�鶹��

Available for over a year

Good morning. I was studying music and mime in Paris before university. One day my hostess invited me to come and listen. A tutor and student from the Conservatoire were using her fine grand piano, Schubert being sung exquisitely. Till the teacher shut the lid with a bang. His pupil’s face was wet with the beauty of the music. “It is not for you,” he said, “to indulge your emotions. You serve your audience.” The King has admitted tears at messages of support. The Speaker of the House’s apology was described as near-tearful. Broadcaster Dan Walker has admitted he cried after programmes. All men serving the public: yet all publicly expressing their vulnerability. Fashions change. When Homer’s Achilles isn’t fighting, he’s crying: only fleeing, not weeping, is described as “womanly”: but Plato considered tears so inappropriate – in a man – he thought the Iliad should be bowdlerised. Medieval men thought nothing of it and Wolsey cried out of self-pity: Renaissance gentlemen, however, modelled themselves on Stoicism; tears were only for hoi polloi. The young Victoria wept freely: the old widow reigned over stiff-upper-lips. What’s indisputable is that tears are good for you: they clean your eyes and shed toxins. Far more interesting, emotional crying produces chemicals to reduce pain and anguish and also help us regulate and enjoy extreme happiness. After my father died the legal wrangles were so agonising I couldn’t cry… till, nearly two years on, I saw flowers like those he’d given me and my loss flooded me. Now I weep most days. Jesus wept. Even though He could give his friend life again, and did. He wept over his city Jerusalem. Then out of fear and loneliness. Dread, distress and desolation are all inescapable for the human state: tears to express these, unique to it. Is it sane, I asked my daughter, to hear of a child thousands of miles away and be incapacitated with grief? Of course, she said. What is abnormal historically is the news coverage so that we can. God cherishes our tears. Put thou my tears in thy bottle: says the psalmist. Are they not in thy book? And one day God will comfort them away. In the most exquisite image of the future: God shall wipe all tears from our eyes; … no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying… nor pain. So weep as often as you can: one day you might never again.