Apostle Paul said that nobody knows what’s in someone’s heart only God and that man himself. But sometimes it happens that we don’t know what’s in our own souls ourselves. The people have so many faces that you don’t know what’s the real one. Maybe is that one which is displayed more?
We get upset, we rejoice, we are stingy, some other times generous, sometimes too severe, other times too careless. Few are the steady men in good or bad. I have so many faces myself and I find myself in all of them so much that I don’t know which one represents me better, in other words with which of these faces I will go to the Judgement. I inherited this hypocrisy unbearable for me and for those around me from my father. This combination of good and bad is undoubtedly a disease which may motivate the most reckless deeds when you don’t have any God.
I think that the worst deeds from history were not committed by completely bad men but by men who had in themselves the good mixed with the bad. Cause who would follow an evil man? The evil is not that bad if there is some good mixed in it.
Once when we were in Essex I had a discussion with archimandrite Zacharias one of those discussions which remember all your life. We came to talk about tears, because it is a disease of the beginners to discuss about high things and the tears are a fruit of the heights. Then father Zacharias told me a thing I cannot forget. That we people are real only when we cry. I don’t remember if these words belonged to him or he heard them from his spiritual confessor, elder Sophrony, but I had never heard before this definition of the man, although it was so true. I know it can be built a whole philosophy about false tears, but that’s not the point. Crying is as natural as laugh. I think we should cry at least as much as we laugh. From a certain moment men began to consider crying as being shameful, as an expression of weakness. But it is equally true that laugh can be a sign of weakness too.
I think that prophet David who was a brave soldier cried many times confessing that he even wetted his bed with his tears. Of course that was another world. Today the men don’t go to wars, don’t cross forests in search of prey, they are not threatened by wild animals, by natural disasters, they don’t cry anymore. This incapacity of the men to cry seems to be the only quality of the man of nowadays. My father cried very often and this was a big paradox. He was a sturdy, grumpy man who spoke very loud. If he called you to tell you something you had the impression that he wanted to beat you.
Even when he asked you to give him a plate from the other end of the table it seemed he shouted at you.
Despite these he cried at proletary films.He cried when he saw poor old men, hungry children and especially when he saw an injustice. My mother made fun of him. This was the only time when my mother could banter him and he didn’t get angry. Here father Zacharias was right to say that the man is himself only when he cries. I can’t forget how my father’s tough face changed when he cried at movies, wiping his eyes with his large hands, with those stumpy fingers on which he had never put any ring. In those moments father was so pure and so kind, he was himself. The rest was life with its miseries, poverty and vainglory with everything is strange and estranges the man leading him so far away of what he should really be.
There are people who have crying in themselves. These are the most beautiful men on earth. This inner crying has nothing from the sadness and the heaviness of the men who are unfulfilled or suffer a pain. This inner crying is like a morning light which permeate the fog. These are the men you love and without knowing why you come back t them because their memory doesn’t leave you. There is no other joy in life than meeting such a man. However they can pass by unnoticed. In order to recognize them you should have cried yourself at least once in a lifetime for real.
There are so many tears in the world which are shed without cease. The tears of pain flow under the tears of commercials in the big cities, im bathrooms, in beds, in the cars. There are heard so many cries of pain, so many sighs, beyond the news, the tv talk shows, beyond the noise of the night bars. Our entire civilization with its new technologies one more performant than the other is taught to hide these tears for making us believe that crying doesn’t exist.
But the tears flow ceaselessly and a lot of people live their real condition finding themselves in the most painful moments of their lives while we fall into callousness. And only when suffering comes into our life unexpectedly only then the curtain of indifference is drawn apart. The world appears as it is with its good and evil. And beyond it only then can be seen God.
The light of God’s love can be seen only through tears, otherwise it would blind us.
(Excerpt from the novel `The run to the field with crows – memories from an atheist childhood ` Cathisma Publishing, Bucharest 2012)
