The gift of tears...

This morning we buried one of the saints of our church - a sweet and vibrant 97 year old woman - and during the Lord's Prayer one of the participants at the internment started to weep.  Later she told me, "I hadn't expected to cry but as I was praying I realized that the last time I said those words were sitting in the Sanctuary next to mom... and it just washed over me."  I know that one REAL well - out of no where the taps get turned on - and they keep flowing with a life all their own.

Music does that to me - certain movies and photographs, too - and I have

come to think of them as gifts.  Fr. Ed Hays spoke of such tears as prayers too deep for human words and I cherish them.  For most of my life as both an adult and teen, I hated how freely my tears came - and I fought to hold them inside and back.  But, as Fr. Richard Rohr notes, in the second half of life I don't have to prove myself to anyone, so I can simply let go and experience everything as a gift or a way of returning thanks for a gift received.  He writes: 

Living in the second half of life, I no longer have to prove that I or my group is the best, that my ethnicity is superior, that my religion is the only one that God loves, or that my role and place in society deserve superior treatment. I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort—every day—is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received. I now realize that I have been gratuitously given to—from the universe, from society, and from God. I try now, as Elizabeth Seton said, “to live simply so that others can simply live.”

So, after a late afternoon nap it is off to play a jazz gig - and then worship in the morning..