Shed Tears: They Make You Human

What The Jungle Book taught me about a theology of tears and the imago dei.

“Have you allowed yourself to cry?” the counsellor asked me after I had told her all that I had been through in the past six weeks. 

I had thought it an odd question, but at the end of the session, she said she could see trauma written all over my blank, numb face. 

“I did during the first two weeks,” I murmured. “I called the women’s shelter crisis hotline and cried to them and then after I hung up I would cry myself to sleep. Now I just feel numb.”

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, Zundert 1853–1890 Auvers-sur-Oise); November 26−27, 1882; The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As a little girl, I wrote stories to make sense of my world, but my main character was always the same: a stoic teenager who never shed tears because of how strong she had become. Tears are weaknesses, right? That’s why we sing, “The cattle are lowing / The poor baby wakes / But little Lord Jesus / No crying he makes.”¹ In light of these lyrics, a believer told me once when I was a child that his lack of crying showed his sinlessness. 

The Jungle Book, written by Rudyard Kipling, has better theology. When Mowgli, the man-cub raised by wolves, is banished from the forest by Sheer Khan and the wolves that sided with him, he cries for the first time in his life.