The Room of Tears

On wrestling with new callings

Instead of the usual Wednesday round-up of others’ holy labor, I wrote a new essay instead. Since we’ll likely have a new pope very soon, you’ll see why I wanted you to have this today.

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The room is small and plain, curtains drawn, fresco-flaked walls. 

A single rack of clothing stands at the center. Three sizes of white robes, ready to fit whomever will walk through the door. Seven boxes of white shoes, waiting to slip onto new feet. A handful of hangars with albs, chasubles, and copes worn by popes across centuries, hung to remind the newest successor of Peter that he is not alone, exactly when he feels most alone.

To the right stands a wooden desk where he will sign his new name for the first time. To the left sits a plush scarlet couch, long enough for flinging himself down to weep, next to a stiff-backed, gold-edged chair, straight enough to right himself for public viewing.

Here is where the next pope will go, right after he is elected. Here is where he will change his clothes and don new robes. Here is where he will be alone for a moment, to pray, to weep. Here he will get the chance to compose himself (in every sense of the term) before he steps out onto a balcony to greet cheering crowds of thousands below and billions beyond. 

Before he becomes known to the world, he will sit in the silence before God. 

This chamber is called the Room of Tears.¹ From the cavernous Sistine Chapel, since the time of the Renaissance, each new pope has walked through the narrow room where he is transformed, then pushed out into the wide world waiting for him. But even for those who have never watched a papal conclave like the one that starts today, this place of passage may be the most familiar part of the whole mysterious process. 

Because we have each walked through a room like this.

“Pope Leo XIII is said to have cried upon his election in 1878. After the 1958 papal conclave elected Pope John XXIII, he looked at himself in the mirror, wearing the papal cassock. Due to his large frame, it did not properly fit the pontiff, leading him to jokingly remark that “This man will be a disaster on television!” After the 2005 papal conclave, Pope Benedict XVI is said to have entered the room looking upset, but emerged in a brighter mood.”²

Upon seeing two lines on the pregnancy test stick, any of these same reactions can arise. Elation, joy, confusion, despair. Gratitude, fear, anger, dread. Anxiety, delight, numbness, hope. Gasps, swears, laughter, tears. 

The truth of any calling is much more complicated than the world celebrates.

Take this weekend. By Sunday morning, we’ll pray for a new pope at Mass (all the pundits predict). In the U.S. we’ll wake to Mother’s Day, too. We say we celebrate mothers, the same word we use for every holiday, but what a complicated calling to dress up with flowers and toast over brunch. At its best, parenthood will break your heart ten thousand small ways and maybe a few huge ones. It will wrest you from your sleep, crumple your best-laid plans, trip you over your every expectation, and humble you back into the humus of the earth from which you came.

In short, it is the shape of human love.

(It is also the shape of a papacy.³)

It’s always simpler to celebrate the surfaces. Easier to buy a bouquet or give a card. Easier to fist pump for your favorite or groan with agony when your guy didn’t make it.

But if we are brave enough to dig beneath, to linger a moment longer in a room of tears, to remember the meeting place of our humanity—my God, the kinship we can find there.

Wherever we went when we got the news. Where we sank to our knees and cried out that we couldn’t do it—anything but this. Where we wept or prayed or sat in silence, stunned by the unrecognizable future. Where we changed slowly, taking off the trappings of our old life and putting on a new unknown.

“The Room of Tears (Italian: Stanza delle Lacrime), also called the Crying Room (Italian: Stanza del Pianto)...receives its name as a reference to tears that have been shed by newly elected popes within it. According to Fr. Christopher Whitehead, the room’s name can be explained ‘because the poor man obviously breaks down at being elected.’”⁴

Right now in the Sistine Chapel sits a single man who will soon enter a room of tears. On the same day he dons a fresh white cassock and slips on brand-new shoes, more than 368,000 women will give birth around the world. One becoming a spiritual father, hundreds of thousands becoming mothers. 

But the room of tears—could anything be more universal? The place of passage from one calling to the next, from known to unknown, from darkness to light.

During the hours and days of birth, the grueling labor of body and soul, surrounded by midwives, nurses, and doctors, yet marooned alone on the far-flung planet of pain, one crystal clear thought surged through every contraction in my body by the end: I am breaking in two. I am dying, and no one in the room cares.

The last part was false. The first part was true.

Because a calling can indeed carve your life into before and after. The newborn pope weeping within the room of tears knows this truth as deeply—if not as viscerally—as every woman writhing in labor, pushing into a new life for herself and her child.

Mothers who have birthed remind each other of this, even in the darkest moments decades later. Remember transition? Remember when you thought you couldn’t do it—and that meant when birth was about to happen? Remember when you did what you thought you could not do?

Transition, the final stage of labor, is a twisting, pressing, painful passage—but then you round the corner and with one last push of all your power, here comes the great rush of release and relief, the cry of new lungs into fresh air.⁵

You were one, and now you are two. You were one thing, and now you are another.

Perhaps the last moments in the Stanza delle Lacrime are like this for a new pope, too.⁶ Whether this birth comes in mere hours or long days, he will be pushed from the womb of tears into the fresh-aired piazza. The world will never be the same again.

“I have often spoken of the gift of tears, and how precious it is…Let us think of the weeping of St Peter, which will lead him to a new and much truer love: it is a weeping that purifies, that renews. Peter looked at Jesus and wept: his heart was renewed…One of the first monks, Efrem the Syrian says that a face washed by tears is unspeakably beautiful (cf. Ascetic Speech). The beauty of repentance, the beauty of crying, the beauty of contrition!...May the Lord allow us to love in abundance, to love with a smile, with closeness, with service and even with tears.”⁷

A room of tears may be tiny. Only the briefest moment to collect ourselves and take a deep breath to face the people that need us. Or the room can be a long corridor, the slow walking into seismic change.

But whatever passage bridges Then and Now is part of the process. A place of grieving and growth. A space to slip off old ways and try on new. A moment of humility and humanity, trying to trust that what comes next will be good, even as we struggle with everything it will demand.

A room of tears is not a stage of fake smiles or a conference of forced cheer or a boardroom of blind acceptance. It is a small, quiet place prepared for humanity to be human. Because God knows we need it, to make space for the overwhelm: the simultaneous burden and beauty, the ragged responsibility of a daunting role, the surrender of a simpler life that will never be.

Each one of us believes we are in the place of suffering alone, don’t we? But every prayer pressed against the walls by the others who have been here before us—they remind us of the promise of the passage. You will get There; eventually you will. But right now, you only have to be Here. Right now, you can be nowhere else.

The room of tears will always come first.

1. Watch this striking, silent tour of the Room of Tears, contrasted with the Sistine Chapel set for hundreds of cardinals.

2. Wikipedia.

3. Did you know Pope Benedict XVI prayed not to become pope, comparing the election to a “guillotine”?

4. Why isn’t there more written about the history, design, stories, anything about the Room of Tears, so that I keep resorting to Wikipedia again? Hungry for more if you’ve got it.

5. This is a tender week for all who mother, so lest anyone lament that I’m elevating one kind of birth over another here, know that I have birthed in every way, and the one where you stretch out your arms cruciform like a cross and let your body be cut open to give life to your child—the holiness of that impossibly hard birth is a sacrifice I hold in highest esteem, with lasting scars.

6. Did you catch that Crying Room is another translation for this chamber? Remember that the next time Catholic Internet once again takes up the tired ol’ debate about crying rooms—welcome respite? or shunning exile!—as emblematic of the place of children in the church, the role of families in the Body of Christ, the formation of seminarians, the nature of the church’s ministry to the wider world, etc. Everything small is big.

7. Pope Francis, December 2, 2020, General Audience, Catechesis on the Beatitudes: those who weep (Matthew 5:4).