April’s Reviews > Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep > Status Update

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 af-flicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake.
Amen.

When we're drowning we need a lifeline, and our lifeline in grief cannot be mere optimism that maybe our circumstances will improve because we know that may not be true. We need practices that don't simply palliate our fears or pain, but that teach us to walk with God in the crucible of our own fragility.

Compline speaks to God in the dark. And that's what I had to learn to do—to pray in the darkness of anxiety and vulner-ability, in doubt and disillusionment. It was Compline that gave words to my anxiety and grief and allowed me to reen-counter the doctrines of the church not as tidy little antidotes for pain, but as a light in darkness, as good news.

When we pray the prayers we ve been given by the church— the prayers of the psalmist and the saints, the Lord's Prayer, the Daily Office-we pray beyond what we can know, believe, or drum up in ourselves.

But over a lifetime the ardor of our belief will wax and wane. This is a normal part of the Christian life. Inherited prayers and practices of the church tether us to belief, far more securely than our own vacillating perspective or self-expression.
Prayer forms us. And different ways of prayer aid us just as different types of paint, canvas, color, and light aid a painter.

The sixteenth-century Saint John of the Cross coined the phrase "the dark night of the soul" to refer to a time of grief, doubt, and spiritual crisis, when God seems shadowy and distant. The reason this resonates with us is because night typifies our fears and doubts— "the hard day of the soul" or "the gray morning of the soul" would never have had the same staying power.

In wisdom, God made things such that every day we face a time of darkness.

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."l God becomes foreign to us, perplexing, perhaps even terrifying.
Adrift in the current of my own doubt and grief, I was flailing.

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

And yet we are given means of grace that we can practice, whether we feel like it or not, and these carry us… 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 in us to change who we are and what we believe.