Tears are a gift from God
They put us in touch with essential things that we know to be dear or wrong.
Some memories never leave us. Climbing the final steps to the third floor of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, I entered the room with the shoes. Four thousand shoes in the exhibit, the leather of which still gives off a musty smell. We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses, a poem overhead reads, as if to deliver the final crescendo of the Final Solution.
A lone woman in the middle of the room was sobbing, her face in her hands. I felt helpless and must’ve looked helpless. I wasn’t going to walk over and put my arm around a complete stranger, especially a vulnerable woman crushed with grief. Instead, I stood awkwardly at a distance, listening to her cry. It wasn’t long before her pain caused me to start tearing up, too. In her company, I couldn’t find any reason to hold back emotion, especially in the presence of all those shoes. Those baby shoes!
In the Bible, when Jesus weeps, it’s either in reaction to the grief of another or it’s his grieving disappointment over this broken world. When he sees Mary weeping over the death of her brother Lazarus, he begins to cry. When he weeps over Jerusalem, a city that didn’t seem to know what makes for peace, it is as if he were crying over human malpractice the world over.
