Tears

Recently, I find tears come to me easily. I’m not sure why.

Maybe it was the passing of my parents two years ago. A broken hip and pneumonia, a broken heart and dementia, a numbing fog in and out of hospital rooms. In eight months, they were both gone. Or maybe it’s the background hum of an unstable world that seems to grow darker every day. Or maybe it’s my advancing age, and the realization that my remaining sunsets have a finite number, making each beautiful and horrible thing so precious, I can’t afford to let it pass unnoticed.

I’m in the sanctuary of the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra, Portugal. I’ve been sitting for an hour, sitting with my thoughts, sitting with questions in a place people have come for centuries seeking answers, or at least solace. I’m wondering why we are continually confronted with impossible questions. It can’t be that we expect clean answers, a formula with algebraic precision. It’s more like the tangents of a wicked geometry, the curve of my mind measuring whether the points are coming together or falling away.

At the heart of our wondering, I think, is the desire to know we are living a moral life, and that can only be known by walking through the brambles of impossible questions and making choices. We look for a source of wisdom to lay the question against, see where it fits, where the corners stick, and take guidance as best we can. Over time, we find that some sources of wisdom serve us better, or are more suited to our nature, or grow with us as we walk. Wisdom shows us truth in glimmers, as light through a moving curtain, and something in our soul remembers and points our steps in one direction or another.

How does this philosophizing help me with my questions? Why did my parents’ deaths unfold the way they did? How do I hold the country I love even as it transgresses the bounds of evil? Do I give or refuse the man begging change outside the bottle shop? Is my life significant beyond the people I touch in this small flicker of time?

When I am still for a time, a frame of mind can come where my thinking slips to the back and a fuller presence comes forward. Under the quiet of the gothic vaults and blue-white tiles of the sanctuary, I let go of myself. The space absorbs me, my inner and outer indistinct. I feel large but empty, a weight floating at the top of my chest like a bruise. It wants to move but can’t find a way out.

A father wanders through, his young daughter, a tassel of curls, holding his hand. At a side chapel, she leaves him and moves toward a stand of votives. I watch her gaze into the candles and then hurry back to take his hand and place her head against his hip. An ache rises in my throat and my eyes spill over. What is this glimmer? A pair of strangers and their tender moment, a source of wisdom.

Photo by Steve Sphar