PsalterMark

This Vale of Tears
This psalm speaks of a tension in this life between joy and tears. As human beings we tend to learn of both joy and tears before we even have any serious understanding of the world in which we live. Who hasn’t seen (or heard!) a baby’s tears? Who hasn’t been delighted to see a smile on the face of a baby? As infants the space in time between our tears and our joy can be minutes, sometimes mere seconds. As adults we are often slower to move from tears to joy. More worryingly we can sometimes get stuck in a numbness between the two.

If the Bible has something to say about both tears and joy it is that life on this planet will brim with both of them. Children are free with both their tears and their joy. As adults we sometimes find both troublesome. Older translations of another psalm—Psalm 84—render the Valley of Baca as the Vale of Tears. This phrase has become synonymous with the broken humanity we all possess; and the experience of this worked out in this life. It is odd that even as Christians we so easily miss this duality of tears and joy. I’ve known Christians that get fixated on one or the other.

I became a Christian in a tent in Margate (a coastal town in Southern England). During the last night of three in the tent, Eric the evangelist spoke of tears and joy. He was so blunt about the apparent failings of some Christians that I felt quite defensive for them. I was in that tent, in earthly terms, because of the life-giving joy I had seen in Christian friends and two schoolteachers. Eric suggested that many Christians were boring but that this should not be a barrier to following Christ. His argument was that boring Christians were boring before they became Christians. Sitting on the edge of my seat, wanting to follow Jesus, waiting for the call that I knew would come—having been twice already—I didn’t think this seemed right. Surely this expert—Eric the evangelist—had got this wrong. How could Jesus Christ invited into someone’s life leave them boring? Would the God of creation, who sent Jesus to redeem us, leave us boring?

Well, that was just over 37-years ago but it has stayed with me. Today I’m not sure that there are boring Christians but rather we are all unfinished work. The Vale of Tears is an environment that is antagonistic to us as new creations. I’m not sure it makes us boring, but it can leave us in a sort of limbo where we embrace neither tears nor joy as seriously as they both deserve.

The events of the past, our current circumstances, our personalities—shaped by DNA and nurture, or the lack of it—all these things make us unique in where we are on the journey of being remade by God. This is the ongoing ‘not yet’ called sanctification. A journey on which we must embrace tears and joy with greater wisdom and vitality.

This newness is there in Psalm 126:

The LORD has done great things for us,
and we are filled with joy.
Psalm 126:6, NIVUK

The not yet, is there in the very next verse:

Restore our fortunes, LORD,
like streams in the Negev.
Psalm 126:4, NIVUK

This is the goal of our worship, the gospel-reason for the church’s existence: praise arising from God’s grace and blessing, whilst we are still here in the Negev or Vale of Tears.

Sometimes we get carried away, fixated on joy, grace, God’s gifts to us to live in denial of tears. This can leave us in denial of our own frailty and the brokenness around us. We expect too much now and are not content to hope in adversity. We can eclipse cross with resurrection.

Sometimes we get so fixated on tears, woe, sin and suffering we live in denial of joy. This can leave us blind to our own glorious wholeness in Christ enabled by the Spirit. We expect too little now and are denying Christ’s victory over sin and death. We eclipse resurrection with cross.

In one case we are not content that our glass is half full. In the other we are fixated on our glass being half empty. In Christ, however, our cup already brims over. Sanctification, here and now, and the glorious future that awaits us is about the cup being enlarged.

This post will be incomprehensible to those Christians who know the cross daily to a level we can barely comprehend because of poverty, war or oppression. But we might note that they are less prone to mishandling the twin poles of joy and tears than those of us in the West who, as Pink Floyd put it, live in a part of the vale that makes us comfortably numb.

Tears in the Rain
Whether we are Christians, atheists or have another faith we can’t deny humankind’s lot that we live in a vale of tears. As Christians the fact that it is a vale, or valley, is already an encouragement as it reminds us that we are on a journey. Metaphors, especially biblical ones, have profound poetic, life-giving power. This short psalm is an extended metaphor that has helped me understand the world at large, my place in it, our place in it, and the gospel call we all share.

Similar imagery and metaphors can alter the biblical hope, sometimes retaining its profundity but at the expense of some truth. The end of one of my favourite films does just this. In Bladerunner we meet Harrison Ford being relentlessly hunted by a walking, talking, living breathing, AI. But it is Roy, this android, who has been working out his vale of tears. If you don’t know the film simple search on-line for ‘Bladerunner: Tears in rain’. The android Roy has suffered in his own 6-year vale of tears. And at his death all those tears are lost, washed away by the rain. Profound yes, but truly hopeless. The metaphor is perhaps too close to home to be comfortable all our tears, joys and moments appear to be lost at death, given up to the tide of history or Roy’s rain. But, our tears, shed in the vale, are counted by God:

You’ve kept track of my every toss and turn
through the sleepless nights,
Each tear entered in your ledger,
each ache written in your book.
Psalm 56:8, The Message

Having numbered our tears, and our life experiences that gave rise to them, God does not stop there. He then sends Jesus to wipe them away.

No More Tears
It is worth remembering that our tears have different sources. There are those things that happen in this life that make no sense to us; the randomness of accident and tragedy. There are troubles in this life that are fairly and squarely of our own making. The choices we make have consequences. Even the sins we have been forgiven still have consequences that may continue to roll on, though God has blotted out our wrongdoing. Sometimes trouble lands at our door because we serve Jesus Christ. If we are following Jesus properly, we will sooner or later bear the consequences of bearing a cross.

A part of spiritual maturity, or sanctification, is recognising why trouble is at our door. Because how we deal with tears differs on their source. Crying out to God in lament, seeking God’s forgiveness, growing in character through suffering are three very different actions that arise from different sources of pain and tears. We also need the humility to recognise we cannot always know the reasons for our pain in the vale of tears in which case we should lament, repent and persevere—all through Christ.

Those who go out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with them.
Psalm 126:6, NIVUK

I read this verse as referring to that Day of Days when Jesus returns when the new creation is made perfect. The day when tears can only be those shed through joy. That day when the harvest is complete, and we can put aside the Vale of Tears.

Poets and mystics have tried to capture that day. Perhaps none better then T. S. Eliot as he closes his Four Quartets and ends Little Gidding:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot- 1955Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.