Penthos

The Gift of Tears

Photo by Mayank Dhanawade on Unsplash

“In the world of feeling, tears are the criterion of truth.” - E. M. Cioran¹

“Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.” - Psalm 126:6

Since 1996, I have regularly visited the Bishop’s Ranch; often, several times each year.  The Ranch is a retreat center located on some 300 acres of rolling hills, nestled among vineyards and pastures in the Russian River valley outside of Healdsburg, California.  It is one of my favorite places in the world:  a place of natural beauty that invites contemplation.

Walking down the trailhead from the Ranch’s campus toward Keepo Creek one February afternoon – a sunny, warm, wine-country winter day – I suddenly paused in wonder at the sense of belonging I felt.  And I burst into tears. Tears of gratitude, yes, but there was an undertow of melancholy too.

It was one of the most poignant experience of joy I can remember.  Real joy, much as Gerald May describes it:

Joy is altogether beyond any consideration of pleasure or pain, and in fact requires a knowledge and acceptance of pain.  Joy is the reaction one has to the full appreciation of Being.  It is one’s response to finding one’s rightful, rooted place in life, and it can happen only when one knows through and through that absolutely nothing is being denied or otherwise shut out of awareness.²

In the moment, I was conscious only of the vibrant landscape enveloping me:  the sharp color of blue sky against still golden hills, thirsty from drought, and the canopy of tree limbs offering a welcoming embrace; the gentle breeze caressing my skin, warm from the touch of the sun; the smell of earth, dry wood, and cow manure.  In truth, however, my tears crystallized the integration of a much wider range of awareness, not all of which was conscious at the time. 

My experience is hardly unique, but it provides an opening to consider the interrelationships between place, awareness, and grief; elements constitutive of joy, according to May.  In his splendid book, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, Douglas Christie recalls a meeting with academic colleagues to reflect on the place of the natural world in their teaching and scholarship.  At the end of the meeting, the conversation took a personal turn, as each participant described with real feeling particular places, often in childhood, where they had experienced a powerful connection with nature.  These were places now lost to time, distance, and destructive development.  A wave of profound grief emerged, with many tears. 

Reflecting on the experience, Christie writes,

In offering our simple accounts of those places that had shaped and formed us, their acute fragility, as well as their preciousness and importance to us, became clearer, more palpable.  It seems too that something else, more difficult to describe or define, began to emerge in that moment:  something like a new awareness of ourselves as beings alive in the world.  That this awareness was so closely bound up with a sense of loss and grief, is, for me, one of the most poignant and significant elements of the experience.  The sense of being alive in the world and awakened to its fragility and beauty was mediated to us through our tears, through the unexpected but undeniable sense of being pierced by sharp feeling for places we had known and lived, places whose loss and diminishment we were in that very moment struggling to acknowledge and absorb.³

Here, too, we see the elements of place (May’s “rootedness”), an expansive awareness, and an integration of painful experiences (grief).   Christie highlights, however, that it is through tears that this strange joy (“sense of being alive”) is mediated.   He describes these tears as a gift.

In naming these tears as a gift, Christie draws on an ancient and venerable tradition of Christian practice.  The fathers and mothers of early desert monasticism describe this gift as penthos, “a profound piercing of the heart that is the very source of tears.”⁴  They taught that the cultivation of an openness to tears, an acceptance of grief, was crucial to spiritual growth. 

A brother asked an elder, “What should I do?”  And the old man said to him, “We ought always to weep . . . “Let us weep,” Abba Macarius counseled his disciples, “and let tears gush out of our eyes . . .”⁵

Why this emphasis on tears?  Tears were considered a sign of honest appraisal of the self and the world, our fragility and mortality.  This must be acknowledged and integrated, else progress in the spiritual life will be undermined by denial of unexamined fears.  Not that tears should be forced.  This was not a counsel of contrived, maudlin display.  It was an invitation to allow genuine feeling for the world to open the heart to being transfigured by compassion. 

The monastic practice of memento mori, keeping always before one’s eyes the awareness of death – one’s own death, and that of all life forms – fostered the realization of just how precious life is, and our responsibility to hedge it round with care.   Tears reconnect us to the world, breaking through the fear and illusion that alienate us from life and from one another.

The early Christian monks knew that tears could help break open the soul, kindling a deeper awareness of one’s vulnerability and fragility, and one’s capacity for intimacy with God and all living beings.  But opening oneself in this way required courage, a willingness to face one’s own fragility as well as the fragility and brokenness of the world.  It meant refusing the temptation to evade the reality of those bonds that connect all beings to each other, and embracing the reality of a shared world.  Weeping, when understood as part of a conscious spiritual practice, had the capacity to flood the soul with an awareness of the intricacy, beauty, and spiritual value of all existence.⁶

As we move through this liminal end-of-year time, let us pause to acknowledge our gratitude and our grief.  Give yourself space to become aware of what has been lost and what has been savored.  Just notice where you are.  If tears should come, let them come and let them go.  The seeds of joy are watered with our tears.

Penthos, the gift of tears, is both the doorway into life, and the sign that we are not only alive, but awake. 

1. Quoted in Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 101.

2. Gerald May, Will and Spirit (New York:  HarperCollins, 1982), p. 16.

3. Christie, p. 72-74.

4. Christie, p. 74.

5. Christie, p. 75.

6. Christie, p. 77.