Book Review: Prayer in the Night

Tish Harrison Warren is a new author to me. My guess was that her book, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep, was about facing a "dark night of the soul." While it addresses spiritual despair, it is actually a more focused treatise. Warren is an Anglican priest. This book breaks down the liturgical last prayer of the day, known in Anglican and Catholic churches as Compline. Even though I don't have a liturgical background, I can appreciate the benefit of praying scripted prayers from the Bible or The Book of Common Prayer. (She calls them "other people's prayers," as opposed to personally driven ones.)

Warren is an outstanding writer and excellent storyteller. She sweeps you into the book with her introductory story of her sudden desire to pray Compline while she was in the midst of a miscarriage. I could fully relate. When I had my miscarriage, I felt an urgency to sing Amy Grant's song, "The Lord Has a Will." (The Lord has a will, and I have a need, to follow that will, to humbly be still, to nest in it, rest in it, fully be blessed in it, following my Father's will.) There is a strange comfort that can come over you when you focus your mind away from your difficulties and onto a pattern of words that bring you into God's presence and remind you of His sovereignty and care.

Each section of the book breaks down a part of the Compline prayer (those who weep, watch, work, sleep, are sick, weary, dying, suffering, afflicted, joyous). I finished with multiple Post-It flag markers peeking out from the side of the book. So many articulations of things I want to remember. Her words about Christ weeping over Jerusalem especially resonated: "Any mother who has had to sit and watch her child destroy himself, watch her beloved walk into destruction, abuse, or addiction, watch as the one she sang over disappears into someone she cannot recognize, knows something about how Jesus wept over Jerusalem."

I loved the pastor's words after her best friend confessed his "most secret sin:" - "We need you in our church, not in spite of your struggle, but because of it." Powerful, redemptive words - our vulnerabilities and brokenness allow the light of God to shine through. Those failings "can be the raw material God uses to bring us to the truth about who we are and who he is." In the section on dying, she acknowledges such an important truth: "There is no darkness into which he has not descended. He knows the texture and taste of everything I most fear."

As if reiterating the idea of the "upside-down kingdom," she writes: "We are topsy-turvy. We don't know what's best for us. The things I'm most afraid of are often the very things that will set me free. The desolate places in my life that I most want to avoid are the very places God wants to meet me.... The way to save my life is to lose it." I loved the way she phrased it: "Suffering gives us new eyes; it teaches us to see in the dark." When we desperately want to run from the dark, we should run toward it, knowing it will teach us things we could learn in no other way.

I'm so glad I discovered this book on my library's recent acquisitions list. Besides the benefit of many highlighted passages (perhaps I should buy the book), I also enjoyed the section of discussion questions and practices to accompany each chapter. I'm always looking for things to prompt contemplation in my morning writing. These questions bring the reader closer to the material. If you are experiencing a dark patch in your life, you might benefit from reading Warren's book about this Compline prayer.