What does it mean to weep for a nation?
Not in the abstract sense of land and trees and rivers, the voiceless grass and sea. But to weep for a people, individuals, an ocean of faces and souls torn by divorce, drugs, gang violence, bullying, isolation, ostracism, domestic violence, abuse, addiction, sex, pornography, apathy, false religion and piety, hopelessness, a valley of hate. People who have a voice, but who use it to scream, or muffle it in the bosom of a broken breast.
What does it mean to cry out as one?
A family who share the same pains as our eternal paternal benefactor. A body whose skin itches and gut wretches at the same injustice, or even mercy starved streets. A bride who refuses to rest in riches ignoring the squalor and slums outside of the palace gate.
I do not want to talk about theology, although I will say that there are so many references to lamenting and crying and rending and tearing our clothes in the bible, that it is as if the bible itself weeps and spills great floods of emotion out over the cracking floor.
Rather than theology I want to say this:
Today I sat on the floor and wept.
Without knowing exactly why I began to cry and could not stop. I fell to my knees and even curled up into a ball such was the intensity of the emotion of grief I felt. I put my face to the expensive patterned rug in my living room and I wept. The rug did not invalidate my tears anymore than a council estate ghetto validates anyone elses. So be generous with your tears, for He hears the years of pain and waits for the cry of a penitent heart.
Oh that my tears ran like great rivers coursing down my cheeks. Rivers that flowed into a sea of cheek shed passion from a generation of believers, believers who believed the one who changes hears hearts. That this sea would flow across the open wound of our country and soothe our aches like healing balm.
For we do not need a generation of heroes, great people of whom we tell stories so that we do not need to enact greatness ourselves. We need a generation of ordinary people who weep because it is the right thing to do, who pray because desperation reaps fervency, who dance because joy is the cry of the bride, and who speak because hope must have a voice, because hope has earned a voice, and because she waits on the mountains to ride to the rescue of her children.
But before we speak hope. We must learn to weep.
I do not mean to deny hope a voice. For in fact hope shouts loud from mountains above the roar of our dissent and horror. But, I feel we must taste the mud and blood and sweat and tears of grief before we have to right to raise our voices. We must learn again that genuine grief is a beautiful offering of worship before our Father. That our bowls of prayers are most full when they are full of tears.
For mercy and hope and the grief of the Father’s heart.
N.B- John 16:19-21Jesus saw that they wanted to ask him about this, so he said to them, “Are you asking one another what I meant when I said, ‘In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me’?
I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.
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