Tears that Fertilize the Soul: A Reflection on Flesh, Passion and Spirituality
A young man prayed, “Lord, take away from me all my passions.” And he became impassible.
He came before an elder monk and said, “You see before you a man who is completely at rest and has no more temptations.”-
The elder said, “Go and pray the Lord to command some struggle to be stirred up in you, for the soul is matured only in battle.”
The youth was made wise by this experience and now prayed, “Lord, give me strength to get through the fight.”
– Verba Seniorum
The story above is a masterclass in spiritual wisdom. The young man mistook emotional numbness for spiritual maturity. The elder corrects him gently: a passionless life is not a holy life – it is a hollow one. True holiness engages our human passions, redirects them, and redeems them.
The value of feelings and passions in the growth of the spiritual life has not always been recognized in Christian spirituality. There was a time when our journey towards God was described only in ascetic moulds and symbolisms.
To be holy was to flee the world, to deny oneself of earthly passions and sensuality. Thus St. Gregory of Nyssa, in his treatise On Christian Perfection, advices on the need for the proper examinations of one’s thoughts, words and deeds:
“Any action, thought or word which involves passion is out of harmony with Christ and bears the mark of the devil, who makes muddy the pearl of the soul with passions and mars the lustre of that precious jewel.”
For St. Gregory, passions can cloud the soul, and can introduce muddy influences to distract our relationship with God. While his advice is sound in its basic essentials, it can be misleading if not properly understood. Because if Christ is to be encountered only at the pole of a passion-less life, then the goal of the spiritual life looks quite impossible for man.
Our passions are not accidents in our very identity as human beings. They are part of our truest humanity, part of our character and identity. Bringing our passions into harmony with Christ – placing our feelings and sensuality before the feet of God, to be transformed and redeemed through the influence of his grace – should be seen as the proper objective of the spiritual life.
To be holy is to be human—not in spite of our passions, but because of them.”
To be holy is to be human. Our passions are valuable in our journey to our truest self, and in our quest for growth in the spiritual life. There are many things that should grieve us, a lot of anxiety, unrest and agitations. There are many wounded parts of our lives and of our world, so much brokenness and pain.
A journey to our true self is a painful search for clarity and wholeness amidst a host of debris and sins. It is impossible to bottle up the passions that dominate our waking hours forever. A passionless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one should be weary of prisons and pretensions, and all one should care for would be the warmth and wonder of an understanding heart and a healing tear.
Uncovering and integrating the passions that occupy us, rather than denying them, is the pathway to our healing and salvation.
To be holy is to be human – not in spite of our passions, but because of them. If redemption requires the full range of human passion, and salvation demands honest tears, then we must rethink certain traditions within Christian spirituality.
Holiness is not the absence of emotion, but our earnest participation in becoming who God created us to be. This means embracing our passions – not suppressing them – as part of our sacred pursuit of holiness. Perhaps then, we can finally lay down our shame when tears rise in prayer, or when raw emotions surface in communal worship.
Holiness is not the absence of emotion, but our earnest participation in becoming who God created us to be.”
For ourselves and for others, the work of naming our passions, negotiating their claims, and facing our own imperfections, is inseparable from the honest self-development that holiness demands. These passions are not passive – they claim us, and we must answer their claim.
They sprout, bloom, and ripen inside us; they take control; they hold in their hands the destiny of persons and peoples. Some passions burn within us with uncanny fires, ruling our impulses and thoughts. Others are more exalted. And then there is com-passion.
Which kind of passion is taking root in us today? Are we being stretched toward growth, or coiled into self-preoccupation? Are we ripening into selfishness, or flowering into compassion – true empathy, understanding, and kindness for ourselves and others? And in all of this, are we drawing nearer to holiness, or drifting further from it?
To be holy is to labour with our passions, not against them. This simple truth exposes a deep flaw in much of today’s popular spirituality. Prosperity theologies, for all their energy, rarely give us permission to be broken – to ache, to falter, to grow old, to be unattractive, unwell, unfinished, or unfulfilled.
They operate on an unspoken assumption: that wholeness is the only path to happiness, that love must run smoothly, and that every longing must eventually be satisfied. And so we often come before God clutching a checklist of demands, expecting the erasure of every imperfection.
But in doing so, we lose sight of what is sacred: pain that refines, brokenness that opens, vulnerability that connects. A more grounded spirituality grants us room to be passionate and pained, flawed and yet held. It reminds us that God is not ashamed of our fragments – and that grace does not remove our struggles, but redeems them, step by step, into a stairway toward glory.
Grace does not remove our struggles, but redeems them, step by step, into a stairway toward glory.”
Holiness is about working with our passions, not against them. Yet we must acknowledge the challenge that our contemporary world exposes us to: we live in a world that prizes performance over presence – a world of fierce competition, where politics, work, and even family and Church life often leave no room for softness, vulnerability, or honest weakness. No wonder so many of us experience our daily environments as cold and unyielding.
This relentless atmosphere stirs up fear and restless passion within us, and magnifies our anxiety when success eludes us. A more grounded spirituality should invite us to name what we feel, to accept our fears and own our limitations – even when the world around us refuses to be kind. Holiness, then, is not a flight from reality, but a search for God within it. When we suppress our struggles and pretend to be already whole, we close ourselves off to the very grace that could heal us.
The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18: 9 – 14) captures this beautifully. The Publican returned home restored, not because he was flawless, but because he was honest: “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.” That simple, raw prayer teaches us that God meets us not in our polished pretentions, but in our truthful need – and there his mercy transforms us.
Honesty is the foundation of any real spiritual life. Psalm 126 is very instructive in this regard. The psalm is one of many psalms in the Bible where the believer confronts their own raw, messy, and difficult emotions, and then dares to make that honesty the starting point for grace: “Those who sow in tears will reap with cries of joy” (Psalm 126:5). We are thus encouraged to bring to God everything – our hurt and our hope, our anger and our relief, our despair and our determination to heal.
When we suppress our truth and pretend to be already whole, we block the very grace that could remake us. Spiritual growth begins not in perfection, but in honesty.
Passion means involvement, attachment, surrender, loss of control, and commitment – and when sustained, it becomes fidelity. That is why submitting our natural emotions to God’s purposes does not diminish us; it connects us more deeply to God and awakens real empathy for our fellow believers. And when we accept our own imperfection and vulnerability, we can finally cross dividing lines and touch the vulnerabilities of others.
The Letter to the Hebrews (4:15 – 16) gives us the confidence to do just that: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin. So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.” Grace flows not to the perfect, but to the honest.
Our spiritual depth depends on how we direct our passions – whether we can turn our fears and tears into something that nourishes connection, especially with those who are hurting. Ancient peoples understood this. In many Near Eastern cultures, mourners bottled their tears at funerals, believing they held sacred power.
A Shiite tradition in Iran says that an angel preserves those tears until the Day of Judgment. Even the Psalmist asks: “My wanderings you have noted; are my tears not stored in your vial, recorded in your book?” (Ps.56:9). Our tears accumulate over a lifetime, bottled up inside, awaiting release. But release is not waste – it is fertility. Those tears water the soul. And watered souls bear fruit for others.
There is no genuine conversion without the shedding of many tears, the rending up of our hearts. When we consider the immense waywardness of God’s children, our lust, our greed, our violence, our anger and our resentment; and then we look at them through the eyes of God’s com-passionate heart, we cannot but weep and shed tears. If they are not the tears that stream from the eyes, they have to be at least tears that well up from the heart. Such tears and sobs are part of our healing process, the prayer of the heart, used by the Spirit to bring our intentions before the boundless love of God (Romans 8:26).
Our salvation was gained on the pathway to Calvary. Thereon were many tears shed, much sweat and blood lost. Think about it! Could Christ in his weakness have brought the Cross alone to Golgotha without a Veronica wiping his tears and sweat, without a Simon of Cyrene helping him to carry the burden?
In that overflow of goodness and tenderness by Veronica, in the forgetfulness of self by Simon, many human passions are at work. There where time never penetrates, where no images of selfishness shines, in the innermost and highest realms of the soul – there we find love and hatred, there is also found exalted passions and genuine com-passion.
Pains, fears, and imperfections are not our undoing – they are our raw material for growth. What breaks us can also birth us. Our wounds run deep, and the more we open them to healing, the deeper we discover they go. That journey of discovery will cost us pain and tears. But the pain and the tears are not weaknesses – they are the sign that something is shifting within us.
They come when life changes course, when new realities demand new responses. We should not suppress those pain and tears. We should allow them to flow. Their free flow can help us to ignite the passions within us – to summon our gifts, gather our fire, and attempt to surpass ourselves in the work God has given us to do.
What we do then with our fears and tears determine their power. Every stone has the potential for being a stepping stone or a stumbling block. Are we embarrassed by our fears, our tears, and our imperfections?
Do we try to stamp them out and deny every trace of weakness and pain in our lives and in our efforts to love one another as God would want us to? There is the choice for us to make. All genuine deeds of relief and acts of healing involve the interplay of human passions, the flowing of tears.
Passion shared is passion unbounded. The Christian community is a community of com-passion. We are bathing in the ocean of God’s passion for the world – not a passion of ‘yours or mine,’ but a com-passion that is ours. Not something divided, hoarded, used competitively or divisively, but something that flows in and out of all of us. Instead of competing against one another, we are invited to drink in the ocean of God’s compassion.
This is how our Christian communities can become oases of God’s compassionate love.
Tears fertilize the soul. Much of praying is grieving.”
Tears fertilize the soul. Much of praying is grieving. Our tears reveal our vulnerability and our need for God’s comfort. When we look at the Cross – and then at a world growing silent and dark – we see that evil thrives because there are too few mourners left, too few willing to weep over what is broken.
Wickedness grows when we can no longer weep. But to those who walk through their pain, Jesus speaks his blessedness: “Blessed are those who mourn: they shall be comforted” (Mathew 5:4). This is not a blessing for masochists, but for those who discover that their tears hold hidden gifts of liberation.
