Necessary Tears

What's the cost when we lose touch with our sorrow and our joy?

I’m convinced we need to pay better attention to our tears. Tears arrive a hundred ways: misty eyes, a lump in the throat, a granite boulder resting on the heart. Sometimes tears feel like laughter or gratitude or pleasure. Tears works as shorthand for all the ways our soul widens, how we’re learning to live open, awake, close to the bone.

Tears accompany hollowness and grief, but they’re also fused to beauty and delight. Tears emerge with joys we’ve forgotten, happiness we thought we’d never know again. Fiery tears reveal righteous anger over wrongs that must be made right. Tears tell us our stories of loss and longing, of hope and disappointment, of what we truly want and need. These catch-us-off-guard friends remind us of the truths we can’t completely submerge or dismiss, no matter how hard we try.

“Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears,” writes Frederick Buechner, “it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the…