“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid:…”
These opening words of the Collect for Purity stand as one of the most magnificent and beautifully terrifying inflection points in the entire landscape of Christian liturgy. Recall, when your priest turns to face the congregation and declares, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” we are all of us, immediately summoned to lay down the exhausting burden of ANY religious pretence.
Thomas Cranmer carefully lifted this prayer from the private preparation of the medieval Sarum Rite and placed it at the very beginning of the Holy Communion service to ensure that every worshipper, every Christian, understood the absolute futility of attempting to hide from their Creator. Much like Adam in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:9) and his attempt to hide himself from God we cannot make ourselves invisible, nor close the door of our hearts to the One who created them It is a striking reminder that as we prepare to approach the altar and partake of the sacraments, we must first allow the piercing light of divine omniscience to strip away the carefully curated masks we wear so successfully throughout the rest of our week, the faces we show to those around us.
The assertion that all hearts are open to God firmly dismantles any illusion we might harbour that somehow we can construct a private, interior fortress where we remain completely sovereign. Throughout our lives we invest a tremendous amount of emotional energy in building thick defensive walls designed to keep us safe from the judgment of others, yet the Almighty bypasses these human fortifications with effortless grace. We see this truth echoed perfectly across scripture and for example in the first book of Samuel, where we are reminded that while man looks on the outward appearance, the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7 ESV). To stand before God with an open heart is to be entirely vulnerable, yielding our deepest desires and affections, our most guarded fears to the one who knit us together in our mother’s womb.
Moving on slightly, the acknowledgement that all our desires are known presses even deeper into the messy reality of the human condition, touching upon the complex web of motivations that drive our daily actions. We are remarkably adept at dressing up our selfish ambitions in highly pious language, perhaps trying to convince both ourselves and our fellow parishioners that our desperate prayer for a lucrative promotion is solely so we might give more to the church building fund, when Jesus is perfectly aware we simply fancy a slightly nicer car. The psalmist understood this uncomfortable level of divine intimacy perfectly when he wrote that the “Lord searches us and knows us, perceiving our thoughts from afar and sifting through the tangled reality of our ways “(Psalm 139 ESV). There is a gentle, knowing humour in the fact that we continually try to present a sanitised version of our wants to a Father who already knows the chaotic truth of what we actually crave.
And finally, the sweeping declaration that no secrets are hid brings us to the very edge of the precipice, forcing us to reckon with the staggering reality of Hebrews 4:13, which warns that no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account (ESV). We all carry quiet shames and silent regrets that we desperately try to hide from our families and our closest friends, fearing that if the depths of our minds were ever fully broadcast we would be immediately cast out of polite society. Yet the genius of this Anglican prayer lies in how it frames this terrifying exposure not as a prelude to divine condemnation, but as the essential prerequisite for true absolution.
We are invited to bring our darkest secrets into the light precisely because the God who sees everything is the very same God who provided the sacrifice to forgive everything. When we finally accept that we have absolutely nowhere to hide, we discover the breathtaking relief of being fully known and yet entirely loved by the Saviour.
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