I was driving into the village next to mine one morning last winter when Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars came on the radio. Brilliant, I thought, turning up the volume, but then I heard the words ‘All that I am’ and I burst into tears. I had no idea why I was crying. This morning, I heard the song again and I burst into tears again. “Stop or you’ll get depressed!” my wife said. “Are they sad tears or happy tears?” my daughter wisely asked.
Dear readers, they were happy tears.
I’ve copped it. ‘All that I am’ put me in touch with an important conviction in my life – the conviction that God is in on my story. He knows all that I am. Indeed, I am a story that He tells. We all are. ‘You know when I sit and when I rise; you discern my thoughts from afar’, the psalmist says (PS139: 1-2), and he is correct. So I cry because I am deeply known by God and thus greatly loved. Not because I’m a lunatic.
What a relief!
The scene in the movie Titanic where the 101 year-old Rose begins to recount the story of her love for Jack to the deep-sea divers, one of whom interrupts her, also puts me in touch with this conviction. “Do you want to hear this, or not, Mr. Lovett?’ Rose snaps, chiding the diver for cutting across her. It is a powerful moment. She wants her life story to be listened to with respect. She wants to be heard, to be known. We all do. Indeed, I think that this is the deepest human desire of all and I believe that it is at the root of our dignity and what it means to be human precisely because we are a story that God tells. For this reason, it wouldn’t surprise me if the day of The Last Judgement – to use that dreadful term – were not the day we are summoned forth to give account of ourselves but the day we step forward to be told our story by the one who listens and has been listening all along.
“Come and see a man who has told me everything I have done” the woman at the well tells the townspeople after Jesus has revealed her life story to her in what has to be the funniest repartee in the bible (JN4:29). These could be your words.
Today, tell someone your story. Or tell Jesus. “It’s been eighty-four years,” Rose begins before she is interrupted. Try it! ‘It’s been …… years’.
And if there are tears, well, just remember, Teresa of Avila experienced periods of prolonged tears in her meditations. Which should make me a saint.
Of course, my wife would tell you a different story!
perSONal 