Ever since I was a young child, I was given to accept that in all lives, without exception, there will be the inevitable experience of sadness and gloom, most especially when we ourselves or somebody close to us suffers a terrible affliction in life. These afflictions are varied, and because there is no way to avoid them completely, when these happen to us, we just must accept the pain and sorrow and only when we manage to do this, we will just be absorbed and overtaken by them and sink, inescapably, into the abyss of darkness that seems endless.
As a priest and shepherd of souls, I have presided at many funeral Masses and have been present at so many cremations of the deceased that I have lost count of them. At each one of them, there is always the experience of witnessing the surviving family members and loved ones of the deceased person completely wracked with anguish, grief, hopelessness and melancholy. Do these emotions show a raw weakness of those who survive the deceased in the casket? Should these emotions be avoided and negated no matter how difficult it can be? The human instinct in these situations is to go up to the sorrowful person and stand steadily next to them and utter the phrase “Please don’t cry. Be strong. Your friends and family don’t know how to handle your copious tears.”
Although these words seem to be the sensitive and correct thing to do, all it does is that it avoids the truth that at these moments of dark and inconsolable grief, that there actually is something truly beneficial and positive about grief and tears in these moments of despair. Our weak humanity wants to run away from our moments and encounters with death, illness, sadness and any sense of loss. Escapism is our modus operandi in the face of affliction and suffering. We may escape from these moments of harshness and darkness, but at best, it is only a momentary escape. The sad fact is that it will return to bother and haunt us later on in life, and because it is so raw and real, it makes repeated returns into our lives, breaking us all over, again and again.
One of the lovely movies that shows us how hidden the goodness of pain and tears are in our lives was so prominently revealed in a gem of a movie called The Shack. It began as a novel written by a Canadian author named William P. Young, and it tells of how a man handled the horrendous and painful loss of his young daughter who was abducted and murdered by a serial killer and the little girl’s body was never found.
Mackenzie, the father of the girl, receives and invitation to go the shack to meet “Papa”. The long and short of it is that Mack does go to the shack alone, and it is in that shack that he encounters the manifestation of the three persons of the Holy Trinity, where Papa is an African-American woman, God the Son is a Middle Eastern carpenter, and the Holy Spirit reveals himself as an Asian woman named Sarayu.
There are several one-to-one encounters of Mack and each of them, and the one that is most beautiful and mind-opening is one where Sarayu sees Mack crying when he talks about his murdered daughter. This is where Sarayu uses a small glass vial and collects the tears streaming from Mack’s eyes. Mack is puzzled and asks why Sarayu does this. Her explanation is this – Mack, God does not let these tears of grief and sadness go to waste. God collects them and uses them in a positive way. However, most people do not allow themselves to cry, and that is a waste.
It is later in the story, that Mack discovers the body of his daughter, and very sadly carries the dead body to be tenderly buried in the ground, and after the body is covered with earth, Sarayu takes out the vial of Mack’s collected tears and sprinkles the tears all over the burial spot. It is when the tears get absorbed by the soil that beautiful flowers and a majestic tree sprouts immediately over the grave site, and the flowers that bloom from the plants and the tree fills the entire place with so much life and loveliness.
It doesn’t take a philosopher to understand that this is a precious lesson that there is so much positivity that come from the painful process of tears, sorrow and lamentation. Jesus himself was so aware of this because in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before he was crucified, he cried out to his Father, saying “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” At that point of great sorrow and distress, Jesus had a very clear knowledge that something truly good will come out of the passion that he was to undergo that would culminate in his shameful death on the cross of Calvary. The flowers and fruit that will come out of his passion is the undeserved grace of divine mercy that extends to every single one of his followers and disciples, and right up to this very moment, we the baptized in Christ, are the living and breathing fruit and flowers of the empty tomb of Jesus.
Beautiful and poignant this truth is it is also truly challenging to impart this to members of the flock of the Church. It remains the task and endeavor of every ordained priest worth his ordination to try in various ways to break this truth to the people he ministers to in his parish. We need to go against our human intuition to escape from our sufferings and failures, to bring life to those who surround us in life. We owe it to them, and we owe it to ourselves.
We need to begin with the hard task of identifying the ways that we are so prone to run away from our pains and sorrows in life. Once we do that, it is half the battle won. The other half is to courageously admit of our foolish ways, seek God’s divine mercy for our shallow ways, and cry those tears we may have been withholding for so many years.
And once we do that, we will be providing the Holy Spirit with so much to fill those vials so that He can use them to copiously water the parched and lifeless soils of so many lives and allow thousands to live resurrected lives.
