Tears of God

Before the 10-day retreat in August 2025, something had already cracked open. A month earlier, I was meditating alone in my room at home. After about half an hour I said certain words — three times. I don’t know why three times. Only later did I notice that in Gethsemane, Jesus also turned to God three times before his death.

Then I said those words, something happened that I still can’t fully comprehend: time jumped forward. I had been meditating for half an hour, and then suddenly it was an hour later. I know my body. I know what an hour feels like from the inside — I have seen it again and again, it is one of those things I can trust completely. This wasn’t tiredness, wasn’t distraction. Something threw me forward in time. I sat there stunned, unable to believe what had just happened. I laughed like a hyena.

And afterward, I felt a patience and a tolerance I hadn’t had before — something quieter and wider than usual. Something had loosened. I understood then that those three words, almost like a prayer, spoken three times, carried something holy. I understood it through my body before I understood it in my mind. So when I went to the retreat, I said them again. And that’s when I saw.

It was August 2025, day seven of ten — Tuesday the 17th, I think. I can’t know for certain because my sense of time had long since blurred into something soft and continuous. I had been meditating without pause, and patiently. Before each session, as I walked toward the meditation hall, I made a small, private prayer: help me have faith in the technique.

Then came the meditation: the usual posture, legs crossed, hands touching, eyes closed, observing sensations. The usual.

After some time had passed, I called for God. He came slowly and gently. God touched my lower abdomen, and then continued to brush me with a light swoop upward toward my head. I tried to keep observing — to stay with the technique, to be equanimous — but I could not. I had to open my eyes. It was too much. I wriggled out of it and tried to gather the pieces back. My heart was racing and I wasn’t sure what had just happened. I looked around at the other meditators, still and quiet, and thought: I’ve gone nuts. But no. I stared at my legs, processing.

God’s touch was beyond powerful: a divine light, a needle-fingertip of a gentle, soft touch; a bright and infinite presence. An absolute purity, without a doubt, emanating from that presence. I looked down at my legs because God’s touch of goodness was too much to receive directly. Even Moses couldn’t bear to look at God. God burns your face, like a moth to a flame, stripping down the ego with all its impurities and sin. I was clinging to my ego, clinging to myself.

What I experienced in those seconds was something frightening, beautiful, timeless, endless, bright — a light. Love. Gentleness. Sensitivity. Freedom. A deep truthfulness and rightness. All at once, impossibly at once. It lasted perhaps three seconds before I opened my eyes — not because I chose to, but because I could not take in any more. It was, in a sense, a kind of death: The death of the ego. That is what we face when we truly stand before God: everything we have gathered on earth is stripped away, even what we call “ourselves.” God’s brightness made clear, in an instant, how short and fast this time on earth really is.

God didn’t make me cry. I was awe-struck, scared, in disbelief — and yet at the same time filled with love and peace and immense respect. An emotional rollercoaster that only He knew how much I could handle.

The thing that stayed with me — the thing etched into my neuronal circuitry, to this moment — was something strange, peculiar, and mysterious: I have been there before. Somehow. Before I was born? Excuse me, but what the actual fudge? I have no words. I am dumbfounded. It was as though that place with God was my origin home — the source of my being, something from which I emerged and then forgot. Perhaps I forgot it at birth. Perhaps I carry a memory of it from a previous life — that I once died and was reborn with a faint knowing that this origin home exists, and that I came from it, and that I will return.

Whether that is true I cannot say. But every other aspect of what I experienced — the light, the brightness, the power — I could perhaps explain away as an extraordinary side-effect of deep meditation. The origin home, I cannot. I had never read about it, never heard anyone speak of it. It did not arise from me. It came from somewhere else. From outside. From beyond the world. Something heavenly and holy, entirely exterior to anything I had constructed or imagined.

I was scared to be with God. And at the same time, I yearned for God and I was scared to be alone and without God. It is a paradox, and it seems like a fractal pattern that continues ad infinitum. It felt as though I had been there before, and I will be there again and again. Elämä on sukkelaa — life is amusing — as my grandma would say.

Later that night, I felt what seemed like literal tears running down the sides of my eyes. I touched my face, but there was nothing on my fingers. A sensation only. Tears of God, I said to myself, happily and innocently. Weeks later I realised for what that might mean, and found a reference in the Bible to the Parable of the Lost Sheep: God finds one of his wandering, lost sheep, and rejoices in tears of joy. It was, indeed, a beautiful moment.

I did not cry when I encountered God. I was simply äimän käkenä — mouth agape, in disbelief and wonder and confusion. A moment later I returned to the ordinary world, but I knew something important had happened. I had called for God and He had, in His infinite power, touched me. I no longer needed to believe — I now knew Yet even so, in the weeks that followed, thoughts crept in to argue otherwise. Doubts. The mind trying to reframe, to shrink what had been enormous back into something manageable. It wasn’t until few months later on the December retreat that the certainty solidified again: yes, this was truly God. What I had experienced was real.

I also remember how fragile those days were. How easily the experience wants to be painted over. How the ordinary mind fights back against the extraordinary and tries to restore itself to power. How one avoids, without even knowing it, returning to something so large. I still remember this. I return to those days when things are hard. God is now my foundation.

After the August retreat ended, I arrived in Stockholm. I had brought a Bible with me — given by a good friend, from whom I had specifically asked for it. Some weeks before the retreat, an unexplainable impulse had come to me one evening: take the Bible with you and read it afterward. I couldn’t say where the impulse came from. I had never opened a Bible before in my life.

In Stockholm I smiled a great deal. I moved through the city with a feeling of new eyes, new knowledge, some inner light still faintly warm in me. I went to the old part of the city and sat down in a cafe. I ordered Rwandan black tea.

At the table ahead of me sat two elderly women talking about ordinary things — worldly things — in the way of people who have known each other long enough that neither is really listening to the other. They wore a great deal of makeup and polish, as though age were something to be ashamed of, or as though they still wanted to appear young and energetic as they always had in public. The silences between them were long but did not seem to bother them at all — they were comfortable in each other’s company, just not particularly present to it. Across the corner sat a couple, though I barely registered them. No one looked in my direction. I lived happily in my own small bubble, noticing small things with unusual sharpness.

I opened the Bible to the New Testament and began to read from the very beginning — Matthew’s Gospel. I moved slowly through it. And then I arrived at chapter five, the Sermon on the Mount, and my eyes soon landed on a single line:

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

A few drops fell onto the thin Bible pages. And then something broke open completely.

I erupted. Unstoppable. I had to rush out of the cafe — I didn’t want to alarm anyone or bother the people around me. Outside, I pressed my hands over my face. I wept and wept and there was no need to stop and no need to calm down. The pages had already become wet, already begun to wrinkle. I walked quickly to the small chapel courtyard just a few meters away and stood there, hidden, and continued to cry.

These were not tears of sorrow. They were something entirely other — something on the threshold of the new, some door opened from the inside. I felt no pain anywhere. It felt as though God had accepted me and was holding me. As though I had opened something new in myself and become sensitive to everything at once.

Because I had seen God, this verse was now speaking directly to me. It was telling me that I am pure in heart. Me? Accepted? Pure-hearted? In His eyes? No way!

The idea that I could be the one being addressed — that He would say this to me — was almost impossible to receive. I do not feel like I am worth much, least of all before Him. I feel deeply and badly broken. And yet: God accepts me. That is what the moment said. God is good — even though I am not. I knew then, with a kind of clarity that bypassed argument, that the Bible carries real power and that it helps.

There is much else in Matthew chapter five — many other things Jesus speaks of — and I believe those things are also true, even though I cannot yet connect them to my own experience. Perhaps one day.

Amid the tears in Stockholm, something else arose: a nostalgia. I have met God before. He is here with me now and holds me. And an unnamed feeling settled in, quiet and certain — that I will meet God again when my life here is done, and yet for now, my life has but begun.

These were the tears of God — through God’s word, spoken to me.

Afterward I asked myself: whose God was it that touched me? The God of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews? Someone else’s entirely? God did not tell me — He communicated everything else, but not that. And I am still, honestly, an agnostic in that sense. I cannot accept that any religion, or any person, can monopolise God into a single perspective, a single category, a single box. What I know is that at least for me — in Stockholm, in Matthew — what revealed itself was the God of Christ. But I cannot swear that this is the only description of God that is true.

It was the most important experience of my life. It changed me. In a way I was reborn. But I also remember how fragile it is — how easily forgotten, how quietly the mind reclaims its territory, how gently one slips back into the ordinary without noticing. I return to those days when things are hard — for me. It reminds me: God is.