“Pray unit 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.

 Last week I explored this guidance – “Pray until the tears come” – and how it is deeply rooted in the wisdom tradition of Christian prayer and Biblical testimony. What is it like to have this level of trust and honesty in our prayer lives with God, a wholeheartedness, a sincerity that entrusts God with those deep and perhaps secret parts of ourselves where tears may be the only words?

“Pray until the tears come.” As I said last week, 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 beauty. They can be tears of contrition, of confession, of repentance. They can be tears of relief, of release, tears for the forgiveness, the blessed mercy we find in the presence of our Creator’s unconditional love, which embraces us as we are, and does not leave us unchanged.

What I would like to explore more with you this week is how when we pray in a way that is utterly honest-to-God, we can experience tears of contrition, confession, repentance, relief, release, forgiveness, mercy.

I want to be clear from the outset that these dimensions of prayer are perfectly natural and seem to emerge when we earnestly place ourselves before God and say “Here I am.” Confession does not need to be artificially prescribed, but is in fact a feature of many earnest prayers before God.

The testimonies of our faith, from ancient times to the presence, are full of accounts that can lead us to trust that when we allow ourselves to be held in the Holy Presence far greater than ourselves, the experience consistently results in a radical honesty about who we are, who are not, and who we can be. Experiences of communion with God through prayer are very often both morally humbling and morally motivating.

Psychologists Ann and Barry Ulanov have written a very insightful study of the psychology of prayer. This is what they write:

“In prayer we say who in fact we are – not who we should be, nor who we wish we were, but who we are. All prayer begins with this confession…

“If we can let ourselves go in prayer and speak all that is in our minds and hearts,” they write, “if we can sit quietly and bear the silence, we will hear all the bits and pieces of ourselves crowding in on us, pleading for our attention. Prayer’s confession begins with this racket, for prayer is noisy with the clamor of all the parts of ourselves demanding to be heard …”

“Prayer’s first act of confession is the discovery of this primary speech.” By “primary speech” they mean the language of our interior reality which we often keep below our conscious awareness.

“We begin to hear the self we actually are,” the Ulanov’s write, “emerging out of our shadow selves, our counterfeit selves, our pretend selves. We become aware of what is in us, the best and the worst.”

In prayer before God, we can no longer run away from both the best of ourselves and the worst of ourselves. With God’s help, we can be honest to God about all of it:

“Our best parts, if left unlived,” the Ulanovs write, “can be as poisonous as our worst, if left unhealed. In this first act of collecting and recollecting we discover the fine impulses we failed to act upon … and we discover our worst sides … and, above all, we discover our fears – the fear to risk, to love, to submit, the fear to lead, to stand out and be seen …” (Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer, by Ulanov & Ulanov, pgs. 1-2.)

We can add to this litany any number of the sorts of things that we can struggle with when we deny the best of ourselves and deny the worst of ourselves: our frustrations; our feelings of overwhelm; our moral misgivings; the times we did not do what we knew to be right; our numbness to the situations we know do call us to compassionate and courageous response; our suppressed joys; our unacknowledged dreams; and so on.  

We have to be honest about all this stuff.

As Jesus is said to have taught: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not have will destroy you.” (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 70)

It may be difficult at first, but it is a beautiful and healing experience to let these sorts of things come out of the shadows into the presence of the unconditional love and mercy of our Holy Creator. The practice of prayer is our ongoing discovery of this unconditional love and mercy.

Prayer may begin with difficult honesty but, when we entrust ourselves to God, prayer can lead us to merciful release and motivating realization. To healing. To restoration.

Do you know what this is like? Have you experienced it to be true? Do you trust it is the true nature of God’s relationship with humanity, to be one of mercy?

Our relationships with God are so often shaped by our relationships with other people, and our relationships with ourselves. How we approach God in prayer when it comes to our blind-spots and weaknesses can have a lot to do with what our experiences have been with judgment and reconciliation with the people in our lives. Because of those experiences, some of us may be more inclined to trust in God’s mercy; others of us may be more fearful of judgment and condemnation from God.

You may have had the experience of struggling about whether to be honest about something that’s hard to talk about with someone because you fear their judgment, but when you actually are honest, what you receive is mercy. It’s a relief: to receive mercy, and to experience a strengthening of your relationship because you had the courage to bring out into the open what you needed to be honest about. This can shape how you approach God in prayer.

You may have also had the experience of this level of honesty causing legitimate hurt. Hopefully the relationship can bear this and there can repair and reconciliation. But perhaps you have experienced painful ruptures in relationships because of secrets coming to the surface. This too can shape how you approach God in prayer.

Then there are the experiences of relationships that are viciously judgmental, or abusively shaming.

All these experiences we have had with being honest with other people in our lives, or of avoiding being honest – experiences of mercy, experiences of hurt, experiences of reconciliation, experiences of recrimination and abuse – all this can go into our unconscious ways of relating or avoiding relating with God in prayer.

We may know intellectually that God is not a human being, and that the ways that the Holy Creator Beyond Name relates to us as created beings is of a different order altogether from our relationships with other people. Yet when we pray to God and say “Yes, God, here I am,” we can bring to that space and time unconscious things from the other relationships in our lives.

Do we trust that God truly is loving and merciful? Or do we fear that God will be a merciless judge? Does this make us inclined to keep some things in secret, to hide them in shame in the shadows and not dare to name them in prayer? Or does this help us to be truly honest-to-God with anything and everything that is on our hearts and on our consciences, including our moral missteps, and mistakes, and misgivings, and ambivalences, and ambiguities?

Whatever our experiences have been with other human beings, our prayer lives can be a space set apart to experience healing and guidance. This takes an earnestness and wholeheartedness that may at first feel unusual, or may be a welcome relief. It takes a trust in God’s mercy, a trust that is perhaps like a leap of faith, a trust that it is in fact true that our Holy Creator is in fact all-merciful, abounding in grace. 

The testimonies of our faith attest to God’s mercy, again and again. So do the testimonies of other faiths as well. We are talking about a real dimension of the truly universal God. I can also personally testify to the healing experience of God’s mercy through earnestly honest prayer before God. So, let me recommend it to you, if this is not yet part of your way of praying. And let me reinforce it for you, if it is.

I will close with the testimony of Nan C. Merrill’s beautiful rendering of Psalm 32.

It begins with a realization of the terrible cost of suffering that comes when we are dishonest with ourselves:

When I acknowledge not my shortcomings,

I become ill through all my defenses.

And day and night, guilt weighed heavy

In my heart;

My spirit became dry as desert bones.

But then the poet is honest to God in prayer:

I admitted my faults to the Most High,

And I made known my regret;

I cried out, “Forgive me, O comforter,

For those times I have sinned in

My thoughts, my words,

And my deeds.”

And what happens after that?

And the Beloved created a clean heart

Within me.

Therefore, let everyone who is sincere

Give thanks to the Beloved;

For whenever we feel overwhelmed

By fear,

We shall be embraced by Love.

Dwelling in the heart of the Beloved,

We are free from distress,

Free to live creatively.

We shall be embraced by Love.

Dwelling in the heart of the Beloved,

We are free from distress,

Free to live creatively.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, August 31, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.