A Tearful Occasion

“But joy or no joy, people also cry at weddings. It is part of the tradition...

When we shed tears at a wedding, our tears are likely to have a great deal less to do with the bride and groom than with all the old dreams or regrets that the bride and groom have occasioned in us.

In our sentimentality, we think, ‘How wonderful that they are going to live happily ever after,’ or ‘How terrible that they are never going to be so happy again,’ and then we relate it all to our own happiness or our own lost happiness and weep eloquently at ourselves.”

From Frederick Buechner’s sermon “The Wedding at Cana"

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Dear Alex,

Tears tear apart barriers and bridges. We bond and break up in tears. We are what we tear.

Buechner’s words invoke weeping. I suspect I will be thinking of them for the rest of my life. By crying for ourselves, we become objects of self-pity, dispensable, and our tears disposable, deceptive.

A colleague asked me yesterday: Why are we so dependent on cars? Why is there so much suffering in the world? This is why I don’t want to know anymore. No tears exposed.

Tears can be displaced by laughter, diverted and converted in conformity to what we know in ourselves, in dining, traveling and entertainment. Within us, the crouching beast breathes a deep low growl out of its slow-burning furnace of nostrils. The beast is guarding something sacred - calming diversion. It loathes questioning.

Don’t ask about our drought or deluge of tears. The internal beast bites.

This evening, I shadowed 3 volunteering coaches in a community program teaching folks in crisis about financial freedom, including tips on planning a workable budget. During the session, learners shared beastly stories of personal debt and guilt. We asked. We wanted to know. We wept in secrecy, drowning our beasts.

You will be disappointed. One of the coaches warned me instantly after class. He noted less than 3% of those who had signed up for the session were actually present. His silver hair and gentle voice expressed firsthand something more sorrowful than any sobbing.

My thoughts are choppy as tears tonight. I can scarcely write a clear-eyed sentence now. We can choose to cry a torrent for self-centeredness without consolation. Or we can swim in our tears together to reach the shore.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

So I think I have finally figured out what's wrong with my dog Sumi, something of a flattering trouble to me as it turns out.  I think she misses me.

Really there is nothing "wrong" with her.  She still barks at the vacuum cleaner with deep conviction and now adds to the axis of evil the Instant Pot you recently gave my family.  If only human has such good sense to be wary of technology.  If only Sumi could speak about her lost happiness and weep eloquently like Buechner's pen.

I've been asking her, "What have I done wrong, Sumi?  You are otherwise perfectly fine, then why are you not eating?  What are you protesting?"

It would have been so easy to figure out if I was not as absorbed in my own set of convictions as in the past months, trying to establish a new daily rhythm, walking 1.5 hours to work and thus cutting short my walk with her, precision-engineering task after task in the morning like a machine better oiled than ever, all the while still writing and reading like I would wake up illiterate the next morning, like I had something to prove, everything to gain and nothing to lose.

At a wedding the bride and groom occasion in us a relating of ourselves to others all too rare, almost impossible, if not for the occasion.  (Buechner stole his pen from an angel, trust me.)  So what sort of "occasion" is this?

I am not going to fully articulate what I see, but I would say wedding is an occasion that has to do with stilling and staring, remembering and imagining, convincing and being convinced, words spoken to call attention to those left unsaid for being unspeakable, secrets too dark, the white too bright, an awakening too rude, a dream too good, too much coming in going through leaving us way too fast, that if we don't let ourselves out in tears we're gonna blow up like an apocalypse, returning to dust for the world to breathe in the glorious revealing of our nothingness.

I am willing to change, to adjust for you, I told Sumi this morning, 6 o'clock at the beginning of our morning walk.  Half an hour up the hill, I proved with my action.  Even let her lick my peanut-buttered finger when fixing breakfast for the kids, something I wouldn't allow in the past.  Have I disciplined disappointment out of you?  I hand-fed her some water, played it like a game.

When I was leaving the house, about 40 minutes later than usual, she pulled her blanket to the very threshold of a cardboard partition I occasioned for our dividedness, curled up into a fetus, waiting for the birth of our next relating.

Yours, Alex