In Conversation with Rev. Benjamin Perry

Victoria interviews the Author of 'Cry Baby: Why Our Tears Matter'

Dear Friends! Thank you for being here.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Victoria. I cared for my Dad through to his passing (the hellish dark days with grains of joy), and now I look after Mum (calmer waters with giggles). In addition. You can read more about why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why?’

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‘Caring about Crying. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone.’

Day 4 of the Collaboration offers a Q&A conversation between myself and the Reverend Benjamin Perry.

Yesterday, I shared the Ten Percent Happier podcast interview he did with Dan Harris and Dr Bianca Harris.

I was excited to learn that Ben’s on this Substack platform!

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A Special Guest: Reverend Benjamin Perry

‘Author of Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter. Queer + building church that reflects God’s own queerness. Christian nationalism makes Jesus weep. he/they’

Ben has kindly accepted our invite to a short conversation, Q&A.

Here’s Ben’s Bio from his Website

Rev. Benjamin Perry is Minister of Outreach and Media Strategy at Middle Church, and author of Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter, published by Broadleaf Books, May 2023.

An award-winning writer, his work focuses on the intersection of religion and politics. Their writing can be found in outlets like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, The Huffington Post, Sojourners, Bustle and Motherboard and he has appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and NY1. They hold a degree in psychology from SUNY Geneseo and a Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary.

He is married to Erin Mayer, they live in Maine with his brother and best friend. They are the editor of the Queer Faith photojournalism series, curator of an art exhibit by the same name, and a passionate advocate for building Church that lives into God’s blessed queerness. His two proudest achievements are skydiving with his grandmother and winning first prize in his seminary drag show.

Victoria: Hi Ben! Thank you so much for agreeing to answering a few questions for our Carer Mentor Collaboration.

I’m just a little (understatement) excited to have found your book and your interview with Dan Harris and Dr Bianca Harris.

Ben: It’s such a delight to talk with you! Thanks so much for the invitation. We don’t give crying nearly its due, so I’m quite grateful for the space you’re creating here.

Victoria: My first question has to be—would you be willing to share photos of the skydive and your seminary drag show? (Take a look at Ben’s profile above)!

Ben: Haha I wish I had photos of my grandmother skydiving! What an incredible day, lamentably undocumented. That seminary drag show, however, has been fortuitously saved for posterity. Here’s the inverted cross I struck at the end, at the foot of seminary’s giant wooden one! (Apologies for the grainy photo, it was a while ago.)

Victoria: I’m still debating if I’d ever go skydiving - I know my Mum would definitely NOT want to do one, so for now it’s ruled out! Skydiving, for me, is an act of ‘courage’ walking or rather diving, despite the fear.

Question: I wondered if you had any fear when you decided to make yourself cry everyday to curiously explore your emotions? Did you approach it with a clinical detachment to see what happens or were you scared about what might happen?

Ben: It’s funny, when I tell the story now, I can make it sound like I decided to cry every day for several months as an intentional experiment, because that’s what ended up happening. But the truth is, at the time I was so thrilled to feel something deeply—so alive in that first bout of weeping after a decade of deadening myself—that I chose to cry every day because it felt so good. So I wouldn’t say I had either fear or clinical detachment, more a joyous rediscovery of the emotional depths that should be everyone’s birthright, but which so many social forces attempt to suppress.

Victoria: That’s so interesting, Ben. I guess, with 20/20 hindsight, it could be easy to frame up any experience in a neat package of learnings, and lose sight of the emotional journey. But, in your journey of crying, once those tears started, that societal dam of restraint started crumbling.

Question: Could you share more about your experience and exploration of crying?

Ben: Absolutely! One of the things I noticed, as I began to make myself cry every day, was the way that it recalibrated my emotional baseline.

It began as this seismic effort to will myself to tears, but over the weeks and months I became someone who cried easily. All of a sudden, a friend’s story or a beautiful piece of music would bring tears to my eyes when—just months before—they would have surely been dry. Because this transformation happened within such a short period, I was also able to notice the ways it transformed my relationships and social interactions.

I think many of us carry this fear that if we cry in front of people, we’ll become a burden, or they’ll think less of us, but I actually find the opposite to be true. When I began crying with more regularity, I developed an intimacy in my personal relationships that dwarfed what I had experienced earlier.

It made me a more effective care provider in my ministry, a better partner to my spouse, and invited the kinds of deep community I yearned for. There’s an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, and I think learning to feel deeply around other people—to be vulnerable and invite them into that place in our lives—is such a potent part of unravelling that alienation.

Victoria: I hear you, Ben. Social conditioning, cultural biases—be that individualism, or my Asian ‘saving face’, …emotions behind closed-doors are holding all of us back and undermining community health.

Question: I’m intrigued to find out—with everything you know now, do your tears overspill first and then you hold space to curiously explore them when they’re happening, or do you catch yourself about to cry?

Ben: Oh, I’m a quick-to-tears fella. It’s a running joke in our house that my partner or one of our roommates will walk into a room and be like, “Welp, Ben’s crying again,” haha. I think, particularly because I went through so many years of numbness, I try really hard not to catch myself when I’m about to cry, to introduce that moment of cognition between my body and its experience of an emotion.

It’s such a small jump between cognition and judgement, and I’m done with that. What I do encourage and try to practice, as you alluded to in my conversation with Dan, is to try to look at tears with curiosity after they’ve spilled, to ask what other emotions might lie beneath the proximate cause of my tears. Because often I’ll find, if I’m crying about one thing, I’m probably also crying about something else.

Victoria: That’s resonating deeply. Okay, …I’m pausing on that to digest your words. ‘the small jump between cognition and judgment', the auto-response that can be led by biases or that conditioning.

What you’ve just said resonates with the work of Dr Susan David¹ and Prof. Lisa Feldman Barrett²

Giving yourself permission to feel, cry and then curiously explore their meaning.

My favourite quote is by Viktor Frankl from his book ‘Mans Search for Meaning’ Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Question: So I’m wondering if we sometimes misclassify tears as a response, when sometimes they could be a stimulus? What’s your thoughts?

Ben: Yeah, I think this is exactly right. Because we’ve been trained in so many ways not to regard tears as something meaningful to explore in their own right, we often ascribe them just to whatever initially caused them.

But, like so much of the rest of human emotionality, that surface reason is often just pointing our attention towards something deeper, if we approach the moment with curiosity.

So, to use an example I describe in my book, there was a moment when I found myself weeping reading about the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which happened a century ago.

At first, I thought it was just because the bird was so beautiful, but the more I sat with it, I realized it was really more an expression of the climate anxiety and grief I’m having about the present, not just a feeling about the past. When we sit with our tears instead of running away from them, it’s a chance to learn something about ourselves.

Victoria: Thanks, Ben. Hmmm yes I love your last sentence

We’re conditioned into social cues, context and positioning ourselves within the world around us, we forget about our individual inner journey.

Perhaps, due to our hardwired need to feel belonging and tribe with others we paradoxically try to fit neatly to the lens and frame that others set for us, and lose sight of how we want to see ourselves; our own values-lens.

Question: What do you believe is our greatest challenge with regard to crying and why?

Ben: There’s so much shame associated with the act of crying. Many of us learned shame when we were growing up, and still hold it in our bodies when tears grace our eyes. Other folks I’ve spoken with stopped crying because of that shame, and now feel shame that they can’t access that deep emotionality!

What was so revelatory, in conducting interviews for the book, is how universal those feelings of shame were, even though the reasons were so different. Through my book, I chronicle some of the patriarchy, homophobia, racism, sexism—all these forces that create a wedge between our experience of an emotion and its natural release. I think our greatest challenge is eradicating those forces so we can have more authentic relationships with our own bodies, and with one another’s. That’s work that needs to happen culturally, but it needs to happen in our bodies as well.

For Chapters six to nine of your book I think I used four different highlighters - facts, new research/reading leads, insights and the precisely articulated wisdom. ‘Cry, Baby: Why our Tears Matter’ is now in my top ten Annual Read List, for good reasons!

I referenced Professor Feldman Barrett’s work because your words reminded me of hers, around social reality and social constructs. She shares a video that highlights how humans have created social constructs, labels to a form of social reality.

Perhaps, we’re too caught up in the social functioning that we’re forgetting the simple, natural common humanity of connecting as a species rather than an identity?

Question: If you could cry with anyone past or present, who would it be and why?

Ben: Oh, I’d definitely cry with Oscar Wilde. Partly because he’s kind of a patron saint, as much as I have one. But what a soft boi who suffered so deeply for who he was and what he felt. I would love to hold him and tell him how much his life and legacy have meant to generations of queer folks like myself, that we are thriving in freedom he helped to nurture. Plus, I’m sure he’d have a devastating Victorian pseudo-sexual quip about us being leaky vessels that would make me laugh.

Victoria: BIG smile, haa! LOVE that I can see you both laughing-crying, exchanging and receiving many tears together

Question: In your experience, and from all your research how can we be the best receivers/support/aides to crying or tears. This was sparked from

Christine Vaughan Davies

article Sacred Tears How to be with others as they cry (Publication: Journeying Alongside)

Ben: This is such a fantastic question! One of the most important things is to be a comforting and non anxious presence when someone is crying. This might sound simple, but so often when someone is in tears—particularly someone we care about—we feel internal anxiety and desire for them to stop crying. That’s not a bad sentiment in and of itself, it comes from a place of love, but if we express it openly we can make the other person feel like their tears are a burden, or that they should suppress them before they’ve run their course.

So I try to simply sit, often without talking, and—depending on the relationship—give them a hug, or just put my hand on their shoulder. I give them the space to know that what they are feeling is okay, that they have all the time they need to cry, and that I will be present with them for as long as that takes.

Victoria: Thank you, Ben. Sitting in pain and discomfort with someone, bearing witness and calming our energy to be present…just being ourselves and with that person is sometimes all that’s needed. I hear you.

I’ll bring our discussion to a close here and say, ‘Thank you’, for your book and the wisdom you’ve shared within it. I think our readers will resonate with the insights and thoughts you’ve shared here.

I know that I’ve more homework, and leads to follow after reading your book.

May I also say, that I’m SO glad that the Carer Mentor Collaboration brought me to your publication. It’s great to have you as a neighbour here!

P.S. Saturday 28th to Monday 30th of September, there’ll be a Discussion thread for all our readers to share thoughts, after the month long collaboration. I hope you’ll join us to offer readers more of your thoughts.

Ben: It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you. When we give space to let tears teach us, it truly opens the door toward transformation and building a gentler world.

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Dear Readers, share your questions and comments for Rev. Benjamin Perry below.

I’ll also collate the questions, in case Ben can’t respond to them all below.

There will be a Carer Mentor Collaboration Discussion thread 28 - 30th September, where we hope Ben can join the team in answering questions.

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Now, moving forward the Collaboration Team will share their personal experiences.

There are articles, a discussion thread and many opportunities planned for you to share your thoughts and comments. We look forward to expanding this exploration of crying and tears; this biologic, emotional, and very human phenomenon.

Thank you for being here. I appreciate the time and support you give to our community.

Please ‘❤️’ LIKE the article and share it with others.

P.P.S I’m passing the baton to the next team member.

The Caring About Crying Anthology. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone.

1. Sept 1 Launch article: Caring About Crying. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration

2. Sept 2 Crying: 'Did you know?' Resource: Tears the science and some art. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration

3. Sept 3 'Cry, Baby. Why Our Tears Matter' A Podcast Interview. Dan Harris and Dr Bianca Harris of Ten Percent Happier with Reverend Benjamin Perry. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration

Footnotes

1. 'Wholehearted living: Avoid Toxic Positivity and Rethink our beliefs around Emotions.' Showing up to our Emotions. Adam Grant & Susan David.Prompts for reflection - how can we. Prompts

• Rethink the belief that certain emotions are inherently good or bad.

• Avoid forced positivity and instead practice genuine optimism.

• Pay more attention to the emotion of guilt as a signal of dissonance between self and values.

2. Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is among the top 0.1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior.

Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett and The theory of constructed emotion proposes

• Emotions should be modelled holistically as whole brain-body phenomena in context.

• Emotions are constructions of the world, not reactions to it.

• In every waking moment, your brain uses past experiences, organised as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning.