Bread of Tears

Bread of Tears

A grief counselor in a hospice program described years of sitting with families in the hours and days after death. She had seen many types of tears — of guilt, of relief, of love, of exhaustion. She described learning to see tears as holy. 'The Psalms describe God feeding His people with tears,' she said. 'I began to understand that grief is not a detour from the spiritual life — it is a deep part of it. The people I've walked with who have grieved well — who have wept fully and trusted God in the weeping — have a depth in their faces that the people who never grieve don't have. Tears are nutrition. Somehow.'

Psalm 80 is a communal lament written in the aftermath of catastrophe. The image of God feeding His people tears instead of bread is one of the most viscerally uncomfortable images in the Psalter. It is not comfortable theology; it is honest theology. There are seasons in the life of faith when what God provides seems to be pain — not only comfort, not only blessings, but the hard provisions of suffering and loss. The psalmist does not pretend otherwise. But the psalmist does not walk away from God either. The lament is addressed to God: 'You have fed them...' He is still the subject. Still present. Still involved. The bread of tears is still bread — still nourishment. It is not what we would choose, but it feeds something in us that ordinary bread cannot reach.