This year Mother’s Day happened to fall on my wife’s birthday, which is also her mother’s birthday. A veritable celebratory trifecta.
My wife, of course, facetimed her mom almost first thing in the morning, to rub in a little of the vibe labeled, “It’s already my birthday here in China while it’s still yesterday for you in the US.” Towards the end of that conversation, her father, moved by the emotional weight of the moment, spoke sentimentally at length, and there were tears.
After the call had ended, my wife commented, “I thought my Papa (her maternal grandfather) was the really sentimental one, but it appears to be catching. I bet I’ll be crying a river at our kids someday.”
I laughed and said, “I wonder if that might be Lewis’s Transposition in action.”
She gave me that brow-raised look that says, Explain, so I elaborated. “If joy is a more divine form of happiness and through relationship we are continuously investing into a heavenly bank of joy, then moments of joy, especially related to relationship, would potentially be moments where the accrued balance of our investments can’t help but burst out evidencing Lewis’ Transposition.”
She said, “That is worth writing down, but maybe you can make it clearer.” To Annie: Your birthday wish is my command .
I just wrote it down, so we’re halfway there, but clarity is a little more involved. For that, we need background on Lewis’ essay titled Transposition, and I also need to fill readers in on an insight I had concerning Jesus’ words to “store up your treasure in heaven.” We’ll start with CS Lewis.
The notion of Transpositionis well described in the linked essay that bears that name. Lewis uses this term to identify the theological conceptthat higher spiritual experiences often manifest themselves in predictable physical ways, but which are nevertheless wholly inadequate to fully convey the spiritual experience.
He illustrates this initially with an account from an Enlightenment era diary wherein the author records a physical reaction to a piece of music. “…that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind musick when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife…”
Lewis continues by noting three points: that “the internal sensation accompanying intense aesthetic delight was indistinguishable from the sensation accompanying two other experiences, that of being in love and that of being, say, in a rough channel crossing,” that “one (of these experiences) is the very reverse of pleasurable. No man enjoys nausea”, and that the writer was “anxious to have again the experience whose sensational accompaniment was identical with the very unpleasant accompaniments of sickness.”
If I quote much more of this article, I’ll be reproducing it, so for more, please follow the link.
What does this all have to do with sentimental tears? Put simply, spiritual reality may be demonstrated by physical sensation, but because of the limitations of our physical selves, that sensation may be otherwise incongruous.
I am here positing that tears of happiness or joy, so-called sentimentality, are just that sort of incongruity. Anyone beyond a certain age, probably sometime in the teen years, understands that tears can be happy or sad, but below that age and it must be pointed out. Tears of happiness seem an unreasonable oxymoron.
It is this disconnect that just might indicate that the sentimentality from which such tears arise are in some way tied to a spiritual reality. And the fact that such occurrences seem to increase with age might indicate that there is a storing up or accrual taking place in the energy that could be giving rise to these tears.
Let’s talk now about heavenly treasure.
A couple of winters ago, my wife’s paternal grandmother passed away. Due to Covid and the vicissitudes of life, my family was able to be in proximity for roughly the last year of her life. In that year, hers was a life greatly diminished in so many ways from the one she had seemed to enjoy in the rest of the roughly twenty years I had known her.
You see, Annie’s grandmother, Faye Davis, was the quintessential small town American grandma. She gardened and had social to-dos with her women’s group from church. She’d had a hip replacement and still walked the dog to get the mail every day. She was a wellspring of information on the goings on of every house in a two-mile radius. And although she preferred her hometown in Central Washington, she was not afraid to jet around the world with her loved ones like her husband and daughter.
Once upon a time she had been a teacher and a mom, but by the time I met her she’d picked up the moniker “Grandma.” This meant there was almost always a batch of rice crispy treats or snickerdoodles around her house, but you knew that those snickerdoodles had at least a half cup or so of applesauce in place of some of their sugar, like that somehow made them healthy.
This was not a new impulse. Apparently, when Annie’s dad was young, she had spent time working out the precise balance of rutabaga to sneak into mashed potatoes before the flavor alteration became obvious.
Yet she was satisfied with inexplicably dry roast beef.
She had taught third graders for decades, and that showed when she took my kids, her great grandkids to the orchard she’d grown up in to pick cherries or peaches. More than once, I recall watching her patiently guide those great grandkids to pulling weeds or planting spinach and I fondly remember her spending more than a little time with one or more boys seated on her walker helping them see that 1 is followed by 2, 2 by 3… and so on.
She was a fabulous, vibrant woman who had enjoyed the noon and twilight of American life at its height.
But her last days were not easy. Even before we moved from China back to the US in February 2022, it was not clear that her 96-year-old frame would survive to see our return. Before the previous Christmas, she’d been moved from her home into an assisted living facility, and there were a few weeks before the holiday when everyone thought it was over.
But she rallied, perhaps in part because of the presence of our children, and that final year of her life was a blessing for us in so many ways.
Nevertheless, it was a year in which her faculties failed her, one by one, as more and more of her body ceased to function the way it was designed. Spring 22, my wife would often take our boys to read with Grandma Faye or sit with her at dinner or to play Bingo. But by late fall, she rarely left her room.
As the year progressed, her world, indeed her whole life, shrunk to being essentially a bed, chair, tv, and bathroom.
And then, one night, we got the phone call. She was gone.
When it came to the funeral, no one was sure how many people would attend. Grandma had been such a socialite that a large turnout certainly seemed possible.
But some voiced doubt. She had not hosted her small group for years, or been to church in probably almost a year, or even been to dinner at the home in a few months. Furthermore, most of her friends and family had gone on before her. She was among the last in her generation.
Then the day arrived and there were no empty seats. Several stood in the back. In a venue that could seat a couple hundred, there was no room, and as the tribute video played, compiled by her grandson, a professional cinematographer, there was not a dry eye in the house.
In the reception that followed, people came out of the woodwork, some revealing long drives just to pay their respects to this truly marvelous woman. The light of her life had impact far beyond what anyone might have expected.
And therein flashed the insight. Faye Davis was the only common factor in that room. 250, maybe even 300 people, and no one living could have told you who they all were. The one link was gone.
Nevertheless, each of these people testified with their presence and tears to Faye’s significance in their lives, as well as to some extent the manner in which she had given of herself to them. She had drawn them to herself in honor of the memory of her sacrifices.
Yet if she had sacrificed to such an extent for those at her funeral, what about the myriad who had gone before? Faye had buried her mother and father, all of her siblings, many cousins and nieces and nephews, her husband, and countless friends, colleagues, and churchmen, not to mention former students and any number of other random people who had come into her life.
If we were to quantify heart like a sort of investable emotional energy, perhaps limited, how much greater percentage had she already poured out over the course of a lifetime? She lived a life storing up her treasures in heaven. Her heart drew a crowd of those who are still here to celebrate her life. What sort of pull might it have in the other direction. How much influence does the metaphysical substance of a heart possess?
Is it any wonder, then, in the last several months of her life, that she was having a harder and harder time mustering the increasingly decrepit components of a failing body to exhibit interest in all but those closest to her? Might it be possible that part of the detachment of the dying is simply what’s left of our hearts seeking to be whole.
I could tie this to Lewis’ observation that joy is never possessed… it is always grounded in the longing. Perhaps as we get closer to the Pale, that invested heart is part of the joy we long for, a balance that becomes much greater than the remnant that might hold us here.
Yet those reading this still live in the here and now. We walk, every day, bearing unaware the accumulated heart of those who have poured into our lives, all while we cast small but substantial pieces of ourselves into the promise of the future borne by others.
And sometimes, joy smiles on us, and we are filled to bursting. And there are physical ramifications to being so touched by the spiritual, an outpouring that is at times tears of sentimentality.
Am I actually suggesting that getting weepy when Samwise carries Frodo in Return of the King or my fourth grader a little too vigorously joins in with his class during the spring concert really equivalent to some sort of sacrament? Not necessarily. Could be, but it could also be a sort of imprint left on the physical memory of a more original encounter with the numinous. On the other hand, In Him we live and move and have our being.
Whatever the case, it is possible that in situations such as my father-in-law’s sentimentality on the occasion of his wife and daughters’ shared Mother’s Day birthday we might have an example of Lewis’ Transposition, the spiritual overflow into the physical realm of the investment of relational treasure into the banks of Heaven.
Furthermore, increasing sentimentality as we age would corroborate the idea that the pull of our heavenly investment might already have begun, far sooner than when we are ready for hospice reservations. In these moments of relational fulfillment, with tears and intestinal twisting, the overflow of our spiritual investment could confirm what Lewis observed in Mere Christianity. “If we find in ourselves a longing which nothing in this world can fill, then we can make the assumption that we were created for another world.”
To all the sentimental among us, maybe your tears are a testimony that one glad morning, when this life is over, the relationships in which you cached your heart will blossom into an inconceivable fullness of self, shared with all who have gone before. Don’t apologize. You paid ahead for the right to those tears.
Casual Conjecture 