The Vibration of Our Tears

This weekend, I stood on sacred ground. Morehouse College, in all its majesty, founded in 1867, offered me something I will never be able to repay. Interaction and after interaction that dazzled like diamonds of meaning to me. Valuable and precious. I’ll share some of them in the coming days because the pearls of wisdom I received are not done working on me. I hope they stay for a long time.

But I’ll share one shimmering moment today. It was like a quiet fire. Snuck up on me. It came from Rev. Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr.

An elegant gentleman. A Morehouse legend. In 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recruited a young Carter as a 10th grader to attend Morehouse. Dr. Carter would go on to become the first dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel in 1979 and a tenured professor of religion.

He stood at the podium of a dinner that I was fortunate to attend in celebration of the honorary doctorate recipients. Dignified and commanding, Dr. Carter offered a prayer for the meal that shook something loose in me. So much so, that afterward, I approached him and asked if I might take a picture of the words he’d prepared. He graciously allowed me to.

The part that undid me? This:

Guide us to meditate on the energy of love… and send it vibrationally to the millions of souls suffering throughout the world housed in conflicts well known to us. Every compassionate tear, Dear Spirit, is a perfectly encoded prayer for peace.

As I bowed my head and listened, his words hit my heart. Because I’ve been feeling helpless. Powerless. Hollowed out by the horrors in Gaza. In Sudan. In Congo. Myanmar. In Haiti. In Ukraine. In places here at home. All the places that ache and bleed without relief.

But this powerful prayer reminded me that our inner world is not small. That the quiet murmurings of the soul, the concentrated attention, the whispered blessings, the longing for justice, the unseen hope just might actually echo somehow. The energy I emit with intention matters. A tear can be a transmission. A private ache can be a beam of light. Our thoughts, when aimed with love, might actually reach beyond our own chest and stir the air around someone else’s suffering. Maybe.

Kierkegaard wrote “the function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” I’ve long held that as a truth. But to imagine that our thoughts, our meditations, our yearnings for justice, our emotional energy, the breath of our belief has ripple effects beyond our own hearts is moving and motivating to me. Especially in these tragic times.

When Rev Carter spoke of a tear being a perfect prayer, I gasped. What a thought. When we have no words to express what needs to be expressed, our tears are perfect. In SELMA, I wrote a line for Cager Lee to share with Dr. King after the murder of his grandson Jimmie Lee Jackson. I wrote the words: “God was the first to cry.” With Rev. Carter’s prayer, I realize that when our tears join a larger force they are muscular. They can change and charge the air. And if enough people, allow our hearts to open and experience the emotion of justice - not the action of it, the emotion of it - it has the power to, as King said, bend the arc of the moral universe. Maybe.

We live in a world of shrieking headlines and mounting sorrow. And still… the sacred whisper matters. I hope.

Thank you, Morehouse.

Thank you, Rev. Dr. Carter.

Your prayer has become part of mine.