The gift of tears.

Sometimes Catholics need a good cry.

VERY SO OFTEN, I FEEL THE NEED FOR A COMPLETE overhaul, beautywise. And it was on just such a day that I found myself in the clutches of an ambitious saleswoman at a ritzy cosmetics counter in the mall. I had already committed to foundation, blusher, and a year's supply of extra-strength moisturizer when the eye-care line was introduced.

"Everyone wears eye makeup," I was informed.

"Oh, not me," I responded, hastily tacking on the explanation, "I cry too much."

This matter-of-fact revelation, delivered unself-consciously, clearly unnerved the woman. She was momentarily at a loss to reply. After an embarrassed silence, she asked simply, "Why?"

Well, if it's genetic, I got it from my mother. She was the one who routinely teared up at the sight of a school bus passing by or the first crocus proudly pushing its head through the dirt. When we kids asked her about it, she would just shrug wistfully as if to suggest that if you had to ask, you probably wouldn't understand.

But I came to understand plenty, probably by osmosis, the way most children come to absorb their parents' particular brand of spirituality. I remember a blistering summer day when Mother and I dodged the heat by escaping to the Syosset Theater to see what she called "the greatest movie ever made." There we sat for hours in the air-conditioned darkness eating popcorn and crying over Gone with the Wind. In no time, Mother had soaked through her linen hanky and was borrowing balled-up Kleenex from her daughters.

Given this background, I was taken by surprise at something a priest friend of mine once said. In one of his typically well-prepared and passionately delivered homilies, he questioned the assembly, "Can you handle another's tears? How comfortable are you with another's weakness?"

Characterizing crying as weakness doesn't set well with me, I told him later. It is an emotion, shaken loose by any number of circumstances, no more a display of weakness than laughter.

At the 1964 World's Fair, my mother was by my side at the Vatican exhibit where we stood wordlessly taking in the sight of Michelangelo's Pieta. That such grace and fluid movement should come from a slab of marble was in itself nearly miraculous. The line of curious and impatient visitors snaked behind us for what seemed like miles, so we could not linger, but in a few precious seconds I tried to memorize the figures: Mary, the stricken mother, holding the tortured and lifeless body of her son. The sculpture itself seemed to emit an invisible mist of sorrow that only the stone-hearted could have failed to breathe in.

Later, riding home on the train, my mother would attempt to enumerate other images that abound in our Catholic faith tradition--a tradition that has equated earthly existence to a "vale of tears," refers to the Way of the Cross as the Via Dolorosa, and venerates the Virgin Mary as the Mother of Seven Sorrows (Simeon's prophecy, the flight into Egypt, Jesus' loss in the Temple and carrying the cross, the Crucifixion, and Jesus' taking down from the cross and burial). The Catholic tradition has also had its great criers, like Saint Ignatius Loyola, who was said to be moved to tears frequently by prayer.

On a recent Sunday I was at Mass when our choir performed "I Say `Yes,' My Lord" as a meditation song. Along with everyone else in the church, I sat quietly after receiving Christ in the Eucharist and let the beautiful words wash over me. "I say `Yes,' my Lord ... to come to love my enemies ... "Digo `Si,' Senor ... in all the good times, through all the bad times ... I say `Yes,' my Lord." I happened to glance up at one point and noticed a man dabbing furtively at his eyes. This is good, I thought. The song, sung with deep feeling and conviction, had done its job. It had moved us to contemplate our lives as Christians and encouraged us to embrace whatever cross is ours.

Far from being embarrassed, we criers should rejoice that we are in such good company. Let's remember that the shortest verse in the Bible is also the most poignant: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35).

By EILEEN LOVE, director of religious education at Light of the World Parish in Littleton, Colorado and a columnist for the Denver Catholic Register.