The Healing Journey

September 11, 2025

The following is taken from an essay about grief by Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Tears make our hearts realize that the happiness for which we yearn is not here. They make us look beyond to another world where tears shall be wiped away when “He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or cries of distress, no more sorrow. Those old things have passed away.”

But there is yet another value to tears in that they make us more sympathetic to the grief and pain of others. In sorrow, one should never go to a person who has not wept, nor in anxiety and worry should one ever consult a man who has not denied himself. Only those who have passed through the crucible of grief know how to make a rainbow appear in a tear.

Why is it that children, when they have a grief, will run to the mother rather than to the father? It is because the mother knows trouble better than the father. She has companioned more with pain, has more often passed through its cycles, and in giving birth has gone down to the very edge of death. That is why He who promises to wipe away all tears is the One down whose cheeks and body flowed those sacraments of compassion, those tokens of love which make him the High Priest who can have compassion for our grief.

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