Job's Tears
On seeds and grief and harvest
A seed catalog is splayed open on the floor, left behind by some young gardener eager to follow in his father’s footsteps, ready to muck in the mud of spring. The glossy photograph is posed to entice: a deep bowl of multi-colored grains, green sprigs of flowering plants, a string of seeds like pearls, each tiny orb a promise.
But the title of the page is jarring. Job’s Tears.
One of the earliest domesticated crops. Native to Southeast Asia. A barley-like grain for broths and teas. An ornamental bead for rosaries and prayer beads. A healing remedy for pain and disease, made from roots and leaves. Earthy and eye-catching, drooping flowers from tight peas.
What a strange name. What a stark prospect. To plant, pray, drink, eat, or heal from tears. Which coaxes the question: what do we do with our own? Wipe them away, embarrassed? Spill them night after night, weeping into the pillow? Picture them saved by God in a bottle? Ignore them, spurn them, refuse their vulnerability?
What made Job’s tears different? First, he wept so many, an overabundance of grief: the slaughter of his flocks, the deaths of his children, the diseases inflicted on his body. Second, he spoke them aloud. Spat them out and flung them out, never held them back, never stuffed down his sorrow and got on with getting over it. Third, his suffering slid under our microscopes. Job might be the oldest book in the Bible, ancient proof of how humans have been asking the same hard questions since the beginning of time—and getting few good answers. His tears were not just poured out but parsed through, searched by centuries of questioners seeking solutions to the problem of evil and suffering.
What Job did not do matters, too. He did not force his tears into beauty, mixing their water with clay to create anew from the earth. He did not stay silent when faced with the breaking of his existence into scattered shards. He asked every hard, hot, salt-streamed question he could demand of his God, and then he sat with the mysterious un-answers. By the end of the terrible tale, a second chapter is opening: new children, new flocks, new wealth, new health. Not that more could replace everything that was taken, but still growth and grace and goodness where there had been none.
This might be the holiest path of all—to let tears pour out, hard and bitter. To cry out that grief cannot be ultimate, cannot be the end. To believe against belief that sorrows might be seeds: the tiniest mysteries buried deep in the impossible dark, where despite all odds they grow, breaking open to bring forth the curl of new life.
But what could you say to the child who longs to plant, who wants to grow, who still believe God brings goodness and nothing but?
Before any harvest, before any rejoicing, there are seeds spilling and weeping rain.
So fear not to catch your tears in splashing, slippery hands. Hold their salty sorrow. Turn them into prayer, into food, into healing. Or simply let them fall, trusting that if nothing is wasted, then what is wept can be transformed. A bead of prayer. A sip of tea. A healing balm. A meal for many.
Before we reap in joy, we sow in sorrow. Before tears become food, they start as seeds.
I bow to your journey, to Job's tears. and to my own. Thinking of Job's furious faith, he was not alone. It appears he clung to God in an Unending Kaddish Prayer (like you?) that regrounded him in the Great One. In Hebraic wisdom the Kaddish will be said for a mourner when they are too burdened by grief. There is a body logic in this. My friend, Sheila is about to publish the Art of Grieving. She lost all three of her children to horrible diseases, one brother was murdered, and on and on, as told in her book Warrior Mother. Among female Job's she has a place. Her lifework reflects that grief is an art that needs regenerative containers. That Moderns seem to avoid grief means we lack resonant practices to reflect back our grief in ways that feel honoring. I am in awe of Job and his passionate connection to the Divine and people like you navigate grief and share the way with artful care.
Oh my gosh. This is EXACTLY what I needed to hear!