If You're Not in Tears You're Not Paying Attention.

• It was remarked about Simone Weil that she would start weeping just upon hearing of a tragedy somewhere in the world.

• Once on retreat I befriended someone.  We went to worship and the story of the Babylonian destruction of the Temple was read, along with Psalm 74.  I happened to glance at him during the readings and saw tears running down his cheeks. 

• St. Simeon the New Theologian said that we should not presume to come to the Lord’s Table without tears.  In fact, he places great emphasis on the place of tears in the spiritual life.  

Tears, weeping, crying: these are indications of an emotional immediacy that we normally keep repressed.  

But I suggest that the more “woke” we become, that is, the more present we are, the more we are aware of ourselves and our place in the world, the more directly we also  experience both the pain of others and our complicity in causing it.  Shedding tears of sorrow, shame, guilt, and pain is an authentic indication of spiritual awakening.

Now, most of us go through existence separated from the world’s hurt by thick and high interior walls of denial, defense, and ignorance.  Our egos project such barriers as a matter of individual survival; we could not function in the world if our minds allowed us to know the magnitude of creaturely suffering.  It is one of the reasons we lie to ourselves about our personal separateness and independence.  

So we go about our days in a state of numbness, our inherent connection to the Earth and to others rendered inert, our senses weak and ineffective, limited to the physical body and our thinking.

Part of waking up is coming to identify with others’ pain and our own responsibility for it.  

Our egos convince us we have no such responsibility.  Our egos drive us in a psychopathic direction, where others’ suffering has no more effect on us than when we swat a fly.  At worst we justify and even (God help us) celebrate atrocities like Hiroshima, lynchings, executions, torture, and police killings.  We hear of a famine in Africa, a typhoon in Asia, and earthquake in South America, and we shrug and scroll to the next story.  Maybe if we’re a little bit woke we will send some money; if it is a local tragedy perhaps even volunteer our time.  

The closer such events are to us personally, the more seriously we take them.  When they happen to our families, then we feel them more directly.  But when it involves someone else’s family on the other side of the planet, not so much.  Especially if we have decided they are “enemies.”  And when it happens to non-humans?  We usually find ways to ignore it.

If we imagine we have no such complicity in others’ suffering, there is an exercise I recommend.  Consider where you are right now: what are you wearing, using, touching?  Who manufactured our clothing?  Who grew the cotton or sheared the sheep?  Where did the wooden floor on which you stand come from?  The electricity powering your devices?  The food we eat?  The water we drink?  Were all these resources extracted and distributed sustainably?  Were all the people who did all the work paid fairly?  How was the land we live on acquired?  

I guarantee that we are benefiting from centuries of theft and violence, murder and extortion, wanton ecological degradation and destruction.  We sit comfortably atop of mountain of bones of those slaughtered by the Empire we feed.  Our existence is built on slavery, genocide, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the exploitation of the Earth and people.  We are participating in sin and suffering all the time.  

These are things for which we are complicit somewhat indirectly and therefore easy to disregard.  There are other things we do to others more immediately, even those we love and care for, that they will spend their lives recovering from.  The selfish and thoughtless parental actions.  The harmful and angry words.  The things we do to others “for their own good.”  The things we didn’t even know were bad at the time.  The things we rationalized, justified, explained.  

The more conscious, present, and woke we become, the more we realize in our own hearts what we have done and what has been done in our name.  That’s why the original Christian prayer is, “Lord, have mercy.”  That’s why when we look at the cross what comes to us is the awareness that, in the words of one hymn, “I crucified Thee.”

Wokeness appears to warrant existential despair.  But another effect of such a broadening awareness is to lose the scales of our blindness and to see something else emerge within us.  That is the other side of the cross: resurrection.  For if we identify and grieve for the mess we are making, we begin to find hope in the word of resurrection.  Our mess is never the last word.  And we can see another life emerging from deep within us.

That life is the true humanity we share with Jesus Christ.  It is our Essence, our true nature.  Once we realize how connected to, and indeed identified with everything, we are, we can stop treating others with careless violence, and start respecting everyone, all of life, all creation, with wonder and joy as sacred expressions of God’s love, bearing the very voiceprint of God’s creative Word, and energized by God’s Breath, the Holy Spirit.

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