Blubberer

“I'm in a glass case of emotion!”

-Ron Burgundy

Recently, our daughter, just a month and a half old (no longer an newborn, now officially an infant) was crying, unconsolably. Remembering a Welsh lullaby, my wife and I quickly pulled it up on YouTube, and the English translation immediately set me crying. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I’ve always been a bit of a blubberer. I still well up with tears when Spock dies in ‘Wrath of Khan,’ even knowing that he comes back from the dead in the next movie. 

But I’ve never cried as much as I have with my daughter. I cried when I first held her, and often when I’ve held her since. I’m used to crying when I’m sad or even angry, but I don’t think I have before experienced tears of joy.

I like to think that I have, in the words of Jonathan Coulton, a ‘big warm fuzzy secret heart,’ but my wife tells me, “it’s not so secret.”

“But everyone thinks of me as a stoic tough guy,” I protested.

She laughed and said, “No one thinks that.”

But as a thorough going Anglican, I am not completely comfortable with my emotions. In our tradition, our emotional responses to God are typically muted and we tend to project that reluctance onto God. As the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once noted, “God, as represented in the traditional services of the Anglican Church, is an Englishman, uncomfortable in the presence of enthusiasm, reluctant to make a fuss, but trapped into making public speeches.”

But the God of the Bible is one who does not shy away from displaying His emotions. So too His people as most evident in the Psalms, (“I am weary of my groaning; every night wash I my bed, and water my couch with my tears” Ps 6) and especially His only begotten Son, Jesus (“And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts” Mk 3:5) never seem reluctant to show their emotions.

Part of that disparity may be chalked up to natural dispositions. Anglicanism was born in the cold climbs of Northern Europe, a region not known for passionate outbursts (not counting participating in warfare). But there is also a cultural component. We tend to view our emotions as indicative of unbridled passion, for good and for ill. As a result, we tend to view some emotions as ‘good’ and some as ‘bad,’ not realizing that they are neither. They are necessary aspects of our being, conveying within them information about our deepest wants and desires, and properly understood, important parts of our whole selves. But they should always be in subject to our rational souls, and not the other way around. 

But in service of our rational souls does not mean controlled. That is perhaps my own reluctance to have people know that I’m a big softie because that means it wasn’t information about myself I controlled. Instead, it was a part of myself that people could see without my permission. For Thomas Aquinas, we possess emotions because we are not just passive observers, we are effected by the things which we interact with, it is a reaction to our interactions. We cannot control how we feel, not even God can command that. Instead, God is concerned with our Will, our capacity to act. Emotions are a reaction to stimuli and what we do with the information granted by that reaction and acted upon or sublimated by the will determines our fates.

In coming to terms with our emotions and maturing in our ability to fully integrate them into our lives, we have the great benefit of the Church’s tradition of Liturgical worship. Through our liturgies of weekly celebrations of the Eucharist and the discipline of the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer, our Spiritual Journeys are not only narrated through the course of the Church’s Calendar but also our emotions are rightly ordered through our use of Hymns and the Psalms in daily prayer. As we deepen in our Faith, we come to see our particular Anglican expression of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church as far from muted but merely modulated to serve the needs of all those present, whatever their own particular feelings. The liturgy allows us to share in worship, combining and narrating our emotional responses, rather than relying on our individual enthusiasms.

So, don’t be surprised if you see me shed an occasional tear, but just don’t expect to see me tearing at my shirt, wailing and gnashing my teeth.