Prayer in the Night

For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

Tish Harrison Warren

• Publisher: IVP Formatio
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780830846795
• eBook ISBN: 9780830846801
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

ECPA Christian Book of the Year; Christianity Today Book of the Year

An Honest, Prayerful Approach to the Difficulty of Ordinary Life

How can we trust God in the dark?

Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God's seeming absence. When she navigated a time of doubt and loss, the prayer was grounding for her. She writes that practices of prayer "gave words to my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reencounter the doctrines of the church not as tidy little antidotes for pain, but as a light in darkness, as good news."

In Prayer in the Night, you'll find:

• An exploration of the real struggles of everyday life, framed around a nighttime prayer of Compline
• Discussion questions to jumpstart group conversations, and
• Practices that offer practical, achievable ways to put Tish's wisdom into action.

Where do you find comfort when you lie awake worrying or weeping in the night? This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.

Prologue

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, covered in blood in an emergency room, I was praying.

We had lived in Pittsburgh for less than a month. Amid frigid nights and snow that had turned to gray slush, I was miscarrying.

Earlier that night, we had joined new acquaintances at their house for dinner. Their daughter went to school with ours. I was two days into the miscarriage, but my doctor had told me to go about the week as planned, so we went. As my husband, Jonathan, made the kind of awkward small talk you rehearse with near strangers, I began to have contractions. I felt like I couldn’t quite breathe. I asked to go to an urgent care clinic. I was trying to be breezy and undramatic—not the emergency room, but urgent care, the place where people go for stitches, no big deal.

Jonathan began to explain to our hosts that we had to end the evening early because, though we hadn’t mentioned it over dinner pleasantries, I was in the middle of a miscarriage, and while I was supposed to be bleeding slowly for a week, now I was bleeding quickly and in pain. I stood apologizing to our dinner hosts—because as a woman from the South, there is no awkward social situation in which I won’t compulsively apologize. Then, suddenly, I began gushing blood. Gushing. I looked like a gunshot victim.

Our hosts threw two towels to my husband, which he wrapped around me as I stumbled into the car, shouting, “Where is the hospital?” We left our children upstairs playing, without saying goodbye, with people whose last name we couldn’t quite remember.

It was dark out now. We wound through blurred city lights and hip college students walking to bars. On the way to the hospital I felt faint. Blood quickly soaked both towels as Jonathan offered panicked prayers: “Help her! Breathe. Oh God.” He ran all the red lights. He thought I was going to die on the way.

But we made it to the hospital. I was going to be okay, but I needed surgery.

The room filled with nurses, all commenting that this was way more blood than they usually saw, which should have been discomforting, except they seemed calm about it, even a bit fascinated, like I was a particularly well-done project at a school science fair. They put in a line for a blood transfusion, and told me to lie still. Then, I yelled to Jonathan, lost amidst the nurses, “Compline! I want to pray Compline.”

It isn’t normal—even for me—to loudly demand liturgical prayers in a crowded room in the midst of crisis. But in that moment, I needed it, as much as I needed the IV.

Relieved to have a direct command, Jonathan pulled up the Book of Common Prayer on his phone and warned the nurses, “We are both priests, and we’re going to pray now.” And then he launched in: “The Lord grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.”

Over the metronome beat of my heart monitor, we prayed the entire nighttime prayer service. I repeated the words by heart as waves of blood flowed from me with each contraction.

“Keep us as the apple of your eye.”

“Hide us under the shadow of your wing.”

“Lord have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.”

“Defend us, Lord, from the perils and dangers of this night.”

We finished: “The almighty and merciful Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bless us and keep us. Amen.”

“That’s beautiful,” one of the nurses said. “I’ve never heard that before.”

Why did I suddenly and desperately want to pray Compline underneath the fluorescent lights of a hospital room?

Because I wanted to pray but couldn’t drum up words.

It isn’t that “Help! Make the bleeding stop!” wasn’t holy or sophisticated enough. I was in a paper-thin hospital gown soaked with blood. This was not the time for formality. I wanted healing—but I needed more than just healing. I needed this moment of crisis to find its place in something greater: the prayers of the church, yes, but more, the vast mystery of God, the surety of God’s power, the reassurance of God’s goodness.

I had to decide again, in that moment, when I didn’t know how things would turn out, with my baby dead and my body broken, whether these things I preached about God loving me and being for me were true. Yet I was bone-weary. I was heartbroken. I could not conjure up spontaneous and ardent faith.

My decision about whether to trust God wasn’t merely an exercise of cognition. I wasn’t trying to pass some Sunday School pop quiz. I was trying to enter into truth that was large enough to hold my own frailty, vulnerability, and weak faith—a truth as deniable as it is definite. But how, worn out with tears and blood, in a place without words and without certainty, could I reach for that truth?

That night, I held to the reality of God’s goodness and love by taking up the practices of the church. Specifically by taking up prayer, the liturgy of the hours.

For most of church history, Christians understood prayer not primarily as a means of self-expression or an individual conversation with the divine, but as an inherited way of approaching God, a way to wade into the ongoing stream of the church’s communion with him.1 In that moment in the hospital, I was not trying to “express my faith,” to announce my wavering devotion to a room full of busy nurses. Nor was I trying to call down (in the words of Richard Dawkins) my “sky fairy” to come save me.2 Through prayer I dared to believe that God was in the midst of my chaos and pain, whatever was to come. I was reaching for a reality that was larger and more enduring than what I felt in the moment.

Every prayer I have ever prayed, from the most faithful to the least, has been in part a confession uttered in the Gospel of Mark: “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). That was my prayer as I repeated the well-worn words of Compline that night. And as countless nights before, the church, in the midst of my weakness, responded with her ancient voice: “Here are some words. Pray them. They are strong enough to hold you. These will help your unbelief.”

Faith, I’ve come to believe, is more craft than feeling. And prayer is our chief practice in the craft.

This is not to say that a relationship with God is something we accomplish by effort, or that there’s a hierarchy of Christian achievement where an elite group excels at faith like some excel at sewing or basketball. Grace is the first and last word of the Christian life, and all of us are desperately in need of mercy and are deeply loved.

Faith comes as a gift. And any artisan will tell you that there is something miraculous about their craft. Madeline L’Engle said that any good work of art is more and better than the artist. Shakespeare, she said, “wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew; Rembrandt’s brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.”3 A gardener cannot make daffodils grow, nor can a baker force the alchemic glory of yeast and sugar. And yet we are given means of grace that we can practice, whether we feel like it or not, and these carry us. Craftsmen—writers, brewers, dancers, potters—show up and work, and they participate in a mystery. They take up a craft, again and again, on bad days and good, waiting for a flash of mercy, a gift of grace.

In our deepest moments of anxiety and darkness, we enter into this craft of prayer, at times trembling and feeble. Most often, we take up prayer not out of triumphant victory or unimpeachable trust but because prayer shapes us; it works back on us to change who we are and what we believe. Patterns of prayer draw us out of ourselves, out of our own time-bound moment, into the long story of Christ’s work in and through his people over time.4

Faith, I’ve come to believe, is more craft than feeling. And prayer is our chief practice in the craft.

As I prayed that night, I wanted to believe the things I proclaimed: that God knew and loved me, that this terrible moment, too, would be redeemed. I believed it and I didn’t. Reaching for this old prayer service was an act of hope that it would put me under the knife, work in me like surgery, set things right in my own heart. I may as well have said, “Compline. STAT.”

1

Finding Compline

Nightfall

IT WAS A DARK YEAR IN EVERY SENSE. It began with the move from my sunny hometown, Austin, Texas, to Pittsburgh in early January. One week later, my dad, back in Texas, died in the middle of the night. Always towering and certain as a mountain on the horizon, he was suddenly gone.

A month later, I miscarried and hemorrhaged, and we prayed Compline in the ER.

Grief had compounded. I was homesick. The pain of losing my dad was seismic, still rattling like aftershocks. It was a bleak season—we named it, as a grim joke, the “Pitts-of-despair-burgh.”

The next month we found out we were pregnant again. It felt like a miracle. But early on I began bleeding, and the pregnancy became complicated. I was put on “medically restricted activity.” I couldn’t stand for long periods, walk more than a couple blocks, or lift anything above ten pounds, which meant I couldn’t lift my then four-year-old. As I spent hours sitting in bed each day, my mind grew dimmer and darker. The bleeding continued near-constantly for two months, with weekly trips to the hospital when it picked up so much that we worried I was miscarrying or in danger of another hemorrhage. In the end, in late July, early in my second trimester, we lost another baby, a son.

During that long year, as autumn brought darkening days and frost settled in, I was a priest who couldn’t pray.

I didn’t know how to approach God anymore. There were too many things to say, too many questions without answers. My depth of pain overshadowed my ability with words. And, more painfully, I couldn’t pray because I wasn’t sure how to trust God.

Martin Luther wrote about seasons of devastation of faith, when any naive confidence in the goodness of God withers. It’s then that we meet what Luther calls “the left hand of God.”1 God becomes foreign to us, perplexing, perhaps even terrifying.

Adrift in the current of my own doubt and grief, I was flailing. If you ask my husband about 2017, he says simply, “What kept us alive was Compline.”

An Anglicization of completorium, or “completion,” Compline is the last prayer office of the day. It’s a prayer service designed for nighttime.2

Imagine a world without electric light, a world lit dimly by torch or candle, a world full of shadows lurking with unseen terrors, a world in which no one could be summoned when a thief broke in and no ambulance could be called, a world where wild animals hid in the darkness, where demons and ghosts and other creatures of the night were living possibilities for everyone. This is the context in which the Christian practice of nighttime prayers arose, and it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Author's Note
• Part One: Praying in the Dark
• Part Two: The Way of the Vulnerable
• Part Three: A Taxonomy of Vulnerability
• Part Four: Culmination
• Acknowledgments
• Discussion Questions and Suggested Practices
• Notes
• Also by Tish Harrison Warren
• Praise for Prayer in the Night
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright