Some prayers were never meant to be safe.
Last winter a man in my office said something I have not stopped thinking about. He had been through a custody battle that lasted two years, lost his house, and was sleeping on his brother’s couch. He told me he had prayed something so angry he would not repeat it out loud. Then he looked at the floor and said, “I think God might be done with me after that one.”
He shook his head when I asked what he had prayed. I told him there is a psalm in the Bible that ends with a line about dashing infants against rocks, and that it has been in every printed Bible for three thousand years. He looked at me like I was making it up.
The Psalm That Should Have Been Edited Out
Psalm 137 opens with one of the most haunting images in Scripture. A group of exiles sitting by the rivers of Babylon, harps hung on willow trees, weeping for a home that no longer existed. Their captors demanded a song. Sing us one of those songs from Zion, they said. Entertain us with the music of the place we burned to the ground.
“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’”
Psalm 137:1-3 (NIV)
For six verses the psalm is grief and longing, the kind of sorrow that makes your throat close when you try to speak. If it ended there, it would be one of the most beautiful poems in the Bible, and every church would read it comfortably on a Sunday morning.
It does not end there.
“Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
Psalm 137:8-9 (NIV)
There it is. The verse that makes Bible study leaders flip to the next page, that children’s Bibles leave out, that sermon series skip, that well-meaning readers pretend is metaphorical because the alternative is too much to hold. These are people praying for the murder of children. And the prayer was written down, set to music, and kept in the book of God for every generation that followed.
What the Rage Was Made Of
Before you soften it, sit in what produced it. Babylon did not politely relocate these people. Babylonian soldiers killed children during the siege of Jerusalem. The psalmist watched it happen or heard the accounts from people who did. When he prays for Babylonian infants to be dashed against rocks, he is praying back what was done to his own people, holding up a mirror and saying: this is what you did to us, and I want you to feel it.
The rage is visceral, immediate, born from something witnessed that could never be unseen. The only place left to put it was in front of God because no one else could bear the weight of it. These exiles did not go to a therapist or journal about healthy coping mechanisms. They screamed at the ceiling of heaven, and whoever wrote it down did not clean it up before handing it to the next person.
The psalm does not apologize for itself, offers no final verse that says, “But we trust in your mercy, O Lord.” The anger is the last word.
The Editors Who Left It In
Scripture went through centuries of collection, copying, and curation. Scholars debated which texts belonged, and councils weighed what was inspired and what was not. Psalm 137 survived all of it. Every rabbi who copied it, every council that reviewed the canon, every translator who sat with verse nine and had to decide whether to keep going: they all left it in.
That tells you something about what the people who assembled the Bible believed prayer was. They believed it was a place where you could bring the worst thing inside you, the version of yourself you would never show another person, the fury that would make everyone at a dinner table go silent. They believed God could hold that, and they believed future readers needed to know he could.
The Prayer You Never Said Out Loud
You have prayed something you are ashamed of. Maybe it was during a hospital stay that went on too long, or after a phone call that split your life into before and after. Maybe it was three words in a dark room that you took back immediately, as though God operates on a five-second rule. You have carried the guilt of that prayer like a stone in your coat pocket, heavier some days than others, always there.
Psalm 137 does not tell you that prayer was okay. It does something stranger. It shows you that prayers like yours have always existed, that they are old enough to have been set to music, copied by hand onto animal skins, and placed in the same collection as “The Lord is my shepherd.” The book that contains the gentlest comfort in the human language also contains a prayer for violence against infants, and no one saw a contradiction worth resolving.
God kept Psalm 137 in Scripture because the honesty was worth preserving. The exiles brought him the ugliest thing they carried, and he did not strike them down or withdraw his presence or demand a revision. He let the words stand. He is still letting them stand.
I have watched people type the prayer they will not say to anyone into a search bar instead. The words go somewhere even if they cannot go to a person. Someone will find this page the same way, in the same hour, carrying the same weight of a prayer they believe disqualified them. If these words were waiting when you arrived, it is because a reader before you kept them standing for exactly this moment.
What Silence Costs
The man in my office had been composing his prayers for two years. Polite, appropriate prayers, the kind that sound right in a small group when someone asks you to close. And underneath all of them, the real prayer was rotting because he would not let it out. He thought the anger disqualified him.
I wonder sometimes if God grows tired of our composed silence, if he sits through our careful prayers the way a parent sits through a teenager’s “I’m fine,” knowing full well what is underneath and waiting for the moment we trust him enough to stop performing.
The psalm that should have been edited out is still in your Bible this morning, and it is there because the God who received it would rather hear you screaming than hear you pretending.
