Prayer in the Night
Tish Harrison Warren did not set out to write a book about grief.
An Anglican priest and writer, Warren was already known for Liturgy of the Ordinary, a book about finding God in the small routines of daily life. But several years later, ordinary life suddenly became much more challenging.
Within a short span of time, Warren suffered two miscarriages and the death of her father. She was raising young children, serving in ministry, writing, and trying to keep moving through the demands of everyday life while carrying losses that did not disappear just because her calendar kept filling.
During that season, she returned again and again to "Compline," the ancient nighttime prayer service used for centuries in Christian communities: "Compline speaks to God in the dark," Warren writes. "And that's what I had to learn to do -- to pray in the darkness of anxiety and vulnerability, in doubt and disillusionment. It was Compline that 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."
Warren became especially interested in the people named in that prayer -- those who work, those who watch, those who weep, those who sleep, the sick, the dying, and those who rejoice -- and those categories became the structure of her book Prayer in the Night.
Rather than writing a general book about prayer, Warren takes the reader through the individual phrases of Compline and connects them with the experiences that had become painfully real in her own life: pregnancy loss, death, fear, sleeplessness, uncertainty, and the limits of what prayer can feel like when a person is exhausted or grieving.
One of Warren’s recurring observations is that contemporary life makes it remarkably easy to avoid those experiences. We stay busy. We keep working. We scroll on our phones. We move immediately to the next task. But for Warren, grief disrupted that instinct. It forced her to recognize how difficult it can be simply to remain with sorrow instead of finding a way around it.
"Unless we make space for grief, we cannot know the depths of the love of God, the healing God wrings from pain, the way grieving yields wisdom, comfort, even joy," Warren writes. "If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make itself heard or we will die trying to silence it. If we don't face it directly it comes out sideways, in ways that aren't always recognizable as grief: explosive anger, uncontrollable anxiety, compulsive shallowness, brooding bitterness, unchecked addiction. Grief is a ghost that can't be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled."
During the day, we have things to do. At night, much of that activity stops, and suddenly the unanswered questions are still there, the people we miss are still gone, the diagnosis has not changed, the worry we managed to ignore at 2 p.m. has grown exponentially by 2 a.m. ... and it is from this place that Warren writes about prayer.
That is the most practical invitation in Prayer in the Night. Warren’s losses could not be hurried. They could not be made smaller through productivity. They required time, attention, and -- eventually -- words.
Chapter by chapter, she describes what it meant for her to receive words that Christians had already been praying for generations. When she did not know what to say, she could pray words that were already there.
Warren’s book offers important wisdom: Slow down long enough to notice what hurts, give grief the time it requires, and allow prayer to hold what cannot yet be fixed.