My understanding is that the voice saying “Some things can only be seen through eyes that are crying” during the emotional Knicks’ celebration at the end of last night’s game was ESPN analyst Richard Jefferson. The words sounded familiar, so I jotted them down. The original quote is attributed to Oscar A. Romero: “There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.”
So why do we tend to “hold ourselves together” when it’s ultimately limiting? We like polish and pizazz. We think tears make us vulnerable, and we forget that vulnerability is good.
Lakers are my team, but last night, the Knicks were. I unexpectedly cried not only joyful, celebratory “yay!” tears for the underdog team, but also pained “ouch” tears while watching Knicks MVP Jalen Brunson and his dad, Rick (Knicks assistant coach). Observing unabashed displays of love and affection between a father and a son—and a mother and a son—stings for the obvious reason.
I came across this short video last week, and it struck me as breathtakingly wise and beautiful, hinting at “thin places,” a term that originated with the ancient Celts. I keep replaying the reel to get it into my marrow. In the clip, the poet David Whyte talks about the “controlled edge.” I think it’s a mistake to think these edges, or walls, keep us safe. They keep us separate. Whyte says that weeping is a “doorway to something much deeper,” which I understand to be a thin place. One online definition describes thin places as “those rare locales where the distance between Heaven and Earth collapses.” Or, as some call it, an “overlap” between the material and the spiritual.
I’m not suggesting the Knicks and anyone celebrating last night experienced thin places, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Maybe it’s just me, but I think I saw some glistening eyes that looked as if they were witnessing something otherworldly.
Carl R. Rogers said, “What is most personal is most universal.”
Tears are personal.
Pretense dissolves, edges fade, and walls crumble.
It’s known that the shortest verse in the Bible is in John, chapter 11, verse 35: Jesus wept.
That’s an easy one for me to remember.
Expand your heart and your peripheral vision. Do as Albert Camus advised, and “Live to the point of tears.”
See what you see.