“Pray until the tears come.” This is the guidance that St. Columba taught to his Christian community at the Iona Abbey, which he founded in Scotland in the 6th Century.*

“Pray until the tears come.”

Just let that sink in.

Do you know what that’s like, to pray until the tears come?

If this is something you have experienced, may you feel encouraged in that depth of prayer. Make it a practice, as you can.

If this is not something you’ve yet experienced with prayer – tears – then this is something to notice and to be curious about, with grace. I offer this as a word of guidance and a of challenge, from deep within our Christian tradition: to wonder about how to pray in such a way that eases the heart open to allow a greater depth of feeling to arise to the surface. How to pray in such a way that trusts God with those tender places.

These tears of prayer before God can be tears of grief. They can also be tears of love. They can be tears of gratitude. They can be tears of contrition, of confession, of repentance. They can be tears of relief, of mercy. They can be tears of beauty. They can be tears for all that which is too deep for words, when we let the yearning at heart of our human condition draw us into the presence of our Holy Creator.

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness,” the Apostle Paul teaches, “for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words.” (Romans 8:24-26)

This isn’t about knowing the right words or praying as some impressive display.

This is simply about a willingness to be wholehearted and sincere in our prayer.  

It takes trust, to let down our guard before God, to growing in our trust of God, as well as in our trust of ourselves. It can take finding ways to pray that feel safe, whether that’s in private (“pray your closet” as Jesus said), or with trusted others.

Often, it takes the kind of experience, which happens in one way or another to all of us in this human condition, called desperation. When we don’t know what else to do but cry out to God.  When you don’t know what else to do but cry out to God then, for the love of God, cry out to God. And wait for what happens next.

Now, you should know that I for one say all of this as someone who does not naturally pray until the tears come, because I’m not inclined to let the tears come ever. I know I’m not alone in that. I’m the product of a culture of stoic Scandinavian farm folk. Tough, unflappable, matter-of-fact, steady. When painful things happen, you just put your shoulder into it and plough all the hard feelings back under and keep moving forward. The cows still need to be milked, after all. The hay still needs to be bailed.

The kind of religiosity this tends to produce is pious and moral. It tends to be intellectual. It may be mystical. But it is not emotional.  

For a good while I for one pursued a kind of religious ideal that was removed and unattached from “lower” emotions. You seek God to try to transcend our messy human limitations, therefore you don’t act “messy”. The religious person is serene, stoic, abstract, correct, come what may.

Now, this is very common in any of the world’s religions, using religion as a means of escape from what’s hard about life. This is not only an issue for Euro-American Protestants. “Spiritual bypass” is one term for this, which I believe was coined by a Buddhist to name a phenomenon in their religious community.

Whatever you call it, “spiritual bypass” doesn’t really work very well for very long. Real life is real, after all. You can evaporate all you want, eventually you’re going to get pulled back down to earth, in a rain of tears.

I for one discovered that when that happens, God is there.

And I know I’m not alone in that either.

Psalm 34:18

“The Holy One is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

The stories in the Bible are full of testimonies to this experience, that God is near to the brokenhearted.

The Bible is full of tears.

The great Hebrew Prophet Jeremiah wept so much he’s known as “the Weeping Prophet.” The Book of Psalms is wet with tears. Jesus wept in the Gospel stories, several times. He wept while praying to God; he wept for others, he wept for himself, he wept for humanity, he wept out of love.

The Bible is also full of testimonies about the comfort that God gives to those who weep. Yet to paraphrase Gustavo Gutierrez: Yes, God will dry all tears, but woe unto those who do not have tears to dry. (From “On Job,” by Gustavo Guteirrez, re: Revelation 21:4).

The prayer manuals of Christian monasticism are very encouraging of tears. These are the folks who are dedicating themselves to prayerful absorption in the presence of God, and to lives of utter humility, mercy, peacefulness, devotion, and service. St. Columba was in a long and rich lineage when he taught, “pray until the tears come.”

A monastic prayer manual from the 14th century by two monks named Callistus and Ignatius speaking about the “warmth” generated in the “pure and undistracted prayer of the heart,” that is open in loving communion with God.

“Such a heart,” they write, “often sheds tears, which purify and enrich rather than exhaust and dry up the man whom they endow.”**

Now, again, I’ll repeat, these tears can be tears of grief, of pain. They can also be tears of love. They can be tears of gratitude. They can be tears of contrition, of confession, of repentance. They can be tears of relief, of mercy. They can be tears of beauty. They can be tears for all that which is too deep for words, when we let the yearning at heart of our human condition draw us into the presence of our Holy Creator.

This is about bringing our full selves into our relationship with God, including all those people that are on our hearts, all those things about the world that convict us in a deep way.

There is so much in our society that is trying to do the opposite:

to numb us;

to pacify us;

to distract us;

to isolate us;

to reduce us to creatures of impulsiveness and reactivity, compulsion and consumption.

There is so much in our society that is trying to harden our hearts and cheapen our humanity.

Prayer is a powerful antidote.

Before God, who is all merciful and full of love, we can let what is truly on our hearts come to the surface. Honest to God.

We can honor fully our grief: our personal grief, our grief for those who are dear and near to us; our grief for those we don’t know but whose suffering pierces our hearts.

Bring the news headlines into your prayers. Not in a cheap “thoughts and prayers” kind of way. But in a way that lets the tears come for the horrors and the outrages. People have asked me, “how do I pray when children are being starved in Gaza?” How else can we pray but break down and cry out before God?

Before God, we can be honest about our own moral misgivings, our own failures, our convictions, our own feelings of guilt or confusion or determined desire.

Before God, we can be honest about the beauty in our lives and in our loves; the depth of our gratitude. We can realize the ways we feel rightness in our lives. We can remember the ways we have felt God to be present to us.

So often the only language for any of this is tears.

This depth of prayer never ends with the “Amen.” When we pray in this deep way it makes room for God to move in our lives in response to all we bring before God in prayer. This means compassion; this means direction; this means wisdom; this means purpose; this means action.

But we won’t know what we are to do and how we are to be, if we don’t first sincerely bring it to God in prayer.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, August 24, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.

* cited in Sacred Earth Sacred Soul, by John Philip Newell

**from Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, p. 231