When I was a small child, our milk was delivered in real glass bottles — a fact which divulges my olden-days’ origins. These bottles were recycled by the dairy, and were useful in many ways.
When at the age of four or five I would indulge in a bout of inconsolable weeping – sometimes because I had skinned a knee, other times because my feelings were hurt, but more often because something had made me mad – my father would say, “Wait a minute! Let me get a milk bottle to catch those tears.”
And off he would go to the kitchen.
Have you ever tried to have a satisfying cry while someone is holding a bottle under your chin? This is especially frustrating if you are hoping to elicit sympathy.
At the time I didn’t know about Psalm 56, where the psalmist complains to God that “people trample on me.” The situation causes him not only distress, but tears. He finds comfort, however, in God’s attentiveness:
You have kept count of my tossings;
put my tears in your bottle.
Are they not in your record?
(56:8)
While the purpose of the milk bottle was to get me laughing or at least to distract me from whatever had made me sad or angry, the bottle in this psalm, I believe, assures us that our tears are important to God. Our sorrow is engraved in the divine heart. We can be confident that we are neither forgotten nor abandoned in our pain. I don’t believe it is too strong to say that our tears are mingled with God’s own tears – for us, for the poor, for the oppressed, for the hungry and the abused – tears that will flow until that day when “mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4).
The Cenacle Journal article Bottled Tears reminded me of a story I read in a book about Saint Padre Pio of Pietralcina. One of his spiritual daughters told that one day a lady came to Padre Pio’s confessional crying copiously to the point that she couldn’t hardly speak. So Padre Pio told her to try to stop crying, to calm herself, and accept gladly the sufferings that God had sent to her, but at that moment Padre Pio’s guardian angel told him not to say that because at the moment when the lady was crying, her guardian angel was collecting in a small vial (a small bottle) her tears. Padre Pio’s guardian angel told him that since her tears were from real suffering the vial with all her tears will be presented to God in heaven by her guardian angel the day that she dies and goes to be judged at the throne of God as a worthy sacrifice and a testimony to her life. So every tear we shed, God knows and wants to know about it. Leticia Ewbank