The Bearded Ecclesiologian

In 1961 publishing house Faber and Faber printed a new book by N.W. Clerk entitled A Grief Observed. Clerk was writing about his recently deceased wife who is referred to throughout the book as simply “H.” 

The initial reviews seemed to be mixed. While some appreciated the candid look at the grieving process, other found the openness and struggle to be somewhat disturbing. 

The public also was not familiar with the author. Who was N.W. Clerk, anyway? A new author, perhaps? And this was his first book? He did not have any other books in print, after all. What a first book to publish!

A few years later in 1963, A Grief Observed would be published again, this time under the name of the book’s true author: Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis, who had himself passed away that same year. Now the general public knew what only a few had, that the man behind The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Space Trilogy, and The Screwtape Letters was the bereaved man behind A Grief Observed. Ironically, some people gifted Lewis copies of A Grief Observed, thinking it would be helpful for him as he mourned his beloved Joy. 

Why the pseudonym? Perhaps he did not want to alter people’s image of him. Or perhaps he felt freer to express how he really felt behind a pseudonymous designation. I think the answer lies within the book itself.

The answer, I believe, is that he felt embarrassed by his grief. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think Lewis was himself embarrassed, but that others were embarrassed by his grief. Consider: 

“An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers. 

To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking. ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’ At first I was very afraid of going to places where [Helen Joy] and I had been happy—our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at once like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

Surely those who Lewis references meant no ill-will. People are simply ill-equipped to handle grief, whether they are the bereaved or they are around the bereaved. We do not know what to do with it, as is clear in Lewis’ words. He could tell as they approached on the street that they weren’t sure how to speak to him or what to do. 

I recently picked back up A Grief Observed and re-read it. It had been a number of years since I had, and now that I am in a “season” of grief (whatever “season” means), I read it with new eyes. His words are more real than ever. And I understand what he means in a way I hadn’t before. 

Those who are outside of grief might read Lewis’ words (or even my referencing or quoting them) and ask, “what do you mean ‘embarrassed?’ Was it something I did? Was it something I didn’t do?” 

That’s not the point, is it? I think regardless the bereaved will, at least for a time, feel as though they are an embarrassment to people around them. “Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers,” wrote Lewis. Perhaps. 

Again, Lewis is not being uncharitable or critical of others, it was simply how he felt. Humans are awkward and strange. Fed notions that the ordinary life “well lived” is one that is mostly happy, we do not know what to do with the bereaved. What do we say? As someone in a current state of grief, I do not know either. 

I do not think there are many people who would outwardly tell a grieving person, “Can’t you just get on with it already?” but that seems to be how Lewis felt. It was embarrassing to them that he was grieving, and if he would just act “normal” (as he was before his loss, that is), then maybe those he mentioned who edged away or turned red or offered curt words would feel relieved. Then it would not be embarrassing anymore. Ought the grieved be in a hurry to get through the grief? Maybe that would help others, but would it help us?

In her book Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li (who lost two sons to suicide eight years apart) said in one of her chapters that she does not even like the word “grief” because it indicates that the process has an end point: “the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel.” 

Her words are worth quoting at length: 

“Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual.

I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?

Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life. 

The only passage in which grief appears in its truest meaning is from King John, when Constance speaks eloquently of a grief that is called madness by others in the play.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, 

Remembers me of all his gracious parts, 

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;

Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

Fare you well. Had you such a loss as 1, 

I could give better comfort than you do.

I will not keep this form upon my head 

When there is such disorder in my wit.

Have I reason to be fond of grief? Yes, as much as a mother has reason to love her children. Alas, few people use the word “grief” these days as compellingly as Constance. For that reason, I prefer that in the abyss that is my habitat, grief is not given a place by design. If it decides to grow there, it will grow like a volunteer rose campion or a sweet violet or a columbine.”

Nicholas Wolterstorff, who has been one of my best companions since the worst day of my life (via his writings), said that grief is irrational in the sense that there’s nothing that can be done to relieve it or speed it along. “It is this irrationality at the heart of grief that leads persons who have not personally experienced grief to say to the person in grief, ‘Get over it. No use crying over spilled milk. You can’t bring them back.’ And it is the fact that grief is irrational at its core that makes it almost irresistibly tempting, in our society, to regard the person in grief as needing therapy.” 

A few paragraphs later he says, “The grieving person is to be treated like the irrationally fearful person, like the irrationally jealous person. Grief, so it is assumed, is inherently pathological. One does what one can to return the grieving person to health, to rationality. One tries to get them to stop wanting what cannot be.

Given that there is, at the heart of grief, an irrational collision between what one wants and what one knows, it’s easy to understand why this response is so common…Grief is the normal response, and not only the normal response, but the appropriate response, to the irreparable loss of love’s object.” 

Here’s his point: “I realize that some well-meaning religious persons try to alleviate the grief by declaring that the person who has died is not really lost. But this is irrelevant. Believing that one’s child or spouse or friend is eternally lost is not typically the cause of grief over their death; if it were, then being convinced that one is mistaken, that one’s child or spouse or friend is not eternally lost, would indeed dissipate the grief. What typically causes grief is believing that the person one loves has died, so that all one’s desires for their presence in one’s life and for their earthly flourishing are now deprived of their object. Being reminded that they remain in the Lord’s hand does not bring them back to life.”

There it is. 

We are problem solvers; we are fixers; there must be something that can be done. No, there is not. Maybe this is why Lewis thought people embarrassed. Maybe he thought they wanted a fix but had none. But they wished he’d be fixed so they could be alleviated from the awkwardness. But as Li says, there is no cure, there is no fix, and there is no end. As Wolterstorff said, grief is irrational; there is no cure like there is for other “problems.”

What is to be done? Nothing at all. That’s frustrating, is it not? Yet, there is no fix. The bereaved are the bereaved until the end of their lives. A leper colony sounds lovely, but no such colony for the grieving exists, so where do we go? Nowhere. Here. Stuck an Ambrose-less world until the resurrection. But that there’s a resurrection does not give me now what I so desperately desire. And that’s the irrationality of it all. We the grieved hold in tension misery and joy. Does that make sense? Not to some and that’s ok. 

Is grief embarrassing? Not for Lewis. Not for Li. Not for Wolterstorff. Not for the Psalmists. Not for the ‘Man of Sorrows.’ And not for me. 

The Grinch. Scrooge. 

Two names synonymous with failing to be sufficiently gleeful during the Christmas season. Or, at the very least, names given to those who do not have the so-called “Christmas spirit.” The Christmas spirit is, after all, the mood of being jolly, making merriment, being joyful, “singing loud for all to hear,” as was the case in the movie Elf. 

If, then, one defies the expectations of the mood of the season, then you’re liable to be lumped in with a penny-pinching harsh taskmaster like Scrooge, or a thieving goblin-adjacent lonely man like Grinch, or a book-demanding, publishing house-owning, Christmas Eve-working boss like in Elf. But what if you don’t feel jolly this Christmas season? What if the mood for you isn’t merriment? 

I have had a roller coaster relationship with Christmas myself. As a kid, of course, I enjoyed it like all kids do. As I became a teenager and young adult, I did not like it all that much, often volunteering to work on Christmas day so that others might enjoy the festivities in a way I would not. Then in recent years I have become more in a Christmas mood, listening to “Christmas music” well before the culturally acceptable window. 

But this year? This year I don’t feel jolly and the season does not feel all that bright. 

This year? No Christmas music for me. The movies we will often play during the season as a family? Not so much. All the decorations at the house? Just a solitary tree my kids put up and decorated. 

To be sure, I understand that Christmas announces a joyous event. The incarnation of preexistent God is an unbelievably boisterous, cataclysmic, earth-shattering event. It deserves a mood of joy. After all, it announces God and sinner reconciled. It tells of incarnate deity who was “pleased as man with men to dwell.” Christ came to dispel darkness, to rescue wayward rebels of which I am chief. 

This is incredible news that surpasses all news. And I am joyful, but is there room in our view of Christmas for a mood that is outside of the “merry” and the “jolly” and all of that? What if I do not feel like singing? What if, for all I care, this season ends quickly? Am I Scrooge? Am I Grinch?

(I don’t even anticipate this post doing all that well. At least not as well as, say, a recipe on egg nog or a picture of a golden retriever wearing a Santa cap or something)

Maybe. Or maybe there really is room in a theologically robust view of Christmas for those of us who feel that this midwinter is bleak. After all, Christ did not, as NT Wright said, come into the world to tell us that everything is alright. In fact, the opposite is true: Christ came into the world to confront it with its brokenness, helplessness, and need. If the world were fine, the incarnation would be unnecessary. So the incarnation does not tell us that we must force joy to mask the painful realities of life in this age. It does the opposite: it is honest that things are not right in this world. 

Let us think about the first Christmas. Joy was declared, this earth-shattering thing had taken place, but it was also surrounded by blood as Herod slaughtered the innocents. It was surrounded by exile as Jesus’ family fled to spare Him of that mortal danger. It was about the Godman who was born to an unwed handmaiden surrounded by donkeys and cows, visited by shepherds, wrapped in whatever clothe was on hand. The Bible is not shy about any of that. 

Nor did the man Jesus, when He preached His first sermon say that He had come to proclaim to the captives that they really were not captives, or the blind that blindness is not so bad. Rather, He proclaimed freedom would come, but not yet. He was not shy that there were things in which humans are bound or things that make us sorrow or things that make us long for a better world. 

Isn’t the trick of Christmas, then, that we live between Advents? Christ came, Christ will come again. Until then, we look forward to when all things are made new, but they have not been made new yet. We still ache, we still weep, we still experience loss and pain. The Bible does not cover over those things. 

There is, then, a tension that must be had at Christmas. A straight jolly Christmas does not actually seem to be the proper mood. That does not mean dourness is required. But there is a reason the church has historically (outside of most ‘low’ church denominations) recognized the “Feast of Innocents” only a few days after Christmas. Because that’s honest. Joy must not be an excuse to act as if this place were not profoundly broken. Nor ought brokenness act as if there is not something to be joyous about. 

I appreciate the way Tish Harrison Warren put it in a recent New York Times column when she wrote, “American culture insists that we run at breathless pace from sugar-laced celebration to celebration — three months of Christmas to the Super Bowl, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Fourth of July, and on and on. We suffer from a collective consumerist mania that demands we remain optimistic, shiny, happy and having fun, fun, fun…

I do not want to be the Grinch tsk-tsking anyone for decorating the tree early or firing up “Jingle Bell Rock” before the 25th. I’m all for happiness, joy, eggnog, corny sweaters and parties, but to rush into Christmas without first taking time to collectively acknowledge the sorrow in the world and in our own lives seems like an inebriated and overstuffed practice of denial.”

Here is what I cannot deny this Christmas season: I thought when Christmas 2025 arrived I would be watching my children open presents while I held my baby boy Ambrose. Instead, I held his lifeless frame on August 1. Instead of feeding my son, I’ll be recalling the fleeting moments I had with him. Instead of hearing him make the various noises newborns tend to make, I will be hearing the faint echoes of my restrained sobs bouncing off the walls of whatever room I happen to be in when the next wave of sorrow hits me. 

I know some people are fairly good at phoning in a cheery mood for the sake of others. I am not one of those people. I point people to the hope of Christ for a living, and that hope is what keeps me on two feet. But it would be pastoral malpractice if I didn’t also tell my people that this world is incredibly broken and that the Bible does not demand a forced mood of happiness when one feels acutely how sorrowful it is to lose someone you love. 

So this year I will remember the earth-moving incarnation, and hope in a second advent. I will be joyful, but not merry. I may be violating the prosperity gospel, consumeristic, culturally happy clappy mood of the season, but I will not be violating the honesty that the real Christmas declares. The man of sorrows wept as both a baby and a man, He hurts with us still, for we are united with Him. I have a High Priest, then, who knows what it is like to feel as I do. In Him I rest, even through my sadness. That seems to be closer to what Christmas is about.  

Today, 1 December 2025, was the due date for my Ambrose. On July 1, I fully expected to reach this day and be holding my baby boy. Instead, on July 31, the Lord called Ambrose to himself, and Ambrose went. I held Ambrose on that July day, but he wasn’t there, not truly. 

Not a day has gone by since that miserable day that I haven’t wept. Not a night has passed that I haven’t woken suddenly with thoughts of him. Many nights I identified with the psalmist who called his tears his bed. Many nights I identified with Augustine who said that he let the tears flow and his heart rested upon them. And though I know many have gone through similar loss, and worse, I find myself asking with the poet of Lamentations, “Is there any sorrow like my sorrow?”

I’ve found some solace in the words of others who have experienced a similar grief; perhaps that’s why I feel the need to write myself? Not only in their words of hope, but in their articulating well what I feel. And how do I feel? A lot of things, but I feel acutely that I will never recover; I’ll never be the same. The old me is gone, died the day my beautiful son did. That’s ok, though, isn’t it? 

One told me that this was a “sore providence” and “You will never be the same again, but God will be the same to you, again and again.” Isn’t that what matters? 

Nicolas Wolterstorff wrote a book that has been my favorite, “Lament for a Son.” He said at the beginning, “Grief is existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides. 

So I own my grief. I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it, to forget it. I do not try to dis-own it. If someone asks, ‘Who are you, tell me about yourself,’ I say – not immediately, but shortly – ‘I am one who lost a son.’ That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs within my story. I struggle indeed to go beyond merely owning my grief toward owning it redemptively. But I will not and cannot disown it.”^[1]

Recently I stumbled upon a work by Yiyun Li who lost two of her sons to suicide (six years apart from one another) and wrote a little book called “Things in Nature Merely Grow.” She said, “Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.” And “Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.”

Li said in an interview, “I don’t ever want to be free from the pain of missing my children…This pain is in my life for ever and ever, and I don’t want to do anything to mitigate the pain, because to mitigate it means that’s something bad, it’s an illness or affliction.”^[2]

“To live with pain is possible, you do things in everyday life, you garden, you listen to music, but you’re thinking about,’ she said, trailing off, leaving the unspeakable unsaid.”^[3]

Wolterstorff lost his son to a climbing accident; Li, two sons to suicide, but there is similarity and solidarity in their grief, as in mine. To know that it is not abnormal to refuse to ever move on. 

And I don’t want to.

Many things I once enjoyed have lost their color. Again, I resemble the words of Wolterstorff, “I remember delighting in them–trees, art, house, music, pink morning sky, work well done, flowers, books. I still delight in them. I’m still grateful. But the zest is gone. The passion is cooled, the striving quieted, the longing stilled. My attachment is loosened. No longer do I set my heart on them. I can do without them. They don’t matter. Instead of rowing, I float. The joy that comes my way I savor. But the seeking, the clutching, the aiming, is gone. I don’t suppose anyone on the outside notices. I go through my paces. What the world gives, I still accept. But what it promises, I no longer reach for. I’ve become an alien in the world, shyly touching it as if it’s not mine. I don’t belong any more. When someone loved leaves home, home becomes mere house.”

I’m not sure what Christian expectations are for grief, but if what Carl Trueman has said is true, that Christians find cries of sorrow like we find in the lament Psalms a “little short of embarrassing” due to the fact that we have “drunk so deeply at the well of modern Western materialism that it simply does not know what to do with such cries,” then we likely do not know what to do with grief, especially how to handle the grief of others.^[4] Is the Christian response to “return” to a pre-loss mood? Does the fact of the resurrection mean that the grieving process has a temporal expiration date at which point we “move on” and act like the people “we were,” in some sense? I don’t think so, and that’s not what I’m going to do. 

I’ll never be the same. I don’t want to be the same. I refuse to move on, and I will forever be marked by the death of my Ambrose. I see his face when I close my eyes, and I never want to forget him. 

Nor will I forget what it’s like to fill out a death certificate for your child. Or to pick up an urn that contains what remains on earth of a son you’ll never hear laugh, or play catch with, or kiss again.

It is a sore providence indeed that I will, for however long the Lord allows me to continue living on this celestial ball of horrors, be a father who lost a son and choose now to be identified as such. My children will hence have a sibling they cannot see, or hold, or play with. But they too, own that he is their brother still. 

Absence and silence.

When we gather now there’s always someone missing, his absence as present as our presence, his silence as loud as our speech. Still [six] children, but one always gone.

When we’re all together, we’re not all together.

July 31 was the worst day of my life, December 1 comes in a close second. Instead of holding a healthy baby boy, I’m typing. Instead of preparing a crib, I’ll be going to, and from, my office like any old Monday. But it’s not any old Monday. It’s the day Ambrose was to be born, but God had another plan, didn’t He? Why? I don’t suppose I’ll know this side of eternity, will I? I’ll just have to trust Him. “We can trust his hand even in those moments when we cannot see his face.”^[5]

I do know that in a truly Christian worldview, one can hold in tension hope and sorrow at the same time. Christian joy and sorrow over sorrowful things. Jesus was a “man of sorrows,” after all. Wasn’t He the ideal man? 

Ambrose is gone, I can’t get him back, I’ll see him at the resurrection, but to sorrow over sorrowful things is to be like Christ. Isn’t that what love is, too? I know the resurrection is coming, but in the meantime, I still live in a broken age. I’ll never not be a father who lost his son. It marks me. I’m not embarrassed by that. I say with Nicolas, “That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs within my story.”

I’d give a million worlds and die a million deaths to reverse time if it meant Ambrose could live. Alas, I cannot. There is, though, a resurrection where Ambrose will be made whole, and I will see him, I just wish Jesus would get on with it already.

“Though I shall indeed recall that death is being overcome, my grief is that death still stalks this world and one day knifed down my [son]. 

Nothing fills the void of his absence. He’s not replaceable. We can’t go out and get another just like him.

There’s a hole in the world now. In the place where he was, there’s now just nothing….Only a gap remains. Only a void is left…The world is emptier. My son is gone. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap, never to be filled.”^[6]

---

^[1] Nicolas Wolterstorff, Lament for A Son (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), 5-6. 

^[2] Alexandra Alter, “I Don’t Ever Want to Be Free From the Pain of Missing My Children,’” New York Times, May 16, 2025. 

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] https://www.9marks.org/article/what-can-miserable-christians-sing/

^[5] https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/trust-hand/

^[6] Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son. 

This is a photo (not original to me) taken of the moon on July 31, 2025, the day that my Ambrose went to be with Jesus. It was a waxing crescent, meaning the whole moon wasn’t visible, part of it is darkened, as you can see.

The moon has been meaningful to our family the last four months due in part to Jonathan Gibson’s little book “The Moon is Always Round,” which tells the story of a catechism that his family created, and how that ministered to them when Jonny and his wife Jackie’s daughter Leila was stillborn at 39 weeks. The catechism goes like this:

Q. What shape is the moon tonight?

A. The moon is a crescent moon, or a half-moon, or a gibbous moon, or a full moon.

Q. What shape is the moon always?

A. The moon is always round.

Q. What does that mean?

A. God is always good.

We taught (our oldest son) Augustine this before that horrible July day (I actually purchased the book back in 2019 and its been on our shelves ever since), so even before we lost Ambrose, Augustine would sometimes say randomly, “The moon is always round, which means God is always good.”

Now I look at the moon every time I’m outside, day or night. I looked at the moon on July 31 and only saw part of it; half was hidden. Just like that night (and almost all of them since), it’s hard to see God’s goodness in taking Ambrose, but I know He’s good even still.

Ambrose is my evangelist because every time I think about him (which is a lot), I have to think about the resurrection and the hope of the world to come. He ministers to me more than anyone I’ve ever known, and he ministers still. Just like his namesake. If anyone is blessed by something I share here – or through my preaching/teaching – about suffering, lament, sorrow, or hope in dark times henceforth, they have Ambrose the evangelist to thank.

“Even when we cannot see the whole moon as it orbits the earth, the moon is always round. It’s the same with God’s goodness. There are times in our lives when things happen to us that make us question or doubt God’s goodness, like when someone in our family dies. But just because we cannot always see God’s goodness during difficult times, this does not mean that God is not good in those times. God is always good, even when we cannot see it, just like the moon is always round, even when we cannot see all of it.” ~Jonathan Gibson, The Moon is Always Round.

Martin Luther is one of the most famous men in the last 500 years. Seen as the fire starter of the Protestant Reformation, his actions are seen as among the most important to move Christendom away from Rome. Through his life, he endured many trials for his stance, the most difficult trial in his life, however, was not when he faced the Diet of Worms or was stuck in the castle tower nor when the Papal Bull was issued in his name. Rather, it was when he experienced the loss of his daughter.

When his daughter Magdelena died, Luther picked her up and said, “Du liebes Lenchen, you will rise and shine like the stars and the sun. How strange it is to know that she is at peace, and all is well, and yet to be so sorrowful!”

The epitaph for her grave was written by Luther and read:

Here, I, Magdalena,

Doctor Luther’s little maid

Resting with the saints

Sleep in my narrow bed.

I was a child of death

For I was born in sin

But now I live, redeemed, Lord Christ,

By the blood you shed for me.

A few days later, he wrote to a friend this: “I expect you have heard that my beloved Magdalena has been born again into Christ’s everlasting kingdom. Although my wife and I ought to rejoice because of her happy end, yet such is the strength of natural affection that we cannot think of it without sobs and groans which tear the heart apart. The memory of her face, her words, her expression in life and in death—everything about our most obedient and loving daughter lingers in our hearts so that even the death of Christ (and what are all deaths compared to his?) is almost powerless to lift our minds above our loss. So would you give thanks to God in our stead? For hasn’t he honored us greatly in glorifying our child?”

I alone knew what I was keeping down in my heart. I was very displeased to see the power that these human emotions had over me. Death must come in the due order and appointment of our natural condition. With a new grief I grieved that I grieved, so that I was worn out by a double sorrow…

As I lay alone with my thoughts in bed, I remembered those true verses of Your Ambrose, for You are:

the world’s great Architect,

Who dost heaven’s rowling orbs direct;

Cloathing the day with beauteous light,

And with sweet slumbers silent night;

When wearied limbs new vigour gain

From rest, new labours to sustain,

When hearts oppressed do meet relief,

And anxious minds forget their grief…

I was minded to weep in Your sight for her and for myself, in her behalf and in my own. And I allowed the tears that I had restrained to overflow as much as they desired. I rested myheart upon them, and it found rest. For it was before Your eyes, not in front of men who would have scornfully interpreted my weeping. And now, Lord, in writing I confess it to You. Read it, any who will, and interpret it as you wish. If anyone finds sin in the tears I wept for my mother for a small portion of an hour, let him not berate me. This mother who now was dead to mine eyes had for many years wept for me, that I might live before Your face. If anyone feel great love for me, let him weep for all my sins against You, the Father of all the brethren of Your Christ.

~Augustine, Confessions IX