Is it unseemly for grown men to weep? To tear up every time they hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a baseball game, or “Danny Boy” at an Irish wake? If life throws you a curve, which it tends now and again to do, is it alright to commence bawling? Does that qualify you for membership in what our late President George Herbert Walker Bush called “the Bawl Brigade”?

But mightn’t it be just a tad indecorous among men of a certain age to be doing that? Especially around strangers, that is, who may find the whole spectacle a bit soppy. “No me digas nada triste,” as they say in Spain. Better not say anything sad, in other words, because it’ll just make me cry.

The trouble with indiscriminate advice like that, of course, is that for anyone to follow it, never mind grown men, one had better first empty out one’s own soul of all possible feeling, strip oneself of the least show of sentiment, and thus reduce the self to the status of a stone. Or, at best, a well-oiled machine, the smooth functioning of which is all that matters. Not exactly a design model fitted for the human heart, is it?

“American men,” writes Whittaker Chambers, “who weep in droves in movie houses over the woes of love-struck shop girls, hold that weeping in men is unmanly.” But Whittaker Chambers did not think so. He may have been many things, an ex-communist even, but he was never soppy:

I have found most men in whom there was depth of experience, or capacity for compassion, singularly apt to tears. How can it be otherwise? One looks and sees: and it would be a kind of impotence to be incapable of, or to grudge, the comment of tears, even while you struggle against it.

And if the word of Chambers weren’t enough, one can always appeal to the Incarnate Word Himself, whom the record will reveal did not hesitate to weep. Indeed, so wide was the breach made in His heart by the suffering of others that the blood and the tears have not ceased since that first Friday we call Good. Indeed, He has unleashed a veritable torrent of mercy from His pierced and crucified side as He hung upon the Cross to die.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, “for they shall be comforted.” But for those steeped in indifference, who do not give a rip about anyone, by refusing to mourn they will never be blessed. Blessedness belongs not only to those who are poor and meek but to the mourners as well, who with their tears are still able to feel the pain of being human.

For those steeped in indifference, who do not give a rip about anyone, by refusing to mourn they will never be blessed.Tweet This

The prophet Ezekiel, for instance, is wonderfully emphatic on the subject. Speaking with the voice of God, he writes: “I shall remove the heart of stone from your flesh and put into you a heart of flesh” (36:26). Or Chesterton, reminding us that, unlike the “Stoics, both ancient and modern, who were proud of concealing their tears, Christ never concealed his tears; he showed them plainly on his open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of his native city.”

What we learn from the Scriptures is that, not once but three times, we are shown the clearest possible evidence of Christ shedding tears. How else can He signify the deep, undeniable bond of solidarity between ourselves and God? In Luke’s Gospel, which we rightly call the Gospel of Divine Mercy, we are told that on nearing Jerusalem, the city that will not receive Him but instead conspires to put Him to a painful and protracted death, “He wept over it, saying ‘Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes’” (19:41-42).

And then there is the darkest night of all when, amid the anguish of Gethsemane, He cries out to an unseen Father with “loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7), in the teeth of whose apparent silence He must steel Himself to face the ordeal of crucifixion the following day. Alone.

And then there is the darkest night of all when, amid the anguish of Gethsemane, He cries out to an unseen Father with “loud cries and tears” Tweet This

And then, perhaps the most dramatic episode this side of Holy Week: we see Jesus once more in tears, a scene set against the backdrop of a tomb where Lazarus lies dead, a man whom Jesus especially loved. He asks where they have placed His friend. And when He is told, writes John in his Gospel (11:34-35), “Jesus wept.”

He will soon walk into that tomb, which is the place where the dead are left to rot, where, in the words of the poet Hopkins, “flesh fade, and moral trash / Fall to the residuary worm.” So, what does Jesus do, standing there before the dead and decomposing figure that had once been his friend, but speak the words we should all wish to hear at the hour of our own death: “Lazarus, come out!” (John 11:43).

What does it really mean to say that those who mourn shall be comforted? It means not only are their tears precious in the sight of God but that they are joined by the tears of Jesus Himself, who feels more deeply than we can possibly know the sorrow and the pain which prompt us to cry out to God. What else is suffering but a cry that goes straight to the heart of God, asking that we either be relieved of it or, failing its removal, that it be redeemed, given a meaning that may lift it above the anguish of the animals.

Or, putting the question a bit differently, what does it really mean to speak of God as love if it doesn’t include this mysterious capacity to suffer with and in and for others? In short, a God who weeps. Because a God who cannot do that, who cannot extend himself in this way, is poorer than any of us. If he will not weep because he cannot feel, then he cannot love. He is no better than the god of Aristotle, the Unmoved Mover whom no one is ever moved to love. We may feel constrained to admire his might, fearful before his power, but, in the end, so loveless a being is more bereft than any potsherd of a man who suffers and weeps because, at least, he knows how to love.

Here is the deepest and most consoling mystery of all: namely, the Suffering of Love, in which the All-Powerful God freely opens Himself to the possibility of being affected, moved by the suffering of others. It was this understanding of God as a Being-for-others, as sheer relational existence—which is to say, as Love—which snapped the Aristotelian spell, giving permission for man to weep in the certain hope that his tears are felt by God Himself.