Another View 2-13

The Byzantine Fathers called tears “the second baptism.” What an interesting way of acknowledging another kind of “rebirthing” process, born from the inside rather than the outside. The indication, of course, is that each time one weeps, each time one sheds so much as a tear, something has been altered, changed forever. There is a shift each time the eyes fill with water, and it is evident whether you are the recipient or the source itself. This word, tears, originates from the Greek word penthos, meaning “to be pierced to the heart.” Interestingly, this piercing describes an autonomic spiritual response, bypassing the brain-function, and immediately moving outward from the interior recesses of what the desert tradition called the nous.*

Recently asked to describe a time in my life when crisis changed me forever, I named the year, and briefly described the details around the year, at which point my throat constricted, my eyes became liquid, and words flowed only haltingly through the tears that burned scarlet along my cheeks. Relating that story, and my reaction to the memories—though they were over 25 years old—made me aware of how the nous has memory, and how valuable remembrance is to our tradition. There is no amnesia of the heart. It won’t forget.

I’ve wondered long about the “what” of that remembrance. What is being recalled, surfacing upon recollection? And why is it so tenaciously fresh? Tracing this movement of the heart, we discover a “wound of love” that continues to guide and guard the human being, by way of the heart. In some tangible way, this wounding will ultimately be tied to the spirit of repentance and thus the reshaping of the will. When the will’s desiring is not oriented towards its divine origins, the nous becomes veiled, or covered over, and one’s wisdom and the choices made in life are in jeopardy.

Repentance is the reorientation of the self to its true end. It is the liberating of the will and the expanding of the heart. It is removing the veils that shroud the nous, allowing wisdom to re-enter, and the eye to see clearly its true desire. Odd as it may sound, the early mothers and fathers of the Church would describe it as the wound holding the nous in God continually, until finally we awaken to the grace that has been awaiting this return.

Is it little wonder that the tenderness of the wound and the acknowledgement of the return would elicit this reborn self? The waters gush forth as a river, and the song that is sung is the song of homecoming. It is the prodigal returning, and the banquet is ever humbling.

I remember being a young chaplain in a hospital setting, and this tiny infant of ten months was brought into the emergency room one evening. Rescued from his torturers, most of his small body was pocked by cigarette burns. The greatest horror yet remained, as the nurses passed him from one and then to another in the room, each of us attempting to move him to response. Some grabbed his cheeks, talking and cooing to him; others hugged him tight; another even tossed him in the air and placed him on their shoulders, dancing about the room. There was no response. Nothing! Finally, one of the nurses began to pinch him, I thought a bit too hard. They prodded him with an IV, and nothing. Though he lived, he was impervious to touch, to laughter, to pain.

It is only these years later that I’ve wondered whether that young lad would ever know tears? Was he so tormented that he would never awaken to his heart? Had his heart, of survival needs, become entombed in some great beyond? Was he beyond even the reach of the Divine? Had he crossed some invisible line of demarcation that could no longer distinguish between light and dark, hope and despair? In truth, I do not know.

This lingering image has served as a severe emblem for me in trusting tears. Because I can weep, I am supple enough to yet return when returning is the only option. To not return is to lose one’s longing for love. It is to deter every attempt, even God’s, of bending us to our greatest longing of all: to weep in gratitude that in fact, nothing can ever separate us from love’s deepest wound. God will outwait whatever has been done to us, or whatever we have done to ourselves. The weeping opens us to grace.

With God, there is only one turning, and that is our gaze turning back towards the Eternal Gaze. For this, we weep. For this were we born, and are born again and again, from within as well as from on high. May all tears wash away all that would deter us from this sacred and deep seeing, and as always, Another View.

*nous – The word has various uses in Patristic teaching. It indicates either the soul or the heart or even an energy of the soul. Mainly, the nous is the “eye of the heart,” the center of all true seeing, or the purest part of the heart. It is where attention is at its keenest. It is also called “noetic energy, and so is not identified with the faculty of reason.