"The soul must weep to be a soul at all"

a special excerpt of Richard Rohr's new book

Dear friends,

Thank you for sticking around through our daily poetry reading and writing in May. For those of you who are like thank God that’s over, it is over indeed, and I’m excited to share some new pieces with you!

For those of you who are like oh my god I miss my daily writing practice already, that’s what makes it so special! And I hope that you’ll find ways to infuse spiritual practices into your own life through poetry and words to keep you anchored in a chaotic world.

Today’s words will also anchor you, and I encourage you to sit mindfully with them, to cherish the gifts they bring us, especially in this time.

Today I’m sharing with you a special except of Richard Rohr’s new book, The Tears of Things.

First, a little background: I found out about Richard’s work in 2015 when I decided to take a class through the CAC on Franciscan theology. It was the first time in my own experience with Christianity that I felt like there were similarities between followers of Jesus and Indigenous peoples. The desert fathers and mothers revered Mother Earth, lived simple lives of prayer and care, and invested in social change.

This changed everything for me, in a time in which I was expanding, questioning, and asking what’s next for my own spirituality. Richard’s work has given me words and language and emotion to process my own journey as an Indigenous woman. Richard endorsed my very first book, and I met him on a private retreat after it came out. Gifting him a copy of the book he celebrated was a dream come true.

Two years later, I was helping lead that retreat with him and our dear friend Mirabai Starr. Below is one of my favorite pictures with Richard, that hangs on my office wall as a reminder of the work I hope to do in the world.

I hope you enjoy this excerpt, links to order the book are below.

I want to point you especially to what Richard says about prophets, about those who guide us through difficult times. We are led by our tears, by our compassion and empathy, yes, by our anger, that we must alchemize into healing.

“The Tears of Things”

Richard Rohr

In the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid (line 462), the hero Aeneas gazes at a mural that depicts a battle of the Trojan War and the deaths of his friends and countrymen. He is so moved with sorrow at the tragedy of it all that he speaks of “the tears of things” (lacrimae rerum). As Seamus Heaney translates it, “There are tears at the heart of things”—at the heart of our human experience. [1] Only tears can move both Aeneas and us beyond our deserved and paralyzing anger at evil, death, and injustice without losing the deep legitimacy of that anger.…

Because the phrase has no prepositions in Latin, it allows two meanings at the same time: Virgil seems to be saying that there are both “tears in things” and “tears for things.” And each of these tears leads to the other. Though translators often feel compelled to choose one or the other meaning, I believe the poet implies it is both. There is an inherent sadness and tragedy in almost all situations: in our relationships, our mistakes, our failures large and small, and even our victories. We must develop a very real empathy for this reality, knowing that we cannot fully fix things, entirely change them, or make them to our liking. This “way of tears,” and the deep vulnerability that it expresses, is opposed to our normal ways of seeking control through willpower, commandment, force, retribution, and violence. Instead, we begin in a state of empathy with and for things and people and events, which just might be the opposite of judgmentalism. It is hard to be on the attack when you are weeping.

Prophets and mystics recognize what most of us do not—that all things have tears and all things deserve tears. They know that grief and sadness are doorways to understanding life in a non-egocentric way. Tears come from both awe and empathy, and they generate even deeper awe and deeper empathy in us. The sympathy that wells up when we weep can be life-changing, too, drawing us out of ourselves and into communion with those around us. This is continuously exemplified in the writings that we have received from the Hebrew prophets.

After a lifetime of counseling and retreat work—not to mention my own spiritual direction—I have become convinced that most anger comes, first of all, from a place of deep sadness. Years ago, when I led male initiation rites at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, I would watch men’s jaws drop open and their faces turn pale when I said this. Life disappoints and hurts all of us, and the majority of people, particularly men, do not know how to react—except as a child does, with anger and rage. It is a defensive, reactionary, and totally understandable posture, but it often goes nowhere, and only creates cycles of bitterness and retaliation.

Over time, the Hebrew prophets came to see this profound connection between sadness and anger. It was what converted them to a level of truth-telling that is deeply and forever true—which is the real sign of a prophet. They first needed to get angry at injustices, oppression, and war. Anger can be deserved and even virtuous, particularly when it motivates us to begin seeking a necessary change. But only until sunset, Paul says (Ephesians 4:26). If we stay with our rage and resentment too long, we will righteously and unthinkingly pass on the hurt in ever new directions, and we injure our own souls in ways we don’t even recognize. This is killing our postmodern world.

In this way, the realization that all things have tears, and most things deserve tears, might even be defined as a form of salvation: from ourselves and from our illusions. The prophets knew and taught and modeled that anger must first be recognized, allowed—even loved!—as an expression of the deep, normally inaccessible sadness that all of us carry.…

I recently turned eighty. The older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be. This is true of Christianity, the United States, politics in general, and most of all myself. Remember, if you do not transform your pain and egoic anger, you will always transmit it in another form. This transformation is the supreme work of all true spirituality and spiritual communities. Those communities offer us a place where our sadness and rage can be refined into human sympathy and active compassion.

Forgiveness of reality—including tragic reality—is the heart of the matter. All things cry for forgiveness in their imperfection, their incompleteness, their woundedness, their constant movement toward death. Mere rage or resentment will not change any of these realities. Tears often will, though: first by changing the one who weeps, and then by moving any who draw near to the weeping. Somehow, the prophets knew, the soul must weep to be a soul at all.

Reference:
[1] Shared in a 2008 essay broadcast on BBC Radio 3 as part of the Greek and Latin Voices series.

Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (Convergent, 2025), 3–6.

Excerpted from THE TEARS OF THINGS: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. Copyright © 2025 by Center for Action and Contemplation, Inc. Excerpted by permission of Convergent Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher