Discerning my tears

My mother tells me that I cried for the first two years of my life. She says that all I wanted was to be held, and being a infant in the mid 1950s, when baby rearing protocol insisted on a feeding, changing and putting a baby down in the crib, I cried most of the time. At the age of two, I simply stopped.

I cry a lot still.

I cry in joy, I cry in sorrow. Sometimes I grieve.

Generally my crying is not a prolonged affair, a tear here and there, a quiet sob, which racks my body with four or five involuntary utterances. I cry in sympathy with others, holding and responding to emotion that is not even mine.

Sometimes I clearly understand what I am crying about, sometimes I do not. And I feel an underlying expectation that I know what I am crying about. In our group sessions, when someone starts to cry, the question is often asked, “what are those tears about?”

When I answer, “I don’t know,” I feel that I am admitting that I don’t fundamentally know what is going on. I feel inadequate in the explanation. I judge myself for not knowing what I am feeling. I imagine others around me silently clucking their tongues and saying, “Geez, she doesn’t even know what she is crying about. How am I supposed to react if I don’t know what is wrong?”

I am coming to realize that maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe my crying is a coping mechanism, just like coughing clears our throat or our eyes tearing washes away impurities.

I generally shed tears in my individual supervision and yesterday my supervisor commented that there is so much pain that I carry around. I tried to explain that I thought pain and joy happen simultaneously. I related observing a dying patient receiving a phone call from his brother. The patient cried tears of joy, and that joy was tinged with great sorrow. He was so overjoyed to hear from his brother, he was so sad as he anticipated his impending death.

By my observation, he feels this because his days are limited. I feel this duality of joy and sorrow because I am alive and sensitive to my surroundings. In some ways I am coming to realize that I live in a world of emotion, and I surmise that others do as well. But this is not something that is a problem. This is something that is a gift.

Our universe and everything in it, including plants and non-verbal animals, respond to emotion. Not surprisingly, there are some noetic scientists who put forth the concept that the fabric of the universe is a hologram that responds to intention and emotion.

I understand that in our world of stoic and intentional distance holding up emotion as positive runs contrary to the internalization of dispassionate living as facing a sober reality. But I believe that if we were actually to understand that our emotions are buffeting us around, whether we acknowledge them or not, we would find that we have more choice in our reactions.

In chaplaincy, we are urged to connect heart to mind and compassion with assessment. We are being asked to participate in the peeling away of defenses, to become in touch with our emotions and our past hurts so that we can know ourselves better and by extension be better ministers.

I have found in this process that I have a great capacity to feel. And for that I am grateful.