Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren

Author:Tish Harrison Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: night;compline;prayer of compline;nighttime prayer;liturgical prayer;laying awake at night;prayer;suffering;ancient church practices;liturgical calendar;liturgy;church calendar;loss;grief;grieving;sorrow;pain;doubt;Resurrection;prayer and suffering;lament;love of God;suffering of Jesus;theodicy;suffering as a Christian;Christian suffering;Anglican;liturgy of the ordinary;ordinary prayer;everyday prayer;Catholic;spirituality
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2020-11-26T11:40:06+00:00

God promises us simply himself. He refuses to be an end to any other means.

God promises us simply himself. He refuses to be an end to any other means. By his mercy we can taste eternal life, which is defined by Scripture not as making it to heaven or seeing our dreams coming true or nothing bad ever happening, but as knowing the true God and the one he has sent (John 17:3). That’s the promise: we can know God. Take it or leave it.

Is Jesus enough?

If we delude ourselves that we can maintain a life of prayer by sheer effort and strength of will, weariness will inevitably puncture our inflated sense of self. The hardest time for me to pray is when I am weary. Spiritual discipline requires energy, and exhaustion turns resolution into dissipation.

When our strength evaporates, when we are spent, we often cannot drum up feelings of ardent faith or conjure the words for prayer. And this is why weariness is almost a prerequisite to learning to rest in God.

This is also why seasons of weariness taught me new and different ways to pray.

I have always loved words, so I have loved wordy prayers.

It wasn’t until my late twenties, in a season of disappointment and heartache, when I ran out of words and slowly learned that there was more to prayer than I had known. I grew weary, my faith flagged, and I learned to receive the prayers of the church as my own. I learned that prayer is a tutor, not a performance. It’s the stretcher on which we collapse and are carried to the Healer.

In 2017, I turned to Compline when I didn’t have anything else to say, when I was so bone-tired and soul-spent that I could only receive prayer as a gift.

That year I also leaned on other ancient ways of praying that rely less on cognitive and verbal ability.

In particular, I found refuge in prayers of silence.

Theophan the Recluse, a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox priest, describes the work of silent prayer: “You must descend from your head to your heart. . . . Whilst you are still in your head, thoughts will easily be subdued but will always be whirling about, like snow in winter or clouds of mosquitoes in the summer.”7 These clouds of mosquitos—my anger and neurosis, my fears and doubts, my unanswerable questions and exhaustion—buzz around me. Sitting wordlessly before God allows space for the real work to begin in my heart.

It’s not that “Help” or “Lord, I’m weary” aren’t good enough prayers. God hears and loves even prayers like these. We don’t need to experiment with the prayers of the church or ancient prayer practices to impress God. But when we are weary, it can help to throw ourselves onto what has come before us, the steady practices of prayer that the church has handed down for safe keeping, for this very moment when we come to the end of ourselves.

In Christian spirituality, there are two ways to describe how we know God.

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