He noticed that he shed two kinds of tears in church. The first he called “tears of compassion,” such as the time he cried during a sermon on Mothers’ Day on the subject of children who were abandoned or neglected. These cases felt to him like “being pricked in the soul,” after which “love pours out” for those who are suffering. But he called the second kind “tears of celebration”; he could just as well have called them tears of elevation: There’s another kind of tear. This one’s less about giving love and more about the joy of receiving love, or maybe just detecting love (whether it’s
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