Morning Prayers: The Rev. Alanna Sullivan
Photo by Jeffrey Blackwell, Memorial Church Communications
By the Rev. Alanna C. Sullivan
Associate Minister and Director of Administration
The Memorial Church of Harvard University
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Sept. 30, 2024)
Our reading for today comes from our Psalter selection.
“You have kept count of my tossings, put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your record?”
Last week, I picked up my seven-year-old son, Henry, from school. He normally bounds out of the school building, either to show me an art project that he's created, or to tell me about the three-point shot he made at gym, or simply to give me a hug. It is one of my favorite moments of the day.
But one day last week, Henry exited the building hunched over, eyes to the ground. I stopped and crouched down to his eye level. "Hey, bud. What's going on?"
"I missed you today, Mom. I cried a little, but it's okay. No one saw me."
My heart broke a little. Hearing those words, I was sad that Henry had had a tough time that day, and I wasn't there to comfort him. But what truly got to me was that Henry thought he needed to hide his tears. My husband and I have tried to help our kids recognize how their bodies feel when they experience different things, to be comfortable with their emotions, to express their feelings. And we try to model the same. And of course, this is easier said than done.
And Henry reassuring me that no one saw him cry revealed something to me yet again. How ingrained it is in our culture to suppress our feelings, to pretend nothing is wrong, to be afraid to ask for help.
I am reminded of one of my favorite lines from The Little Prince. “Such a secret place, the Land of Tears.” The complexity of this secret place is what artist Roselyn Fisher once wanted to learn more about. Margot Buchanan first told me about Fisher and her work. Fisher shed a lot of tears during a season of loss and change. And she began to wonder, "What do tears look like up close? Not just feeling them, not the reason for them, but the actual shape of sorrow, the texture of joy, the architecture of release."
So she caught a tear on a glass slide, dried it, magnified it, and what she saw was astonishing. Fisher shared, "It was really interesting. It looked like an aerial view, almost as if I was looking down at a landscape from a plane. Some tears looked like city grids, others like snowflakes, some like fault lines, some like fingerprints, all made of the same elements: water, protein, minerals, hormones, and enzymes. But each one is utterly unique."
Fisher photographed hundreds of tears. And she titled them "Tears of grief, tears of remorse, tears of those who live for liberation, tears of elation at a liminal moment. Tears shed by babies, elders, strangers, friends."
Fisher reflects, "Tears are the medium of our most primal language, in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, as complex as rites of passage. They are the evidence of our inner lives, overflowing the boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Tears spontaneously release to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance, short-circuited."
There are small contours to our lives that only we and God can know. The psalmist reminds us that God keeps track of our sorrow, collects our tears in a bottle, and records each one. God remembers, God holds. And although we may never truly know or understand one another in our lives, I don't think that God calls for us to endure life alone.
I recently learned that emotional tears have a higher protein and hormone composition, thus making them thicker and slower moving. This stickiness is so that we can see them. Our tears are our body's way of asking for help, of reaching out for acknowledgement, of stopping our routine to recognize what is beautiful, what is true, and what is sacred.
God knows us down to the microscopic makeup of our tears, and it is this one who loves us and knows us so intimately, who entrusts our care to one another. My prayer is that it may be so. Amen.