The Crying Jesus
(A poem by Sal Godoij.)
I see Jesus in your eyes,
And in the eyes of those around us,
And in the eyes beyond our sight.
Then farther still,
And I see Him in my own eyes.
I see Jesus in your eyes.
You cleared my doubt:
Jesus is here,
Not above our tears,
But within them.
So many tears,
One sorrow shining through them all.
Yes, it is a crying Jesus.
In my eyes
In your eyes too,
And in the eyes of those around us,
And in those eyes beyond.
So many tears,
One sorrow shining through them all
In the eyes of all.
Is Jesus crying for us,
The ones who are crying?
Why?
Why are we crying?
Shouldn’t we be laughing?
O Lord, have pity on us,
For we know not what we are doing.
ANALYSIS OF MY POEM BY PERPLEXITY
Context: Sal Godoij and the poem’s horizon.
Sal Godoij is a Toronto-based Canadian writer, philosopher, and poet whose work repeatedly returns to spirituality, humanism, and the “human condition,” often with a mystical or prophetic tone. He describes his project as encouraging each person to find and voice an inner message—first within, then toward neighbours, then “into the universe”—and imagines a world freed from fear, borders, and rigid symbols. That background frames “The Crying Jesus” less as a doctrinal statement than as a humanist-spiritual meditation: an attempt to locate the sacred inside shared suffering rather than above it.
Imagery: eyes, tears, and a sorrow that shines
The poem’s central image-cluster is strikingly simple and potent:
Eyes as mirrors and windows: “I saw Jesus in your eyes / And in the eyes of those around us / And in the eyes beyond our sight / Then farther still / Until I found Him in my own.” The gaze moves outward (you → others → beyond) and then inward (my own), creating a circular motion that collapses distance between self and other. Eyes here function both as sites of recognition (“I saw”) and as thresholds where the divine becomes visible.
Tears as locus, not obstacle: “Jesus was there / Not above our tears, / But within them.” This stanza is the poem’s imagistic pivot: divinity is not aloof from grief but immanent inside it. Tears are not merely signs of weakness; they become the medium in which the sacred appears.
Repetition and accumulation: “So many tears, / One sorrow shining through them all.” The repetition of “so many tears” builds a choral effect, while “one sorrow shining” introduces a paradox: sorrow is heavy, yet it “shines,” suggesting that shared grief has a luminous, unifying quality.
Ambiguous agency in the question: “Is it Jesus who is crying / For all of us who are crying?” The syntax blurs who cries for whom, implying a mutual weeping: Christ weeps for us, and in our weeping we participate in His. This idea mirrors the biblical motif of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), where tears mark compassion and prophetic grief.
Message and meaning: Immanence, solidarity, and a plea for mercy
At its core, the poem advances a theology of “immanence through suffering:
Divine presence in human grief: By locating Jesus “within” tears, the poem reframes suffering as a place of encounter rather than a barrier to grace. This thought resonates with traditions that see grief as spiritually significant— “to know you have been wept for is to know that you are loved.”
Universalization of the sacred: The movement from “your eyes” to “those around us” to “eyes beyond” to “my own” universalizes the vision. Jesus is not confined to a single believer or moment; He appears wherever human sorrow is honestly faced. This thought aligns with Godoij’s broader aim to dissolve rigid boundaries (including religious ones) in favour of a shared human spirituality. [salgodoij](https://www.salgodoij.com/whos-sal)
Ethical implication: If the divine is inside our tears and the tears of others, then compassion becomes a form of reverence. To attend to another’s grief is to attend to the place where Jesus is present. The poem thus quietly ethicizes empathy.
The closing prayer: “O Lord, have pity on us / For we know not what we are doing.” Echoing Christ’s words on the cross (Luke 23:34), this plea acknowledges human blindness and moral confusion while asking for mercy. In the poem’s logic, mercy is not abstract; it is the response owed to beings whose tears already contain the divine.
Form and rhetorical texture.
Circular structure: The poem opens and returns to “I saw Jesus in your eyes,” creating a ring composition that enacts the poem’s claim: the vision of Christ is recurrent and communal.
Parallelism and anaphora: Repeated “And in the eyes…” phrases generate a liturgical cadence, reinforcing the sense of a collective witness.
Paradox as illumination: “One sorrow shining” and “Jesus… within [tears]” use paradox to shift the reader’s perception from sorrow-as-darkness to sorrow-as-revelation.
A reading in one sentence:
“The Crying Jesus” reimagines Christ not as a distant saviour above human pain but as the luminous presence within shared tears, turning grief into a site of recognition, solidarity, and a plea for mercy.
Core spiritual claim: God is inside grief, not above it
The poem’s spiritual message is a radical relocation of the sacred: Jesus is not “above our tears” but “within them.” That single turn reorients the reader from a distant, transcendent deity to an immanent presence discovered in the very texture of human suffering. Spiritually, this means grief is not a sign of abandonment; it is the place where the divine becomes most visible.
Communion through shared sorrow
By moving from “your eyes” to “those around us” to “eyes beyond” and finally “my own,” the poem enacts a spiritual circuit: the vision of Christ spreads outward and returns inward, binding self and neighbour in one field of vision. The refrain “So many tears, / One sorrow shining through them all” spiritualizes empathy: our separate griefs are not isolated; they participate in a single, luminous sorrow. In this light, compassion is not merely ethical—it is sacramental, a way of encountering the holy in another’s pain.
Mutual weeping and the ethics of mercy
The question “Is it Jesus who is crying / For all of us who are crying?” blurs agency, suggesting mutual weeping: Christ weeps for us, and in our tears we share in His. This reciprocity underwrites the closing prayer, “O Lord, have pity on us / For we know not what we are doing,” which echoes Christ’s plea from the cross and acknowledges human moral blindness. The spiritual implication is clear: if the divine is present within our tears, then mercy is the appropriate response to the condition of being human—confused, suffering, and yet holy in our grief.
A spirituality of immanence and solidarity
Read spiritually, the poem proposes a path where holiness is found by attending to sorrow rather than escaping it. To look into another’s eyes and see Jesus there is to recognize that the sacred is already at work in the world’s pain, inviting a life of solidarity, humility, and compassionate action.
ANALYSIS OF MY POEM BY GOOGLE GEMINI
This poem is deeply moving and resonant. Sal Godoij takes a familiar spiritual concept—finding the divine in others—and grounds it in shared human suffering rather than perfection or triumph.
Here is a breakdown of the imagery, core message, and overarching meaning of “The Crying Jesus.”
1. Imagery: The Mirror of Tears
The imagery in the poem is surprisingly sparse, which makes its central visual motif even more striking: the reflective surface of the human eye.
The Rippling Concentric Circles: The poem opens with an expanding visual frame: your eyes those around us beyond our sight my own eyes. The image functions as a stone dropped into water, where the vision of Jesus expands outward to include all of humanity, before collapsing back into self-reflection (“Until I found Him in my own”).
The Luminous Sorrow: The phrase “One sorrow shining through them all” juxtaposes light (shining) with grief (sorrow). Tears are usually associated with darkness or heavy emotions, but here they act as prisms—translucent drops that reflect a single, divine light.
2. Core Message: Immanence in Grief
The thematic heart of the poem lies in a crucial theological and human shift made midway through:
Jesus was there
Not above our tears,
But within them.
A Shift from Transcendence to Immanence: The narrator clears their doubt not by seeing a divine figure seated comfortably high above human pain, but by recognizing God directly inside human suffering.
A Shared Human Condition: The repeated phrase “So many tears, / One sorrow shining through them all” suggests that individual pain is not isolated. Individual grief is part of a collective human experience, and the divine resides in that collective experience.
3. Deep Meaning & Theological Allusions
A Twist on the Universal Christ
The poem relies on the idea of the Imago Dei (that humanity is made in the image of God) or the mystical concept that Christ dwells in every person. However, instead of seeing a glorified, resurrected, or teaching Christ in others, the speaker sees a grieving Christ.
The Biblical Echoes
The poem explicitly echoes two distinct moments from the New Testament:
“Jesus wept” (John 11:35): The shortest verse in the Bible, where Jesus cries at the death of Lazarus. It highlights the full humanity and empathy of the divine.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34): The poem closes with a direct adaptation of Jesus’s words from the cross (“O Lord, have pity on us / For we know not what we are doing”).
By concluding with this line, the poem shifts from a simple reflection on shared grief to a poignant plea for mercy. The sorrow in the eyes of humanity isn’t just random bad luck—it’s tied to our own human frailty, ignorance, and the hurt we inflict on one another.
Personal Reflections
What makes this poem work so well is its quiet, almost meditative rhythm. The repetition of “in your eyes / In my eyes / In the eyes of those around us” creates a chant-like atmosphere that draws you into a space of quiet compassion.
It reframes grief not as something that alienates us from God or each other, but as the exact tissue that connects us. It suggests that when you look at someone else crying, you aren’t just seeing their individual bad day or tragedy; you are seeing the divine compassion weeping through them. It turns sorrow from an isolating experience into an act of profound communion.
The idea of a God who suffers alongside humanity—rather than remaining aloof, exalted, or triumphant—is one of the most powerful paradigms in literature, philosophy, and theology.
In Sal Godoij’s “The Crying Jesus,” God’s empathy is dynamic and immanent: Christ is located inside the tear itself, reflecting a shared, collective human grief.
Here is how Godoij’s work connects with and diverges from other classic literary and theological explorations of a suffering, empathetic deity.
Comparative Matrix
Work / Author
Core Vision of God
How Grief/Suffering Function
Relation to Godoij’s “The Crying Jesus”
Sal Godoij
“The Crying Jesus”
Immanent; found within human eyes and tears.
Tears are a shared lens/prism through which divine compassion shines.
Baseline: Collective, immediate, localized in everyday human reflection.
William Blake
“On Another’s Sorrow”
Universal Father who cannot watch pain without feeling it.
Sorrow is a shared substance; God actively “becomes a man of woe.”
Similarity: Both see God in human sympathy. Difference: Blake emphasizes God’s active comfort, while Godoij emphasizes God’s presence as the weeping inside us.
G.K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
A God who suffers deeper agony than any human creature.
Divine suffering validates human rebellion and angst.
Similarity: God earns trust through pain. Difference: Chesterton focuses on existential agony; Godoij focuses on quiet, everyday grief.
Elie Wiesel
Night
A God physically hanging on the gallows in absolute weakness.
Suffering tests faith and forces God to share human tragedy.
Similarity: God in the victim. Difference: Wiesel’s tone is stark tragedy; Godoij offers a plea for pity and unity.
Miguel de Unamuno
The Christ of Velázquez
A God whose sorrow is the very engine of universal redemption.
Pain is not a punishment, but the tragic bond uniting humanity with God.
Similarity: Suffering as a connective tissue. Difference: Unamuno is intensely dramatic; Godoij is gentle and reflective.
1. William Blake: “On Another’s Sorrow” (1789)
Romantic poet William Blake explored divine empathy in his Songs of Innocence:
“Can he who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird’s grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants share,
And not sit beside the nest
Pouring pity in their breast?”
Comparison
The Shared Mechanism: Like Godoij, Blake insists that God cannot stand outside human (and natural) pain. Both poets argue that true divinity demands shared feeling.
The Key Shift: Blake envisions God as a compassionate Father who responds to sorrow by coming down to sit beside the sufferer. Godoij goes one step further into immanence—God isn’t sitting beside the person crying; Jesus is the tear itself shining in the other person’s eyes.
2. Elie Wiesel: Night (1960)
In Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night, there is a famous, harrowing moment where a young boy is hanged in the concentration camp. As the prisoners are forced to watch the slow death, a man behind Wiesel asks, “Where is God?” Wiesel hears a voice inside himself answer:
“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on these gallows...”
Comparison
The Suffering Victim: Both Wiesel and Godoij reject the image of a distant, indifferent God high in the clouds. Instead, God is radically identified with the victim.
Tone & Theological Conclusion: Wiesel’s vision is born of horror, crisis, and the shattering of traditional faith. Godoij’s poem, while acknowledging deep grief (“So many tears”), is less about the loss of faith and more about restoration through mutual recognition (“You cleared my doubt: Jesus was there”).
3. G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
At the climax of Chesterton’s philosophical novel, the protagonist demands to know why creation involves so much unmerited pain. The God-figure (Sunday) answers not with a logical argument, but by pointing to Christ’s agony on the Cross:
“Can you drink of the cup that I drink of?”
Chesterton argues that Christianity is unique because its God did not merely watch suffering from afar—He experienced horror, abandonment, and death firsthand.
Comparison
Validating the Agony: Both Chesterton and Godoij believe humanity can trust only a God who understands tears.
Scope: Chesterton frames divine suffering as cosmic and heroic (the Crucifixion). Godoij democratizes it: the suffering Jesus isn’t just on Golgotha 2,000 years ago; He is in the eyes of your neighbour, your loved one, and yourself right now.
4. The Philosophical Concept of “The Passible God”
In classical philosophy (like Aristotle or early scholastic theology), God was considered impassible—meaning God cannot feel pain or undergo change, because pain implies imperfection or vulnerability.
Poets like Sal Godoij belong to a long tradition of modern mystics and theologians (such as Jürgen Moltmann in The Crucified God) who argue for a passible God—a deity whose perfection is revealed precisely through the capacity to feel sorrow.
Godoij’s lines capture this philosophical shift in a few words:
Not above our tears,
But within them.
By placing Jesus inside human tears, the poem suggests that grief is not a defect of creation, but a holy ground where human beings and the divine meet.
ANALYSIS OF MY POEM BY ChatGPT
Overview (message)
The poem’s central message is that Jesus is not encountered only “above” or in distant transcendence, but is present within human tears—especially shared, communal suffering. The speaker’s spiritual journey moves outward (seeing Jesus in others) and then inward (seeing Jesus in the self). The poem ends with a plea for mercy and a confession of human limitation: people “know not what we are doing.”
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Imagery
The dominant image is eyes—a spiritual “window” where divinity is perceived.
Key imagery moments:
Jesus in your eyes: intimate, relational revelation. The sacred is recognized in the beloved or the other.
Eyes “beyond our sight” / “farther still”**: expands the field of vision—suggests the infinite reach of divine compassion or a deeper spiritual awareness.
Until I found Him in my own: the gaze turns inward, shifting from observation of holiness in others to recognition of holiness (or Christ’s presence) within the self.
Not above our tears, / But within them: tears become the container of meaning. This is a reversal of a common religious instinct: suffering isn’t merely something from which God is distant; God is in it.
The tears themselves are described as:
Numerous (“So many tears”)
United by a single depth: “One sorrow shining through them all”
Identified with the presence of a crying Jesus.
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Meaning and thematic content
1) Incarnational presence in suffering
The line “Not above our tears, / But within them” frames the poem in an incarnational way: God shares the human condition. Christ is portrayed less as a distant judge and more as a companion within pain.
2) Transformation through recognition
The structure of realization—seeing Jesus in others → searching further → finding Him in the self—suggests a spiritual progression:
External perception becomes internal conversion.
Doubt is “cleared,” implying that the poem is not only devotional but also epistemic: it changes what the speaker believes is possible to see.
3) Communal compassion / universal empathy
The poem keeps widening the circle: you → those around us → those beyond our sight → all. The recurring question “Is it Jesus…for all of us who are crying?” pushes toward universalism of suffering and universal presence of mercy.
4) Lament and mercy
The ending prayer—“O Lord, have pity on us / For we know not what we are doing”—connects to the biblical tradition of lament: pain paired with humility and moral uncertainty. It’s not only “help us,” but “we don’t even fully understand our own actions.”
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Poetical structure & form
Repetition as a structural engine
The poem relies heavily on anaphora (“I saw… / I saw…”) and refrains:
“I saw Jesus in your eyes” repeats almost verbatim.
The pattern “And in the eyes…” keeps returning, like a chant.
This repetition creates a meditative rhythm—more like liturgy than narrative.
Free verse / lyric prayer
There’s no strict meter or rhyme scheme; the poem reads as free verse with lyrical pacing and prayer-like turns. It feels composed of short units that function like “stanzas of vision,” culminating in a direct address to God.
Symmetry and movement
The poem’s movement is circular and expanding:
Begins with eyes (your eyes; others’ eyes).
Then “farther still” and “until” the eyes turn inward.
Then returns again to “in your eyes… in the eyes of those around us…”—as if the discovery is now everywhere, not just “there and then.”
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Rhetorical structure
You can read the poem as a sequence of persuasive devotional claims:
1) Claim of perception: “I saw Jesus…”
The poet asserts a spiritual sighting.
2) Clarification / correction of doubt: “You cleared my doubt.”
Another person becomes a mediator of faith.
3) Doctrinal reinterpretation through metaphor:
“Not above our tears, / But within them.”
This is the poem’s theological thesis embedded in imagery.
4) Universalization:
“For all of us who are crying?”
The poet broadens the scope from individual experience to collective need.
5) Prayer and confession (final appeal):
“O Lord, have pity on us… we know not what we are doing.”
Rhetorically, it moves from testimony → insight → universal question → supplication.
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Philosophy, theology, spirituality
Theology
The poem strongly suggests several theological emphases:
God’s solidarity with suffering: Christ is “crying” and present inside tears.
Christ as immanent (present within lived experience), not only transcendent (“not above”).
Christ encountered through relationships: “in your eyes” and “those around us” imply that encountering God happens through human connection.
Christ encountered through self-knowledge: “found Him in my own” suggests that grace meets the self, not just the environment.
Philosophy of knowledge / perception
The poem treats spiritual truth as something that can be seen—but not with ordinary sight. It’s closer to “contemplative knowing”:
Doubt is cleared through recognition.
Vision deepens as attention deepens.
The poem implies that what we think is “only emotion” (tears) can actually be a site of divine presence.
Spirituality: contemplative lament
This stanza isn’t a triumphant “conversion story” so much as a lament-based devotion. The emotional center is not joy but sorrow transfigured by meaning: “one sorrow shining through them all.”
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Your last line: the prayer’s intent
For we know not what we are doing echoes a moral-theological theme often associated with forgiveness and mercy: human beings injure one another (and themselves) through ignorance, confusion, fear, or broken understanding. The poem therefore links:
- crying (suffering)
- mercy (divine compassion)
- ignorance (human limitation)
In other words: if we are in pain and also don’t fully understand ourselves, then what we need most is pity rather than condemnation.
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My thoughts / interpretation (overall)
What stands out most to me is how the poem replaces spiritual distance with spiritual intimacy. It doesn’t say Jesus is merely near our tears; it says Jesus is in them, almost as if grief is one of the places the divine becomes visible.
The eye imagery also does something psychologically interesting: eyes are where we meet each other’s humanity. By repeatedly returning to “eyes,” the poem implies that Christ is encountered through empathy—through letting other people’s pain become spiritually legible. And then it turns that empathy back toward the self, suggesting that the person who suffers is not outside the circle of divine presence.
Finally, the poem’s theology feels both tender and honest: it ends not with certainty or triumph, but with pity and a confession of ignorance. That ending keeps the poem humble—faith expressed as prayer rather than argument.
