I cry.
Almost every Sunday now, I cry.
I’m beginning to think that the reason I sit in the back at church is so that no one will see the tears … because it’s a little embarrassing.
When I’m not crying, I’m sighing, or taking great, big breaths, puffing out my cheeks like I’m about to blast out a long, melodic run of notes like the great Dizzy Gillespie on a trumpet.
The crying, the sighing, the deep, big breaths—it happens during the sermon or during a hymn. It happens during the Eucharist. It happens when Pastor Debbie says the words, “serve you in unity, constancy, and peace.” It happens during "the peace", with a handshake, with a smile, with a hug.
All these things flood me with emotion.
It is joy. It is healing. It is hope. It is kindness. It is caring. It is love.
It is sometimes overwhelming.
Yesterday, I finished reading Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk. Norris writes that when friends have a hard time understanding why she spends so much time at church, she tells them, “I do so for the same reason that I write: to let words work the earth of my heart. To sing, to read poetry out loud, and to have poetry and the wild stories of scripture read to me.”
I understand Kathleen Norris completely, because the words have been working the earth of my heart for several months now and the seeds that were planted are sprouting and I feel filled with life again.
Words have power.
Words tell stories, even if the word is simply, “Hello.”
And stories, as Kate Morton writes in The Forgotten Garden, have the “magical ability to fill the wounded parts of people.”
We are all wounded. We have all been wounded. Not one of us has reached this point in our lives unscathed.
There isn’t a Sunday that goes by where something … a hymn, a sermon, a scripture … doesn’t speak to me, speak to that wounded part of me.
For me, I know that when I cry or get teary-eyed at church, it is not because of sadness or despair. My tears are tears of joy and thanksgiving because every time I go to church I feel myself being healed, healed of things I didn’t even know needed healing.
So I sing a hymn or I hear the scripture and feel my soul knitting itself back together. And sometimes that soul healing takes my breath away and my eyes fill with tears and I have to remind myself to breathe.
