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            There are tears and then there are tears; there are times to cry for some while not for others; and few are shed by the average American for anything but something at least as deep as the chest, and usually as deep as the chasms of the heart and soul.
 
             For this I must just talk about us in the US, for crying is controlled by culture almost as much as sex is.  The tough-as-nails Comanche, for instance, could torture a pregnant woman to death, or have an enemy shove burning embers down his throat, without shedding a tear.  But if one of their own was killed, especially more than one, the tears HAD to flow with histrionics, to be followed by vows of vengeance, which would continue the cycle of sorrow and hate for at least another generation.  We also have the tough old warrior Jews wailing at the loss of children or wives or kingdoms, as did or does just about every male warrior in any war culture.  As said, righteous sorrow cooks up some pretty righteous anger, and anger makes a pretty fearless warrior. 
 
          But for us, tears are a more private and often shameful thing.  We all know that men are not supposed to cry for just about anything, and for that, I am glad.  We have enough loss of control in our culture.  Unfortunately, that does overflow into things men can cry over, like the death of a parent or child, or the marriage of a daughter or birth of a child or grandchild.  Women can cry over lesser things, but not to the point of seeming to be unstable.  We know what those things are intuitively.  A woman can cry over her son getting a scholarship to Big U, but not over spilt milk, at least in ordinary times.   Children can cry over everything, but are quickly taught the limits after reaching a degree of linguistic fluidity.  Just as potty time must be controlled, so must tears, as with appetite, as with adult drinking and sexual satiation.  Much of culture is control, after all, and culture is the essential reason why humans have remained viable as a species.
 
          Culture also recognizes its limits, however, or at least a good one does.  A certain degree of creativity is allowed in most, as is the breaking of certain rules in certain situations (or following different rules in different situations).   Tears – crying – are allowed with us, as we have seen, in specific emotional situations depending on one’s gender, age, and position in society.  For us, tears must and usually do come from a deep emotional well.  That is why they must be regulated, and that is why they must also sometimes be allowed.  Deep emotions are like blood to the limbs of culture – they keep it alive and healthy.  We just have to keep a check on the daily blood pressure numbers for all-around health. 
 
          So that’s it – we are brought to tears by extra-ordinary emotional events, good or bad, and are allowed or even encouraged to express them in certain circumstances.  But there are some events that stray from our cultural path into a liminal, or twilight zone.  We might, for instance, cry with certain music.  Sometimes it is because the song reminds us of a particularly poignant episode, but sometimes not; sometimes, we cry from it because it elicits an uncontrollable welling of unknown emotions that cannot be shut down.  For me and my wife, this happens when we listen (from a good speaker) to Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, just about every time.  It is as if the music draws out something from within and jets it through us in an irresistible surge.  We like the feeling, but do not like to be seen while weeping, so we listen to it – only now and then, as if it were a strong drug – by ourselves.  These tears are not shameful for the self, but are too much for public viewing.  As said, a twilight zone for tears. 
 
          Thing is, Tallis’s music is fundamentally and at its core a chorus for a high Catholic Church service. 
 
          And so we are brought to those other tears in the twilight, the tears of religious faith.  I have a cousin who was once a pretty bad-ass dude.  Once, when he was about 20, a guy failed to pay him for an amount of cocaine.   So J….. punched him out and then dragged him to a tree (they were meeting in a forested area) and tied him up.  For the night.  J…. was later brought before a court for drug sales, assault, and by far the worst, kidnapping.  After thousands of dollars in lawyer fees and the pleading of his war-vet father, he was released with all sorts of community service provisions and demands.  During that time, J…. “got Jesus,” and that was it forever, right up to this day some fifty years later.  In any conversation he cannot help but bring up his conversion and/or his faith, and with that come the tears, this from someone who is still a pretty tough guy.  We get a little embarrassed for him, and the non-religious move to the other side of the picnic area or room, but he doesn’t care.  He inhabits his twilight zone with absolute self-assurance. 
 
          I have been to more Christian retreats now than I care to recall because I have become the background guitar player, and I see tears every time in a host of people, from fragile old ladies to big bruisers.  Another relative who was raised Catholic but only pops into a service once every few years told me that he starts crying like a baby every time the bread and wine are consecrated.  That might be why he seldom goes, not for the feeling but for the exposure of the feeling.  I have my own experiences with faith and crying, all leading to the question: why?  Crying for faith is not prohibited, but it is not condoned either.  It is not a sign of weakness, but it is a little too personal for the individual weeper and for those around him.  So why, since it is an embarrassment, would people be unable to stop crying at spiritual moments?
 
          Death of a loved one, the wedding of a child, both are OK to cry at, and both are signals of the deepest kinds of transformation.  Intensely beautiful music can bring out tears that are yanked from an emotion too deep for daily use.  For its part, Spirit brings forth both intimately- related sensations, giving us a clue as to the nature and reality of Spirit.  Since it is almost certain that nothing that is not related to the ‘real’ can bring out intensely tearful responses, we must give a nod to the actuality of Spirit.  And since nothing trivial can bring out such responses from ordinary people, we know for certain that the presence of Spirit is anything but trivial. 
 
         Spirit, then, is most likely real, or points to something real, and is most definitely something that is experienced with intensity.  We understand the tears at a funeral; those at a wedding are a little more baffling.  We understand, for instance, that the life of your once- baby girl is taking on a great change, but why the tears?  Even more puzzling are those shed for music, or some other art; and even more are those for Spirit.  Why, for Spirit, should we experience such emotions for something that cannot even be seen or heard?  For something that was never your now- deceased father, or for something that never once played on your knee? 
 
          It must be because Spirit comes straight from our heart and soul.  This is where its reality lies.  It is life-transforming in its realization, as it is outstandingly for my cousin, just as it is intimately, deeply emotional.   It goes to our very core.  It is both in us and part of us.  The startling thing, and a good part of what makes us cry, is the simple discovery of its presence.  Like good sex with the same spouse, it can be a surprise and a delight every time, and, unlike the spouse or music, it is forever with us.  More mysteriously, it does not give us a directly physical delight.  Rather, it arises not primarily from our physical depths but from beyond any organ, beyond our eyes and ears and our tactile senses.  It arises, rather, as a realization of our being. 
 
           So both Spirit and our ‘being’ exist, and both exist outside of physical reality.  More, Spirit affects our being with joy and an ecstasy that often brings us to tears, however embarrassing they might be.  Not the “tears of a clown/when there’s no one around,” but the tears of an immortal being encountering its truth as an immortal being whether anyone’s around or not.
 
         Deeper than an ocean, vaster than the sky, more terrible than an exploding star, such is within all of us just waiting to get out.  The well of tears is only a distant warning or harbinger.   
It is why the wise fear the Lord, and why the bravest among us might weep.
         
              
 
         
 
           

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          When we were finishing off the cabin up nort,’ I bought a faux-marble (read, linoleum) counter top that needed a hole cut into it to fit the kitchen sink.  I had done this before, and took it into the garage right here down south to power-tool it into perfection.  At the back end of the counter top was a rise to keep water from flowing off the back, and with the fit of the sink, I simply couldn’t force the jig saw against the small space it provided to finish off the hole.  After much thought, I got much longer saw bits with which I could hold the saw above this rise.  It did eventually do the job, but I broke several of the saw bits and, having no support for my hand on the table, the hole that was cut was wretchedly jagged.  It didn’t matter, as the sink lip would cover that mess, but it did make me puzzle: how had I done it before so easily?
 
          Well, duh.  What I had to do was trace the outline of the sink on the bottom of the counter top, where everything was nice and flat.  That’s what I had done before, but this time, I couldn’t see it until I had finished the job the wrong way.  This was almost 12 years ago, and as I can still remember my wife’s name, this was not a case of early Alzheimer’s.  Rather, I had simply overlooked the best way for what seemed at the time to be the most obvious.  I had, then, seen only the immediate cutting without grasping the overall concept of cutting such a hole.  This happens.  Recall the NASA engineers when they crashed a 20 million dollar rocket on Mars because they had mixed up English and Metric measuring units.  I can hear their giggles of embarrassment as I write. 
 
          Welp, considering the bigger interests of this blog on the miraculous, the unexplained, and the spiritual, I missed the forest for the trees again on the last essay.  Not that the essay was bad.  Maybe it was a bit too heavy on the philosophy side, but still, there was a valid point to be made and it was made well-enough, I hope, to be understood.   Recall that I had gotten the main idea for the essay from a quote by Mark Sykes about his hatred for his own English ruling class.  But there was something even more interesting in the book found not at the very beginning, but towards the end, and something that was more relevant to the book (The Man Who Created the Middle East, by Christopher Sykes) at large.  That is, that Mark Sykes, the co-author of the infamous Sykes-Pico Treaty, had also been behind the Balfour Declaration.
 
         Of course we all remember the Balfour Declaration.  OK, of course we probably don’t, unless you’re an Israel or Middle East buff, and it was poorly named, to boot.  Arthur Balfour was First Lord of the (British) Admiralty at the time of the First World War, and his greatest contribution to said declaration was to deliver it to the War Department from the hands of Sykes and some influential Zionists.  Without Sykes, then, the Declaration would not have been made.  The meat of this declaration was to ascertain the right of the Jewish peoples to occupy a homeland in Palestine.  It led directly to the beginning of the establishment of the Jewish nation of Israel.    
 
          It gets more interesting.  Mark Sykes should never have been born.  His father, Sir Tatton, was unbelievably wealthy and unbelievably neurotic, even more “eccentric” than the average wealthy bachelor of Victorian England.  He worried constantly about his health, and wanted nothing to do with women in the romantic sense (nor men).  Having reached his middle fifties, it seemed that he would make it to the end as a rich and lonely old man, but fate – and a scheming mother – threw him a curve-ball.  The wife-to-be, Christina (also of the elite class), was a single young woman who came in need of help during her travels.  It was then that she happened to ask for the support of Tatton, who was there at her moment of distress.  As a gentleman, he escorted her to a respectable hotel, and there got her a room, and himself another, for the night.  The following day, when the mother heard about this (maybe she had cooked the whole thing up in advance?), she threatened scandal if Tatton did not marry her.  As that was the worst that could happen to a gentleman of the era, he agreed.  Six months after the marriage (that is no misprint), he took his bride for the first time (reportedly while drunk, and in a very awkward manner), which is when Mark Sykes began his life on earth.  
 
          Almost everyone knows that the Second Coming, as promised in John’s Book of Revelations in the New Testament, is not to occur until after the re-formation of Israel.  1900 years after the Jewish Diaspora – a blink in the eyes of God’s good time – that part of the prophecy was fulfilled.  And as we now know, this would not have happened were it not for the feminine manipulation of an aging neurotic gentleman who managed to get drunk and perky for at least once in his life.  This is oddly reminiscent of Abraham and Sarah, the old infertile couple that was promised by God a son (Isaac), who would start a nation “as numerous as the stars.”   As it so happened, Mark Sykes managed to father 6 children before his death in 1919 (?) of the Spanish Influenza, that disease being the father of our fears over Covid, which has led to actions that have changed the world profoundly in ways we do not yet know. 
 
          Connections and connections.  In the previous essay, I saw the more obvious traces of world history, as calculated by Man.  In this, I write about another connection far more profound.  Who could have guessed that the eccentricity of Tatton would lead to the rebirth of Israel and its re-entry into world politics?  In this latter, world politics, Israel stands large as one of the focal points of history, for both possible good and horrible evil.  All this is based upon one weak strand of a family line, leading in its way to the new David, a democracy-king of a united Israel on earth. 
 
          Some may see the craziness of it all as just another quirk in time, but one has to think: what was the likelihood of Israel ever becoming a nation again?  And by such a random glitch in human society?  Who could have put that together, ever? 
 
          I finished the last essay proclaiming the ultimate leadership of the Holy Spirit, which is underscored here.  I have no proof of its existence other than the apparently random creativity that often comes before meaningful movements in history, all far beyond anyone’s calculations.  These movements happen in each life too, if we look for them.  It appears that we are not the authors of our own lives so much as the pens or the key boards.  We can run out of ink or break down if we choose to fight the Spirit, or we can choose to move along with it as best we can.  With the latter, we might then sit back on occasion to contemplate the forest surrounding our lives rather than each single tree, and marvel at the great power that is imbedded in each of us, even as each is but a whisper or hair in eternity. 
              
 
 
 
            

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          The other night as I was walking through the TV room on the way to the fridge, I noticed that the final episode of that silly show, Lost in Space, was airing.  In it, they had the swashbuckling younger man of the group confronting an alien who was most certainly going to end his life (Surprisingly, it didn’t!)  As there was no way out, he closed his eyes and said out loud, “Lord, forgive me for all the people I have hurt in my life.”  It was supposed to be a funny moment, as we know this Interstellar Don Juan had most certainly sinned, but it also told us that even the adventurers amongst us not only have a conscience, but realize that they are fundamentally selfish.  Even these ne’r do wells, we understand, have moments of self- recrimination.
 
          This does not mean that they hate themselves, but the seeds of self-hatred have been planted.   Recall Pontius Pilate as he washed his hands after the judgment of Christ.  His wife had told him that she had had a dream telling her that her husband should leave this innocent man alone.  He had to do his duty and quell the mob, but he felt fear from his wife’s dream, and guilt.  This, too, does not mean that he had a sense of self-hatred, but the seeds were there. 
 
          I have lived with an autonomous Indian tribe in Venezuela, and have read extensively about many more, and it does not seem that they have self-hatred.  Rather, they have fear of consequences from the spirit world and, like Pilate’s wife, have dreams that make them feel afraid, or simply bad.  Anthropologists have said that the ancient world and the world-view of the primitive are different from “us”– the “us” taking in, at the very least, developed cultures with Western influence – in that they are socialized by shame rather than guilt.  Shame is the feeling of public social disapproval, while guilt is an inward sense of self-disapproval.  This is part of what Jesus meant when he said that the law (of God) would be written on men’s hearts rather than in books.  This is the interiorization of right and wrong apart from public display.  It is where I believe we can find the beginnings of self-hatred.
 
          In a book I am just completing, The Man Who Created the Middle East, by Christopher Sykes, we learn of the life of Sir Mark Sykes, the English aristocrat who was co-author of the much maligned Sykes-Pico agreement of 1916, when England and France were deciding how to partition the crumbling Ottoman Empire.  Many of the troubles we now see in the Middle East (a term popularized by Sykes) have been blamed on this treaty, rightly or wrongly.  More to our point, what was most remarkable in this book was a quotation from Sykes that appeared on the first page of the first chapter: “I hate my kind, I hate, detest human beings… their very stench appalls me … The stupidity of the wise, the wickedness of the ignorant, but you must forgive, remember I have never had  childhood…”  This from a man who inherited a mansion and 40, 000 acres of prime English territory, villages and villagers included.  How did this hatred of his own class, the ruling class, and by extension himself, come about?  And how did it affect his most notable mark on the world? 
 
         When one reads the journals of the conquistadors, one never gets the feeling that there is self-hatred anywhere among them.  Rather, we see unblemished and self-righteous imperialism in full bloom.   But something happened shortly after the Middle Ages.  While there had been people in Christendom who daily repented of their sins since the time of the Church, we don’t see a majority express a persistent self-abasement until somewhere around the time of the Pilgrims.  A leap in the interiorization of sin had taken place after the Renaissance, or so it seems from the writings.  Even if this timetable is off by a century or two, we certainly see this sense of lingering dark guilt in the novels of the 19th century, which were written primarily by the elite educated classes.  For reasons too vast for this essay, and perhaps beyond my scope anyway, by the time of Mark Sykes’ birth in 1879, the sense of guilt that had been set in modernizing man by high religion had been replaced by a clinging sense of self-loathing.  This has very obviously progressed to the common man of the Western world today, but it had begun with the most educated and privileged among us. 
 
          For Sykes, he detested the blind arrogance of the European colonizers.  At the same time, we can see the extreme arrogance of Sykes and his outlandish sense of self-worth.  This clashed with his guilt over the doings of his own ruling class, just as this sense of righteousness underscored his own moral and intellectual superiority.  Thus, we clearly see the strong underpinnings of both self-love and self-hate operating on his life at the professional level.  His goal was to kick his own class in its colonizing butt, which would then justify his self-love and privilege. 
 
          Confusing, yes, but so relevant to our own times and nation as to be painful.  We have now among the elites in government and education a sense of self-hatred so strong that they wish to destroy the culture that enabled its development.  “Get rid of that which gave me this uncomfortable self-hatred, and I shall be free!” Just as with Mark Sykes, a deep-seated sense of privilege has these people believe that they have the right to destroy that which has made them, and made them so miserable.  They must demolish that which gave them their fear of gay elements within themselves, and their racist beliefs, and their class snobbery brought about, they think, by capitalist wealth.  Then, with the society abolished that brought them to their sufferings of guilt, our leaders in thought and actions believe that they will elevate themselves to some kind of amorphous utopia.
 
          They will not, for they miss the point of the evolution of consciousness, particularly of Christian consciousness.  Jesus proclaimed that with his new order, “not a letter of the old law will be abandoned,” but rather will be written, as said, in our hearts.  This is the real movement.  Self-hatred comes from the recognition of our own failings in light of Christian teachings.  To destroy the basis for self-hatred is to destroy hopes of our liberation.  Rather, we are to realize that our brothers and sisters are ourselves, and as such should not isolate ourselves from the lives and troubles and destinies of others.  But we must follow the law that has been written in our hearts, the moral platform from which human action and thought should emanate. 
 
          When the woman is about to be stoned for adultery in the famous Gospel, Jesus asks the man without sin to cast the first.  One by one they walk away in recognition of their own guilt, forced to identify with the woman.  Once alone with the woman, Jesus tells her that he does not condemn her either.  Rather, now that her life is given back to her, she should go and sin no more.  The law, we are told, is to stay intact, but be enforced with compassion and forgiveness.  Such laws were made to develop empathy and give us a way out of the old Roman belief that the victor – the resplendent self – has the right to enjoy the spoils.  For the woman, if she were to continue in her adulteries, she would continue in the short-sighted ways of self-indulgence, ignoring the feelings of her husband, or the wife of the lover, for the whims of her wandering desires. 
 
          The law is still among us, and I do think we are still on a path of moral evolution.  We have now come to a difficult impasse in our society, led by a self-hating but also self-loving elite who cannot stand the pain of their guilt and so wish to (and think they have the right to) throw the baby out with the bathwater.  This, too, shall pass; this movement, too, will be recognized for the fundamental selfishness that is behind it.  We then must learn to recognize our mutual failings and forgive those as we forgive ourselves, and then go forth to sin no more.  The result will not be utopia, but rather a reflection of its promise, where good prevails even as we recognize and empathize with the failings of ourselves and others.  In Buddhism, this might be called the Middle Way.  In it we are to overcome self-hatred in the recognition of our shared condition, and work not against social and religious morality, but with it for the benefit of ourselves and for others. 
 
          This goal has been there all along, right before our eyes.  What keeps us blind to it are the very selfish desires that the anti-capitalists and cultural nihilists pretend to despise, yet so often embrace.  It is a tricky path we have been set to follow.  To recognize light, we must understand darkness; as we mature morally, we also are allowed to see, and are tempted to follow, the opposite path.  The alternative to the law written in our hearts is to live in a Romanesque world of the conqueror, or in the dark and hate-filled chaos promoted by many in our elite classes. 
 
          It is true that it is always darkest before the dawn.  In spite of everything, history intimates to us that we are being led and aided by a greater power to someday realize the new Eden.  Let us pray.