A Liturgy for Those Who Weep Without Knowing Why

There is so much lost in this world, O Lord,
so much that aches and groans and shivers
for want of redemption, so much that
seems dislocated, upended, desecrated,
unhinged—even in our own hearts.

Even in our own hearts
we bear the mark of all that is broken.
What is best in this world has been bashed
and battered and trodden down.
What was meant to be the substance has
become the brittle shell, haunted by the
ghosts of a glory so long crumbled that only
its rubble is remembered now.

Is it any wonder we should weep sometimes,
without knowing why? It might be anything.
And then again, it might be everything.

For we feel this.

We who are your children feel this empty space
where some lost thing should have rested
in its perfection, and we pine for those nameless glories,
and we pine for all the wasted stories in our world,
and we pine for these present wounds.

We pine for our children and for their children too,
knowing each will have to prove how this universal pain
is also personal. We pine for all children born into these
days of desolation—whose regal robes were torn to
tatters before they were even swaddled in them.

O Lord, how can we not weep,
when waking each day in this vale of tears?
How can we not feel those pangs, when we,
wounded by others, so soon learn to wound as well,
and in the end wound even ourselves?

We grieve what we cannot heal and
we grieve our half-belief, having made
uneasy peace with disillusion, aligning
ourselves with a self-protective lie
that would have us kill our best hopes just
to keep our disappointments half-confined.

We feel ourselves wounded by what is wretched,
foul, and fell, but we are sometimes wounded
by the beauty as well, for when it whispers,
it whispers of the world that might have been
our birthright, now banished, now withdrawn,
as unreachable to our wounded hearts as ancient seas
receding down some endless dark.

We weep, O Lord, for those things that,
though nameless, are still lost.
We weep for the cost of our rebellions,
for the mocking and hollowing of holy things,
for the inward curve of our souls,
for the evidences of death outworked in every
field and tree and blade of grass, crept up in
every creature, alert in every longing,
infecting all fabrics of life.

We weep for the leers our daughters will endure,
as if to be made in reflection of your beauty
were a fault for which they must pay.
We weep for our sons, sabotaged by profiteers
who seek to warp their dreams before
they even come of age.

We weep for all the twisted alchemies of our times
that would turn what might have been gold into
crowns of cheap tin and then toss them into refuse bins
as if love could ever be a castoff thing
one might simply be done with.

We weep for the wretched expressions of all things
that were first built of goodness and glory
but are now their own shadow twins.

We have wept so often. And we will weep again.
And yet, there is somewhere in our tears a hope
still kept. We feel it in this darkness, like a tiny flame,
when we are told Jesus also wept.

You wept.

So moved by the pain of this crushed creation,
you, O Lord, heaved with the grief of it, drinking
the anguish like water and sweating it out of your skin
like blood. Is it possible that you—in your sadness
over Lazarus, in your grieving for Jerusalem,
in your sorrow in the garden—is it possible that
you have sanctified our weeping too?

For the grief of God is no small thing,
and the weeping of God is not without effect.
The tears of Jesus preceded a resurrection of the dead.

O Spirit of God, is it then possible that our tears
might also be a kind of intercession?

That we, your children, in our groaning with
the sadness of creation, could be joining in
some burdened work of coming restoration?
Is it possible that when we weep and don’t know why,
it is because the curse has ranged so far, so wide?
That we weep at that which breaks your heart,
because it has also broken ours—sometimes so deeply
that we cannot explain our weeping, even to ourselves?

If that is true,
then let such weeping be received, O Lord,
as an intercession newly forged of holy sorrow.
Then let our tears anoint these broken things,
and let our grief be as their consecration—
a preparation for their promised redemption,
our sorrow sealing them for that day when
you will take the ache of all creation,

and turn it inside-out,
like the shedding of
an old gardener’s glove.

O Lord, if it please you,
when your children weep and don’t know why,
yet use our tears
to baptize what you love.

Amen.