In today’s reflection from Luke’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples face rejection. Many of us know the humiliation of being rejected, overlooked, ignored, and left for another. So, we all carry a lot of disappointment, frustration, and sadness inside. Fr. Rolheiser writes that what we feel in that is wounded pride, but that’s no small, or ungodly, thing. When we turn away in coldness from someone or something we once loved, perhaps even from God and religion, we usually do so out of hurt, wounded pride, out of the need to protect ourselves and keep our dignity intact. What can we do with wounded pride? With disappointment? With jealousy? With the sense of having been wronged? The natural temptation is to deny, to lie, to pretend that none of this is happening inside us. And so when we’re asked how we are, we generally say we’re fine, even when our hearts are bleeding, our jealousy is raging, our faces are tense, our eyes are sad, our dignity is compromised, our fists are clenched. But there’s another option – grieving, mourning, tears. We can mourn our losses and cry the kind of tears that rip open our feelings of security and safety and bring us face to face with the painful truth that we are broken, not whole, disappointed, and unable to actualize our dreams. When we grieve, we soften, rather than harden, our hearts in the face of loss and humiliation. It’s not pleasant, but scary, to enter into your own brokenness, into all those places that you’ve denied exist inside of you. when we cry we learn that salvation lies not in our capacity to be strong enough never to be broken, but in the opposite, namely, in surrender in helplessness to a God who can fill in all those places where we are helpless, lost, jealous, restless, and broken. “The person who doesn’t have a softening of the heart will eventually have a softening of the head.” Chesterton said that. He’s right.