The Psychology and Spirituality of Tears

There is a line I love from Psalm 56: "You have collected all my tears in your bottle." 

Whenever I think of this imagery—God as Collector of Tears—I'm put in mind of the psycho-spirituality of tears that I described in Unclean 

In Unclean I share the reflections of the Puritan leader Cotton Mather, who was urinating outside when a dog came up, lifted his leg, and urinated alongside him. Mather was offended by the similarity between him and the dog as they urinated together. Here is Mather:

I was once emptying the Cistern of Nature, and making Water at the Wall. At the same Time, there came a Dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I; “What mean and vile Things are the Children of Men, in this mortal State! How much do our natural Necessities abase us and place us in some regard, on the Level with the very Dogs!”... Accordingly, I resolved, that it should be my ordinary Practice, whenever I step to answer the one or other Necessity of Nature, to make it an Opportunity of shaping in my Mind some noble, divine Thought.

Mather here expresses offense at his animality, being bound to the metabolic functions of biological life. But why? Why is urination, a wholly natural and vital function, so offensive?

As I describe in Unclean, we have an uneasy existential relationship with our physicality and animality. Humans experience themselves as dual creatures, as possessing both a body and a soul. We are both physical and spiritual creatures. The spiritual aspects of life connect us to the heavenly and the divine. By contrast, our physical and animal nature connects us with the earthy and the animal. Feeling ambivalent about our animal nature, given its vulnerability to damage, decay, disease, and death, we seek to shove the body away. Psychologists call this "animal-reminder" disgust, revulsion, like Cotton Mather's disgust with urination, directed at the parts of bodily life that bring our animal nature into view. Consequently, it's not surprising that pretty much every bodily secretion is a reliable disgust trigger: urine, blood, sweat, pus, spit, vomit, phlegm, mucus or snot, and semen.

In short, disgust has an existential aspect. As Martha Nussbaum has observed, "Disgust pertains to our problematic relationship with our own animality...[Our] disgust reactions are typically mediated very powerfully by the awareness of death and decay...[H]uman beings cannot bear to live with the constant awareness of mortality and of their frail animal bodies."

But there is an interesting exception to how we generally experience bodily fluids and secretions: tears. And it's an exception that proves the point. For tears are the only bodily fluid that we deem to be quintessentially human and spiritual. Given that tears are associated with the deepest and most profound human experiences, tears are considered to be a kind of spiritual fluid. And because of this spiritual association, tears do not produce disgust. 

This is the psycho-spiritual background to images like those in Psalm 56: "You have collected all my tears in your bottle." Tears appear in this image precisely because, despite being a bodily fluid, they signify what is highest and most deeply human within us. To be sure, as I discuss in Unclean, there are problems associated with our gnostic flight from the body, in all its death denial and avoidance. But there is also something lovely in beholding tears as our most spiritual and soulful secretion.