Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, And give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; Give rest to the weary, bless the dying, Soothe the suffering, Pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; And all for your love’s sake. Amen (Compline Prayer)
In the prologue of her book, Prayer in the Night, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren recounts the harrowing experience of her miscarriage. At a dinner party, she suddenly started gushing blood. Her husband rushed her to the emergency room of the nearest hospital where in the midst of being prepped for surgery, she yelled, “‘Compline. I want to pray Compline!’” Her husband, also a priest, called up the Book of Common Prayer on his phone and together, they prayed the Compline, the church prayer for the end of the day.
In this dramatic fashion, Tish Harrison Warren starts narrating her painful “night of the soul,” which, in actuality, was a year of loss: loss of her familiar surroundings when she moved from Pittsburgh to Austin, Texas; loss of her father who died a month later after her move; loss of two babies through miscarriages. Overwhelmed by so much loss, she felt she couldn’t pray. “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.” (p. 12) Flailing in this current of “doubt and grief,” when she felt unable to speak her own prayers, she would pray the words of the Compline.
Each chapter of the book is devoted to a phrase of the prayer along with commentary and insights from her own personal experiences and those of others. In the chapter, “Those Who Weep” she confesses that her experience of loss and sorrow are “ordinary,” writing that “nearly all of us will lose a parent at some point. About a quarter of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Most people have moved, been homesick, and felt lonely.” While this is all true, knowing that so many people have gone through the same losses does not comfort us when we are experiencing them ourselves. Tish Harrison Warren observes that our culture often downplays grieving, urging us to “move on.” We bury our vulnerability and inner cries through work and activity. Yet, such distractions are avoiding doing the work of grieving. Her observation is that we need “to make space for grief,” and learn to weep. Unless we do, we cannot know “the depths of the love of God, the healing God wrings from pain, the way grieving yields wisdom, comfort, even joy.” (p. 43) The Compline prayer reminds us of those who weep, are weeping every night, and that “on one night or another, each of us will too.”
The chapter also underscores that Jesus, far from being an emotionally distant God, was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He wept deeply for his friend Lazarus who died, even though Jesus would soon miraculously resurrect him. Through tears, while gazing over Jerusalem, Jesus sorrowfully said, “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing. (Matt 23:27). Jesus would have gladly gathered them in the safety of a maternal embrace, but stubbornly, God’s chosen people rejected Jesus. Every parent who has ever experienced rejection by a son or daughter would know this pain of “unrequited love,” writes Tish Harrison Warren.
Despite what appears to be the overpowering shadow of night’s darkness when we are caught up in worry, anxiety, and weeping, there is the powerful hope of the end of time when God will wipe every tear from his people’s eyes (Rev. 21:4). In this new world, when we see God face to face, there will be no more suffering, pain, or sorrow and all will be set right.
Tish Harrison Warren ends this chapter by posing an intriguing possibility about this new world. She asks these “what if” questions: “What if in the face of our Maker, we get one last chance to honor all the losses this life has brought? What if we can stand before God someday and hear our life stories, told for the first time accurately and in their entirety, with all the twists and turns and meaning we couldn’t follow when we live through them? What if the story includes all the darkness of suffering…and we get to weep one last time with God himself? What if before we begin to live in a world where all things are made new, we weep with the One who alone is able to permanently wipe away our tears?”
Such an imagined possibility could be the warm rays dispersing light and hope into the night shadows. May it be so!
© 2022 by Emy Kamihara