I didn’t expect to start crying, but I did. I was leading a healing retreat. I made the mistake of going off-script. The Holy Spirit took over.
What I experienced then is often called the Gift of Tears. It is a gift from the Holy Spirit where a person is overwhelmed with God’s love.
In my retreat talk, the Holy Spirit prompted me to describe a time when I was at the bedside of my dying father-in-law. The last few days of his life he was mostly incoherent. But in his final lucid moment, he turned to me and said, “You’re a good man, Scott.” Soon after he died.
These words brought me back to a time when I was eighteen. I didn’t remember myself being a ‘good man’ at all. My mother died that year after a long struggle with cancer and I could have done more to be present to her needs. I’ve carried this guilt throughout my adult life.
These words of my dying father-in-law severed the tether that bound me to that heavy weight of regret and polished my tarnished self-image.
God said to me, “You weren’t a bad man. You were just lost. I’ve been waiting for you. I am glad you have found your way.”
As I replayed this memory during the retreat, a wave of healing crashed over me. But not just me. Like a tsunami, it flooded the room with God’s mercy. Tears came to the eyes of most of the seventy people in attendance.
The gift of tears is a spiritual gift. Like all charisms, it is given by the Holy Spirit not just for personal gain but “for the common good” or the “benefit of the Church”. (1 Cor 12:7, 14:2) Like me at my retreat, God’s Spirit arrived and washed me, and many present, clean with waves of acceptance, forgiveness, and love.
You too may have experienced the overwhelming, supernatural presence of God. It may have even brought you to tears. Tears of joy, healing, or love. Tears of being forgiven, and tears of forgiving others.
Treasure these moments. They’re a gift from God. They may even be an invitation from God for you to enter a profound period of spiritual growth for your benefit and that of the world.
“Let us not fancy that if we cry a great deal we have done all that is needed—rather we must work hard and practice the virtues: that is the essential—leaving tears to fall when God sends them, without trying to force ourselves to shed them. Then, if we do not take too much notice of them, they will leave the parched soil of our souls well watered, making it fertile in good fruit; for this is the water which falls from Heaven.”
The Interior Castle, Saint Teresa of Avila
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