One of the commemorations today is that of Margery Kempe, an Englishwoman of the late 14th through perhaps the mid-15th centuries, the specific dates being unknown. Her life and spiritual journey is recorded in what is probably the first autobiography in English. She was, perhaps, herself an illiterate, but her faithful confessor exposed her to writings of saints and mystics and recorded her own words and journeys. She certainly lived a far-from-normal life as a woman of her time and place, beyond that of wife, homemaker and mother. She traveled widely through England and even as far as Jerusalem and Rome. Her book records almost everything in terms of her spiritual growth and experience, a true spiritual autobiography written by one privy to all her stories and confessions and, at whose hand, her story comes down to us as an example of a mystic who was also a very strange woman in a number of ways.
I read the Book of Margery Kempe sometime early in 2002 and, I must say, there were lots of times I was ready to throw the thing against the wall. Margery, for all her spiritual devotion, drove me crazy. Being raised Southern Baptist, the concept of such piety in relation to images and practices and their veneration was totally alien and, to some extent, a challenge to my thinking. What truly drove me bonkers was, frankly, how her piety was often expressed. Gentle tears I could go with, but wailing and wild sobbing and copious tears that often went on for some time and just as often disturbed others at mass or who wished a quiet time in a chapel or church grated on my nerves like fingernails on a blackboard. She cried at the sight or sound of just about anything that even remotely reminded her of something holy, especially the suffering of Jesus on the cross. It reached the point where she broke down even at the sight of a small child who would remind her of Jesus. I wonder, did she ever do this at the sight of any of her fourteen children?
This morning I was contemplating Margery and what impact she had in my brief exposure to her life and piety. Even after nearly a decade, I still remember her crying more than just about everything except her visit with Julian of Norwich which, as I remember, featured her giving as much advice as receiving it. The accounts of her sobs, sighs, and surely enough tears to float a medium-sized boat, irked me and made me wish she'd just left those out. But she couldn't; they were an integral part of her and how she expressed her faith.
Then it occurred to me, possibly my problem with Margery's tears and cries was due simply to envy, in a sense. As a child I cried enough that Mama often told me that if I didn't stop I'd get something to cry about. If I cried it had to be in private, in my room or the bathroom, from which I could only emerge when the tears were gone. I learned not to cry. I occasionally shed a tear when things build up over a period of time and finally reach the breaking point, but one, maybe two minutes of sparse tears is it for perhaps the next five years or so. The idea of crying copiously at hearing words or seeing an image or visiting a sacred place is alien to me and I confess I wonder what it would be like. I don't cry at times people seem to expect and I guess it makes me look rather hard-hearted. It's not that I don't feel things, it's that I just can't express them as others do or think I should.
This morning I look at Margery differently than I have before. Now I can look at her piety as a gift, not as an irritant. I can admire her strength and adventurousness and not get sidetracked with her irritation factor. I can wish I had such devotion to God and to Jesus even if I can't quite get there with Mary and certainly can't get there with tears such as she shed. I can't put Margery on a pedestal but I can certainly try to put her on a small platform in the regard of my heart and mind. Perhaps I need to go back and revisit her book, this time with an eye more to what message God can send me through her life and words than the distraction of what seem to me to be "crying jags."
Margery must now be a mystic of value, not a very irritating saint. Maybe she can teach me to unblock my own tears -- but in moderation, please?
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