The Common Weeping and Coronavirus

 

Our feelings are running amok these days. Anger, yes, fear, yes, and with good reason, but let them flow on through you, like a barge on a river. (They will come again.)

Perhaps what we most need to feel is sadness, something deeper than our surface emotions, something we are not encouraged to feel.

What we are facing today in calamitous degree is the tragic side of life. The Spanish philosopher, Miguel Unamuno wrote in his classic The Tragic Sense of Life about what he called “the Common Weeping.” Here are his words:

…I am convinced that we should solve many things if we went into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud to the heavens and calling upon God. And this, even though God should hear us not; but He would hear us. The chieftest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which people go to weep in common.

I think Christians and the church today tend to ignore the tragic side of life and suppress the Common Weeping.

The Psalms do not. They are filled with laments where our common weeping is lifted to God. But we rarely read them. And our hymn books used to have a number of lament-like hymns until we put them aside in favor of a sunnier spirituality. “Come Ye Disconsolate”, is one example of a hymn of lament, and it has largely vanished from our hymnbooks.

So, were did these laments go when they left the church? They surfaced in folk music, and country music and blues. “Blowing in The Wind”, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Of course, the Spirituals born in the black church still nourish our spiritual lives.

I think if we truly enter into the Common Weeping during times like this, times of tragic suffering, we will be saved from our cruder emotions. Instead of airing our grievances let’s uncover our griefs. The first destroys community; the second builds it. What if after 9/11 our nation had stayed longer in the Common Weeping? But soon vengeance filled the air, and we had to do something. Soon after, we invaded Iraq.

We can occupy our hearts and minds with anger and blaming as people die, or we can weep. Weep with the sick and dying, weep with those who are afraid, weep with the poor who will suffer the most, weep over our human frailty and folly, weep over a new disease sweeping the world to our human bodies with little natural defense against it.

So let us make a temple when few of our temples are open, a temple of our Common Weeping that we join arms with all people and receive into our deepest places the comfort of the God of all comfort.