Praying Through Suffering, Guilt and Judgement

Start with a Hittite sufferer who protests that he has kept his god's rites faithfully while his health and standing collapse, and who asks the god either to explain the cause or to lift the suffering.

Psalm 142 is headed as a prayer of David in the cave and states its distress and its request in the same breath, asking to be brought out of prison so that he may give thanks.

The fifth poem of Lamentations gives the complaint to a whole community after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, breaks from the acrostic form of the earlier four poems, and ends by asking to be turned back and renewed.

A Hittite king facing a prolonged plague uses divination to look for the offense behind it, confesses wrongs of his father's generation, and pleads for the plague to end, reasoning that disaster follows an identifiable wrong.

This Aztec prayer from Book Six of the Florentine Codex speaks for the whole afflicted community to Tezcatlipoca during an epidemic, and its recorded form passed through Spanish missionary compilation.

The Hittite king Muwatalli II addresses a long roll of deities in turn, led by the Storm God of Hatti and the Sun Goddess of Arinna, asking the assembled gods to relieve him of misfortune, so that no relevant divine party is left out.

Psalm 51 turns from the community or the innocent sufferer to confession of specific wrongdoing, asking God to create a clean heart, and has been read as repentance meant as inner renewal.

Called the master of seeking forgiveness, this supplication taught by the Prophet Muhammad and preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari acknowledges the reciter's broken covenant and carries a stated promise of paradise for sincere recitation.

Ignatius of Loyola made repentance a daily structured routine: thanks, a request for clear sight, an hour by hour review, forgiveness for specific failings, and a resolution for the time ahead.

End with the opposite of confession, the Egyptian Negative Confession of Spell 125, where the deceased declares before forty-two judges the wrongs not committed so the heart may balance against the feather of Ma'at.