ABSTRACT
The most salient sign of kama muta is moist tears; consequently, as we have seen, tears have been endowed with considerable cultural significance, depending on how people judge the performance of kama muta and the display of emotions more generally. Throughout Christian history, worshipful tears were taken as a sign of true devotion. The Christian fathers of the first centuries after Jesus articulated the idea of tears as an index of the desire for CS with God, manifested in penthos (repentance, mourning for sin). Hagiographies from the sixth through the eighth centuries about monastic Carolingians emphasized the spirituality of tears. Some Medieval theologians treated tears as sustenance that is given and shared like a commensal meal. And a recurrent theme is that compunctive tears are a gift from God. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century evangelical Presbyterians and Methodist revival camp meetings, whose assemblies wept together, and tears were prominent in each of the Great Awakenings. Today, around the world, in Pentecostal, charismatic, and other new paradigm churches, the sudden experience of union with divinity, and conversion experiences in particular, are called coming to Jesus, being touched by the Spirit, being possessed by the Holy Spirit, or being baptized in the Spirit. Being born again denotes many of these experiences. They typically involve weeping. At some points, people were exhorted to shed tears when taking holy communion.
