Boys don’t cry—but God does.
“Boys don’t cry.”
This phrase has to be one of the most pernicious lies that our culture has perpetuated.
Like the Stoics of the Greco-Roman era and the rise of the John Waynes in the 20th century, a passionless manhood, sovereign of his emotions, has been repeatedly presented as ideal manhood over the past many decades.
But why do so many men fear weeping publicly, freely, uncontrollably? One reason, I think, is that crying makes us fundamentally vulnerable.
When we cry, our bodies take over: eyes leak tears, shoulders slouch, cheeks puff out and we surrender ourselves to the body’s need to “let it all out.” It is a wholly un-self-protective act.
Socially speaking, the act of crying makes us vulnerable to our need of others, inasmuch as it involves an invitation to empathy, but it also makes us vulnerable to rejection from others.
It's what happened to one of the greatest basketball players of all time. At one point during his 2009 acceptance speech into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Michael Jordan started crying.
The AP photographer Stephan Savoia captured this moment and it became the “Crying Jordan Meme.”
Why did this photo become so popular? As Timothy Burke, a former professor of critical media theory at Florida State College, writes: "It's the ultimate alpha [male] in a vulnerable position."
It turns the most dominant figure in basketball into “an international figure of epic failure.”
Says Limor Shifman, a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “You have a masculine star who expresses vulnerability, and people simultaneously mock and celebrate that.”
In becoming vulnerable through weeping, then, we risk the possibility that others will take advantage of us in a moment of apparent weakness—which is of course what so many men in our culture fear above all.
And yet in Jesus we witness a different way of being human.
When he weeps at the death of his friend Lazarus, in John 11:35, we witness the vulnerable love of God and the empathetic love of the Truly Human One.
We witness a figure who is not only in touch with our human reality but who also is the paradigm of truly human life.
This, too, is what I try to unpack for the reader in my book, A Body of Praise, and which I hope will be read as good news—not just for men, but for all people.
“Man of Sorrows,” by Aelbrecht Bouts (mid 1490s)
James Tissot, “Jesus Wept (Jésus pleura)” (1886-1896)
