Lacrimas

I have spent a lot of time crying this afternoon.  I’m crying right now, in fact.  I’m not completely sure why.

Tears for me are an anomaly, and I never quite know why they come or don’t come.  I’ve wept at superficial films like Gladiator; being caught off guard by words of remembrance beautifully spoken by a girl I knew in grade school at her grandmother’s funeral; at the death of my dog; over breakups; races lost.  I went months before shedding even a single tear over my father’s death, or my grandfather’s.  I didn’t cry at all on 9/11.  I fight off tears every time I sing the last verse of Villanova’s Alma Mater.

When I was in high school, I often wondered why eyes and nose filling with tears and mucus was the way in which humans most commonly expressed intense emotion.  What was the symbolism of this?  Perhaps something highly visible indicating that we are in need.  Perhaps something cleansing, purgative.  Perhaps sobs express something primal and profound, prelinguistic.

Twenty six people.  That is the number of students on average that I have in a section of my course, Christian Faith and Life.  Each semester I work very hard doing whatever I can to help twenty six students in each class see how their life can be empowered by realising God’s presence in it.  Each class I try to help twenty six young adults think about how they can use their gifts for positively impacting their world.  Each moment of that class I try to open up a space of trust, thought, conviction, passion, understanding, so that those twenty six young people might maybe sense the possibility within them.  Each time I meet or speak with one of those twenty six personally, I feel the privilege of having caught a glimpse of an entire world that expands toward a horizon of complexity touching myriad other lives and levels of life’s dimensions.

This might be why I feel such total devastation when I hear that twenty six people have lost their lives at the hand of a gunman.  Even though I know that many more die due to equally wanton acts of violence every day.  Even though I don’t know those people.  Even though I am not a parent.  Even though I have no reason to be afraid.  Even though I feel embarrassed for weeping.

I remember the first and only time I saw my father cry.  It was at his mother’s funeral mass.  It frightened me at first.  Then fear gave way to that sense that I’ve experienced a few times since, of grace.  True grace.  When at once you sense the preciousness and precariousness of life itself, up close, on the back of your neck like the deep humid breath of a tiger.  I’ll never forget that feeling.

Seeing the president cry today was something like that.  Although I’m not any kind of follower of politics and I feel little to no allegiance to any politician, even the president, whomever it might be—there was something momentous, extraordinarily so, in the dabbing of those tears.  Those tears on the corners of his eyes seemed to me like footprints on the moon.  And for a moment, without explanation, my meaningless tears felt slightly less hopeless.

I realised, once again, that the strength of weakness is more powerful than any force.  And my thoughts then turned to Ps. 121: my help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and Earth.  The Lord whose foolishness is wiser than all of our wisdom, and whose weakness is greater than the strength of all persons (1 Cor 1.25).

My prayers are with all who are suffering from this day’s tragedy.