell of God in every relationship; in her delight in dancing the cosmos into its expansion; in the divine artistry, humour, surprise and transformation in every single moment that happens; and, even as the Pope assured us, ‘in every speck of dust in nature’. They are not all tears of doom and gloom, of desperation, despair and sadness. Neither are they tears of hilarity, success or victory. They are the ‘tears of things’, the lacrima rerum, that lie at the heart of everything.

I cry at my own ignorance, my failure to fall in love with God through her Creation, her sheer humanity, her exciting divinity – all finally revealed in the one human being Jesus; and then in every human being and in every created entity. The contemplation of mystery, of the silhouetted end barely glimpsed, is a source of joy, astonishment, wonder, contentment – and healing . . . It is also behind many tears. A significant part of this kind of meditation is a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to touch on truths of which we never dreamed. We must unlearn a great many weird doctrines before we can move on to the original vision, insight and meaning we were born to find – that we ourselves are the Temple (1 Cor 3:16) that God dwells in us, chooses to dwell inside creation (1 Tim 6:16). God is the essence and being and centre at the heart of every tear of life and every smile of delight. Swimming and floating in God, we are rivers of living water, tears and joy, flowing from the oceans of divinity at our deepest core. Such thoughts, words, insights bring temporary slants of light through the cracks in my darkness.