Reclaiming Weeping as a Sacred Practice

IN THE 15TH CENTURY, Margery Kempe received the divine gift of weeping. When considering the multitude of spiritual powers God has bestowed — prophecy, healing, and discernment, for instance — weeping is a peculiar one. After several transformative visions, Kempe, an English laywoman and mystic, wept regularly in hourslong sessions out of contrition for human fallenness and compassion for Christ’s suffering. St. Jerome visited her to convey that God had given her a permanent “well of tears” to help others. Consequently, she developed a form of sanctifying prayer, weeping “on others’ behalf” to help liberate them from sin, purgatory, anguish, or death. Kempe’s fervor continues to demonstrate the place of tears in daily life. Even for us non-ascetics, tears express truth, helping us attune to the wisdom within and beyond us.

Some of Kempe’s contemporaries thought her weeping (which evolved into a decade of “roaring”) to be disruptive, odd, or performative. And as Oxford professor of English Santha Bhattacharji explains in her article “Tears and Screaming: The Spirituality of Margery Kempe,” those critiques continue today. Some scholars have labeled Kempe as “extreme” or “hysterical,” characterizations that ring of misogyny. Nevertheless, her practices were church-approved and part of the well-worn tradition of Christian tears. The Desert Mothers and Fathers considered crying an “official form of worship.” The Rule of St. Benedict stipulates that tears are the mark of “pure prayer.” Tears — whether quiet or loud — are expressions of the heart that connect us to divine wisdom. As Eastern Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware writes in his article “‘An Obscure Matter’: The Mystery of Tears in Orthodox Spirituality,” “We weep [to give] expression to the intimate feelings that are ‘too deep for words.’”

Songwriter and author Amanda Held Opelt writes in A Hole in the World about the lost rituals of grief, including Irish “funeral wailing,” common in the Middle Ages. The bean chaointe, the head keener (usually a woman and most often a midwife), led mourners into a sacred chorus of free weeping and roaring at Irish wakes. “The keener gave permission for people to fall apart, to grieve with their whole bodies without feeling shame,” Opelt writes. With time, the practice of keening waned due to the rise of rationalism, control, and distrust of everything from emotion to Indigenous practices in the church. Today, our bereavement spaces are typically polished, oppressive, and inhospitable to crying.

Opelt writes that tears are often socially coded as “feminine” and therefore inferior. But “in a world that sees the emotions of women as a liability,” Opelt pushes us to “remember that God sees them as a holy asset.” Kempe embodied this wisdom. As Ware reminds us, “tears stand at the enigmatic point of intersection between body and soul.” In wailing or in silence, tears are healing, holy work.