Where the Soul Speaks

In the first, a young man kneels beneath an olive tree in the dark, his face pressed into his hands. His prayer has the quality of bleeding — something forced out of him that cannot be held in. In the second, he kneels under an open sky scattered with stars, looking up at a galaxy that does not seem to be looking back. His prayer rises into a vast silence. In the third, the light has changed. The sky is dawning. He kneels in stillness, his eyes closed, his face soft. Something has answered. And in the fourth, he is no longer alone. The Savior stands behind him, hands resting on his shoulders, holding him as he weeps a different kind of weeping — the weeping that comes when you finally understand that you were never alone in the first place.

These four images are not chronological. They do not depict a journey from worse to better. They are, instead, the four chambers of a single heart. Every gay Latter-day Saint who has prayed knows all four. Sometimes in the same hour. Sometimes in the same prayer.

This essay is about what prayer is, what it has been distorted into, and what it can become again — in the lives of gay Latter-day Saints who are still here, still believing, still kneeling.

The Prayer That Bleeds

The first prayer is the Gethsemane prayer. It is the prayer offered from a place of suffering so deep it threatens to fracture the self in two.

Christ Himself prayed this prayer. He prayed it more than once. He prayed it until His sweat fell as great drops of blood. The most sacred prayer in human history was a prayer of agony — a prayer whose first half was a cry for the suffering to end.

Notice what He did not pray. He did not apologize for the agony. He did not say He was sorry to be suffering. He brought it to His Father whole, exactly as it was, in language so raw it has been preserved across two thousand years because it is the most honest thing ever said in prayer.

The Dear Forrest letter describes this same kind of prayer in its account of "the storms that raged not in the sky but in the chest of a man kneeling in prayer and wondering why God made him this way and then condemned him for it." That is a Gethsemane prayer. It is the prayer of a man who has been told that the deepest, truest part of himself is somehow at odds with the God who made him, and who is bringing his anguish to the only Person who can possibly hold it.

Trauma research has taught us something the scriptures already knew: agony that is named is agony that can be metabolized. Bessel van der Kolk and a generation of trauma clinicians have demonstrated that what cannot be spoken cannot be healed — that grief, shame, and terror lodge in the body until they are given language. Prayer, at its deepest, is the original somatic therapy. It is the practice of putting the unspeakable into words, in the presence of a Witness who will not flinch.

For too long, gay Latter-day Saints have been afraid to pray Gethsemane prayers. We were taught that the proper posture before God was gratitude, contrition, submission — never anguish, never anger, never the kind of cry that asks God why. We learned to edit our prayers before we offered them, to scrub them of anything that might sound like disappointment in the One we were taught had made us this way and then asked us to suppress what He had made.

But Christ Himself shows us otherwise. The cup in the garden was real. The blood was real. The desire for it to pass was real. And the Father did not turn away. He sent an angel to strengthen His Son, and He sat with Him in the dark.

The Prayer That Hits the Ceiling

The second image is the prayer offered into the cosmos. The stars are beautiful, but they are also infinite, and infinity can feel like absence. The young man kneels under the heavens with hands clasped, but his prayer seems to disperse into the void. He is not crying. He is not despairing. He is doing something almost worse: he is wondering whether anyone is there at all.

The Dear Forrest letter names this experience precisely: "the prayers that felt like they hit the ceiling and the ones that broke through into something infinite." Both kinds of prayer are described in a single breath, because every believer knows that they live next to each other.

The ceiling-prayer is one of the most painful experiences of the spiritual life, and gay Latter-day Saints know it intimately. We have prayed for change that did not come. We have prayed for clarity that did not arrive. We have prayed, sometimes for years on end, asking God to take from us what He had given us — and we have heard nothing in return.

There is a passage in the Book of Mormon where Enos prays through an entire day and into the night:

Enos's prayer was not answered immediately. It was not answered easily. The text records the long labor of a soul wrestling with God in the dark. Only after that wrestling came the voice.

If you have prayed and felt nothing, you are not failing. You are in the company of Enos. You are in the company of the Prophet Joseph Smith, who in the Sacred Grove first felt himself "seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me" before the light broke through. You are in the company of Christ Himself, who at the deepest moment of His suffering cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" — a prayer that, in that moment, met no audible answer.

The ceiling-prayer is not always the sign of a closed heaven. Sometimes it is the sign of a soul that has been asking the wrong question.

This is the most important truth about the prayers that did not seem to be heard: many of them were prayers asking God to alter something He never asked us to alter. The prayer "make me not gay" could not be answered because it was never the right prayer. It was a prayer that had been shaped by other people's fear and pressed into the mouth of a child who was simply asking, in the only words he had been given, Father, am I still loved?

The Father heard the real question. He just could not answer the wrong one.

The Prayer That Breaks Through

The third image is the dawning. The light has shifted. The young man is still kneeling, still praying, but something has changed in his face. There is peace there now. Not certainty, exactly, but the deeper thing certainty often only mimics: the felt sense of being known.

This is the prayer Joseph Smith described after his First Vision — the prayer that begins in confusion and ends in light. It is the prayer the Lord describes in the Doctrine and Covenants:

Peace is the answer. It is the language the Spirit speaks most fluently. It is not always loud. It does not always come with light or angels or a voice. Often it arrives as a strange, settling stillness in the chest — a sense that you have been seen, that the thing you have been carrying has been received, that you can stand up off your knees and walk into the next room of your life.

For gay Latter-day Saints, the breakthrough prayer is often the one in which we stop asking God to change us and start asking God to teach us. The prayer changes from "make me different" to "show me who I am." And the answer to that prayer is almost always more tender than we expected.

The way you love is not a defect of the Fall. The way you love is a fragment of the very same love that holds the universe together. You were never broken. You were never fallen. You were always whole.

This is what personal revelation sounds like, and the doctrine of the Restoration is built on the conviction that it is real. Joseph Smith opened the dispensation by acting on a single verse:

That promise was not made to prophets only. It was made to anyone who lacks wisdom and is willing to ask. It is made, today, to every gay Latter-day Saint who is willing to kneel and ask the only question that matters: Father, who am I to You?

He will answer. He always does.

The Prayer That Holds You

The fourth image is the embrace. The Savior stands behind the kneeling man — not in front of him, not above him, but behind him, with His hands resting gently on his shoulders, holding him from a place of total tenderness. The young man is weeping, but it is the weeping that comes after the storm. It is the weeping of a soul that has finally been allowed to stop performing.

This is the prayer that the Dear Forrest letter ends on. After all the analysis, all the theology, all the careful unpacking of fear and shame and institutional harm, the letter does not close with an argument. It closes with a voice. The voice of the Savior, speaking words that anyone who has been kneeling alone in the dark for years aches to hear:

This is the prayer beyond words. It is the prayer that no longer requires you to make your case. It is the prayer in which you stop explaining yourself to God and let yourself be held by Him.

In 3 Nephi 17, the resurrected Christ visits the Nephites at the temple at Bountiful. He has just taught them the most important things He will ever teach them. And then, before He leaves, He notices their tears. He bids them arise. He blesses their children one by one. He weeps. And when He weeps, the angels descend.

That is what the fourth prayer is. It is the prayer in which the heavens open downward instead of upward — in which God comes to you instead of you reaching for Him. It is the prayer of being held.

Compassion-focused therapists, building on the work of Paul Gilbert and Kristin Neff, have spent the last two decades demonstrating something that gay Latter-day Saints already knew in their bones: that human beings are not healed primarily by being corrected, instructed, or argued out of their pain. They are healed by being held. By the felt sense of safe presence. By a witness who can sit with the wound and not turn away.

Christ knew this two millennia before the clinicians did. The fourth prayer is the prayer in which He proves it.

How Prayer Was Weaponized

Now we must speak honestly about how prayer was used to harm us, because the path back to honest prayer runs straight through the rubble of the dishonest one.

For decades, gay Latter-day Saint boys and men were taught that prayer was a tool for self-eradication. We were told to pray to be different. We were told that if our orientation did not change, it was because our faith was insufficient or our willingness was incomplete. We were told that the goodness of God was conditional on the absence of who we were. And we knelt, in our bedrooms and on our missions and in our marriages, and we asked God to take from us what He had given us — and when He did not take it, we concluded that the failure must be ours.

This was not prayer. It was a coercion ritual dressed in prayer's clothing. It used the most intimate posture of the soul — kneeling, alone, before our Maker — and turned it into a tool of self-rejection. It turned the One who loved us most into the One who supposedly required our self-erasure as the price of His love.

The Dear Forrest letter draws the necessary line: not everything that is taught in the name of Christ is from Christ. "If a teaching makes you hate yourself, it is not of Christ. If a policy makes you feel unworthy of God's love, it is not of God." Those are not radical sentences. They are an application of Moroni's test: every thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God. Prayer that taught you to hate yourself was not from God. The institution may have transmitted it. Well-meaning people may have repeated it. But it was never authored in heaven.

This distinction matters, because the weaponized prayer poisoned not only our self-image but our very capacity to pray. Many of us stopped praying altogether, because every time we knelt down we were back in the room where the prayer was a request for self-cancellation, and we could not bear to be there anymore.

The way back is not through more weaponized prayer. It is through honest prayer.

The Healing of an Honest Relationship

When prayer becomes honest — when we stop bringing God a sanitized version of ourselves and bring Him the actual one — something remarkable happens. The relationship begins to heal.

The first honest prayer for many gay Latter-day Saints sounds something like this: Father, I am gay, and I am Yours. I am not asking You to change me anymore. I am asking You to teach me how to love You as the man You actually made. It is a prayer that takes the breath away the first time it is offered, because it is the first prayer in years that has not begun with an apology for existing.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy describes a process called creative hopelessness — the recognition that the strategies you have been using to fix yourself are not only failing but are themselves the source of much of your suffering. The honest prayer is the spiritual version of creative hopelessness. It is the soul saying, I have tried for years to fix what was never broken, and I cannot do it anymore, and I am not going to do it anymore. I am going to bring You me, and we are going to start again.

What follows is not always neat. The Spirit does not always answer immediately, and God's timing is not our timing. But over time, the honest prayer remakes the relationship. The Father becomes the Father again, instead of the cosmic auditor we had been imagining. The Savior becomes the Savior again, instead of the demanding standard we had been failing. The Holy Ghost becomes the comforter again, instead of the silent absence we had been mourning.

Brené Brown's research on shame teaches us that shame cannot survive being spoken in the presence of empathy. Honest prayer is the most ancient form of this practice. It is the speaking of the unspeakable in the presence of the One whose empathy is infinite. And it works — not because God's love is finally being earned, but because His love was always there, and you are finally letting it reach you.

Notice the verse does not say that you must cast out your own fear through willpower or obedience or self-denial. It says love casts out fear. Not your love for God, but His love for you. Your only job is to stop running from it.

Prayer as the Doorway to Personal Revelation

We come, at last, to the deepest claim of the Restoration: that prayer is not a soliloquy but a conversation. That the heavens are not closed. That God still speaks — to prophets, yes, but also to ordinary believers, in the quiet language of the heart.

Personal revelation is the doctrine on which the entire Restoration rests. Joseph Smith's First Vision was the vindication of James 1:5 — the demonstration that an unschooled boy could ask God a sincere question and receive an answer. Every doctrine of the Restoration that followed flowed from that first prayer. The Book of Mormon. The priesthood. The temples. The plan of salvation as the Latter-day Saints understand it. All of it is downstream from the conviction that God still answers prayer.

This means that gay Latter-day Saints — who were so often told that prayer was a tool of self-correction — are in fact heirs to a tradition that places prayer at the very center of spiritual authority. The same God who answered Joseph Smith answers you. The same Spirit that bore witness to the Book of Mormon bears witness to your worth. The same heavens that opened in the Sacred Grove are open above your bedroom right now.

What personal revelation will teach you

It will teach you about the Atonement. You will come to understand that the Atonement was not a tally sheet of sins ledgered against the value of Christ's blood. It was an act of pure love that made you whole at the level of your existence. It did not save you in spite of who you are. It saved you including who you are. Mercy did not make a deal with justice on your behalf. Mercy declared that there was no debt to pay in the first place — that the way you love was never a transgression God needed to be paid off about.

It will teach you about the plan of salvation. The plan is vaster than any single Sunday School lesson ever conveyed. It involves a premortal life in which you knew God and were known by Him; a mortal probation in which you are precisely the person you were sent here to be; and an eternity in which the loves you have carried — the real ones, not the ones you were performing — are not erased but honored. The Dear Forrest letter is right: the plan of salvation is vast and merciful and so much bigger than any single generation's understanding of it.

And it will teach you about the Ninth Article of Faith.

This is not a footnote. It is a theological commitment to humility — an admission, on the part of the Church itself, that what we currently understand about God is not the final word. The Restoration is ongoing. The covenant is not yet fulfilled. There is much that has not yet been revealed, and much that has been believed in error and will one day be corrected.

If the Church could be wrong about Black Saints for over a century — and it was, and the correction came through revelation — then the Church can be wrong about gay Saints now. That is not faithlessness. That is the very faith in continuing revelation that the Restoration demands. To pray for further light and knowledge on these questions is not rebellion. It is fidelity to the Ninth Article of Faith.

Pray it. Pray for further light. Pray for the Church. Pray for the day when the prophets receive what so many of us have already received in our own bedrooms — that the gay sons and daughters of God were never broken, never fallen, never forsaken.

Four Postures of the Soul

Four chambers of a single heart.

The Gethsemane prayer that bleeds. The cosmic prayer that seems to dissolve into silence. The breakthrough prayer that arrives as peace. The held prayer that asks for nothing because nothing more is needed.

Every gay Latter-day Saint will know all four. Sometimes in the same hour. Sometimes in the same prayer.

Pray them all. Pray them honestly. Pray them in the words you actually have, not the words you were told you should use. Pray them with the full weight of who you are, including the parts you were taught to bury. Bring God the man He actually made. He has been waiting a long time for the introduction.

And when, in the quiet of some ordinary night, you feel the answer that the Dear Forrest letter promised — when you feel the hand on your shoulder and the voice that has been saying it your whole life if only the noise had let you hear — receive it. Let it be true. Stop running from the love that has been chasing you since before the world was.