In ancient Rome it was common for women to save their tears. They saved them in little stoppered bottles called “lachrymals”. Some saved tears of joy alone. Some only tears of sorrow. Some collected any tear shed as a sort of liquid history of their lives. Some lachrymals were simple, even crude. Some were jeweled. All were considered sacred.
Despite the diminutive size of these narrow-necked, heart-shaped vials, it took years to fill them. Julie London claimed to have cried a river (over Jack Webb, that’s “just the facts”) in a popular song half a century ago – an amazing feat since filling a small lachrymal could take half-a-lifetime.
Women wore them around their necks as amulets, or hid them in boxes with their dearest treasures. Some times they gave them to a husband or suitor as testimony of the depth of their devotion. Sometimes a woman would empty her lachrymal into a sacred stream or spring in order to bid a symbolic goodbye to the heartache that filled it.
The notion behind saving one’s tears is the understanding that they are a tangible expression of something inner, intangible. How do you quantify something inward and abstract? Yet those inward, abstract things – joys and sorrows, are more real, more immediate than a chair, a bowl, a doorstep. A tear is emotion in the form of liquid matter, or at least the residual byproduct of emotion. In either case, a lachrymal caught and preserved, droplet by droplet, the substance of pure emotion. In this way, the cause of pure emotion was preserved as well.
The Bible is a lachrymal. So many tears of sorrow and joy are preserved in it. Rachael weeps for her children. Joseph cries on the necks of his brothers in glad reunion. David’s tears flow over the pierced body of Absalom, and on and on. Among the tears the Bible contains, are the tears of God.God bears His deepest emotions. His yearnings, His feelings of betrayal, His persistent love are expressed in the tears of Hosea 11. Jesus’ longing to mother-hen Israel and His being rejected are preserved in the tears of Matthew 23.37. And then there is that shortest verse of the Bible;
Jesus Wept.
These are tears of pure empathy. Jesus was about to raise Lazarus from the dead – had intended to do it all along. But Mary, his dear, dear friend – Mary, who was always at his feet, who was one of the very few who understood Him – Mary was heart-broken and unrestrained.
And so
Jesus wept.
And John, in his old age
Collected the tears.
And saved them for us.
And so we have this repository,
This stoppered bottle,
Heart shaped,
God breathed,
And filled with tangible proof that He is, He knows, He cares.