It must be that Love lives within this lady
who makes me go weeping so

Do you not see what sort of life Nature has promised us—she who decreed that the first act of man at birth should be to weep?

Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly - weeping was just what she did now, who she was - Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied

Here I saw a part of the compassion of our Lady, Saint Mary: for Christ and she were so oned in love that the greatness of her loving was cause of the greatness of her pain. For in this I saw a Substance of Nature's Love, continued by Grace, that creatures have to Him: which Kind Love was most fully shewed in His sweet Mother, and overpassing; for so much as she loved Him more than all other, her pains passed all other. For ever the higher, the mightier, the sweeter that the love be, the more sorrow it is to the lover to see that body in pain that is loved. And all His disciples and all His true lovers suffered pains more than their own bodily dying. For I am sure by mine own feeling that the least of them loved Him so far above himself that it passeth all that I can say.

I learned more about God from the tears of homeless mothers than any systematic theology ever taught me. (p. 51)

She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.

Mary sheds tears because men call her "The Mother of God."

Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief.

And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?

The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl's errand as a messenger of anguish was all fulfilled.

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children; and here was one who was worshipping a stone!

In your grief, too, I weep, mother of little children, You who will murder your own, In vengeance for the loss of married love