A professor in the language department of a Korean university, in the recent issue of the Catholic Times, offers some thoughts on tears and their place in our lives.
"Have you cried recently?" the doctor asked during her recent hospital visit. And then told her: "Go to an exhibition or somewhere this weekend and shed some tears alone."
After getting such an unusual prescription, she reflected on her experience with tears. She tended to cry a lot, but tried not to cry in front of others. Perhaps it's because of the Confucian upbringing she received from her father. He restrained his children's emotions. The most lavish praise he gave was, 'You did well'.
When she called him from the U.S. to tell him that her doctoral dissertation had been approved, he said, 'You did well,' but her mother told her later, he cried after hanging up. When she was a child and cried, her father scolded her, saying, 'Don't cry.' His words stopped her tears, but her sense of hurt built up inside.
There was a miraculous moment when the river of emotions that had been bottled up between her strict father and herself was released.
One day, while talking with her father, she began to cry. That day, he laughed heartily and said, 'Cry, cry as much as you want. Cry your heart out in front of your father.' She doesn't remember exactly how long she cried that day, but she remembers well how his words completely released the long-held hurt inside.
After that experience, she sometimes applies it to her own life. When a student comes for career counseling and starts crying as soon as they sit down, she tells them, 'Cry. No matter what it's about, cry your heart out in front of me before you leave'.
What is crying? It's something that bursts out. Whether it's sadness or sorrow building up, it makes sense to let someone cry their heart out. There may be fake tears, but…
Every day, amid countless tasks, we wrestle with misunderstandings, injustice, and irrationality, and maybe each of us is just barely holding on. So, it's OK to cry if it gets too hard. Especially in front of your father, it's OK to cry your heart out.
While she was writing this, her father passed away. It was an unprepared farewell. Her father, had chronic illnesses but was otherwise healthy, caught a light cold but suddenly departed from this world in just three days.
Life is but a fleeting moment, and at times, she gathers her longing with the two words, 'Always be prepared'. She often thinks about it when struggling. It's enough if just one person knows her tears. The tears her father knew, surely God the Father knows as well. After the funeral, while looking at the morning star before returning to Seoul, her mother said, 'I will live my portion, and you live yours. That's how it should be.'
She recalls (Psalm 56:8-9) "You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your record? Then my enemies will retreat on the day when I call. This I know, that God is for me."
God, who wrote your book with human tears, tells us that it's OK to cry if we want to, that it's OK to cry our hearts out in front of our father. With that in mind, I take one more step forward.
