Dear Westwood Family,
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been binge-watching The Summer I Turned Pretty, the coming-of-age romantic drama series that’s based on Jenny Han’s best-selling Young Adult trilogy of books. It’s been comforting to immerse myself in a romantic drama–it’s a very tempting (and occasionally unhelpfully obsessive) escape from a brutal news cycle. I cannot resist being drawn in when I read or watch romance stories that so vividly depict the yearning of not-yet-reciprocated love. The longing glances! The sharp pain held in the tear-filled eyes broken-hearted love are just so compelling to me.
This Sunday and last, we’ve been reading from the book of Jeremiah in our Sanctuary worship gatherings. (Can it be mere coincidence that one of the characters in The Summer I Turned Pretty shares this prophet’s name?!) This ancient Hebrew prophet gives us words of lament – heart-rending prayers about desolation, loss, and injustice. I’ve found them to be a tender gift, too. After all, they are rooted in love, too – tears of grief that give away the deep love held by our broken-hearted God.
On days when it feels like so much is coming at us, so fast, without mercy, tears seem like an insufficient response. But perhaps they are the most human and holy response. I think of mystics and saints who let their tears give form to their deep relationship with God. I remember Margery Kempe, whose 15th century Book is the known first English-language auto-biography. She cried incessant tears, and they connected her to God.
I think of Catherine of Siena, the 14th Italian mystic, who in her Dialogue described five different types of tears, each with capacity to draw us closer to God. She described the gifts that come through our yearning for God–the deep pain of our longing can itself be an experience of God.
Our Psalms described this kind of love and longing:
You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water. (Psalm 63:1)
In a season where it’s tempting to grow numb to all the things that break our hearts, I’ve found that a coming-of-age tv romance helped reminded me of my capacity to yearn. I don’t know what might help you, but I want to offer a word of encouragement: I believe that our tears, our aching hearts, and our long yearnings for connection can be gifts that give us an experience of divine love. We who live in wrenching tension between our confidence in the “blessed assurance” of Christ’s grace and the brutal realities of fear, injustice, and violence are stuck in an ongoing state of longing for the fulfillment of what we believe so deeply to be true, and yet experience only in part. In moments and glances, with insufficient words and unintended injuries to one another, we trust in a love deeper than we have yet known.
So, today, I’m offering my prayers and tears for children in Gaza amid hunger and unthinkable grief, for immigrant neighbors in LA in fear of detention, for transgender siblings afraid for their safety, for autistic friends whose diverse gifts have been denied in our national conversation, for all the families in grief after losing loved ones to gun violence, and for so many others. I encourage you to make your own list. Dare to imagine another world, and let your tears help you dream of it.
May it be so.
grace and peace,
Pastor Molly
