Prayer in the Night

ECPA Christian Book of the Year; Christianity Today Book of the Year

An Honest, Prayerful Approach to the Difficulty of Ordinary Life

How can we trust God in the dark?

Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God's seeming absence. When she navigated a time of doubt and loss, the prayer was grounding for her. She writes that practices of prayer "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."

In Prayer in the Night, you'll find:



- An exploration of the real struggles of everyday life, framed around a nighttime prayer of Compline

- Discussion questions to jumpstart group conversations, and

- Practices that offer practical, achievable ways to put Tish's wisdom into action.Where do you find comfort when you lie awake worrying or weeping in the night? This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.



Tish Harrison Warren is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, which was Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year. She is a weekly contributing newsletter writer for the New York Times and writes a monthly column for Christianity Today. She has worked in ministry settings for over a decade as a campus minister with InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries and as the writer-in-residence at Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, Comment Magazine, The Point, and elsewhere.

Author's Note
Part One: Praying in the Dark


Prologue


1. Finding Compline: Nightfall


2. Keep Watch, Dear Lord: Pain and Presence
Part Two: The Way of the Vulnerable


3. Those Who Weep: Lament


4. Those Who Watch: Attention


5. Those Who Work: Restoration
Part Three: A Taxonomy of Vulnerability


6. Give Your Angels Charge over Those Who Sleep: Cosmos and Commonplace


7. Tend the Sick, Lord Christ: Embodiment


8. Give Rest to the Weary: Weakness and Silence


9. Bless the Dying: Ashes


10. Soothe the Suffering: Comfort


11. Pity the Afflicted: Relentlessness and Revelation


12. Shield the Joyous: Gratitude and Indifference
Part Four: Culmination


13. And All for Your Love's Sake: Dawn


Acknowledgments


Discussion Questions and Suggested Practices


Notes

"Prayer in the Night is another radiant example of wisdom formed in the crucible of suffering. As a priest who finds she can't pray, Tish Harrison Warren finds God in our harrowing vulnerability—and stubbornly holds to believing that God remains good even when life is not. This is a book I'll turn to again and again when life is upended. It's a book I will put into the hands of suffering friends. Prayer in the Night is a book that sings, even as it weeps."



"To be creatures is to face many nights: the darkness of the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen. God, in his grace, does not promise to expel the dark; he promises to be with us in the night. In prose that is both powerful and vulnerable, Tish Harrison Warren invites us to receive Compline as a gift to help us face the dark. Prayer is how we press our hands into the invisible and find the hand of Christ reaching back." weniger anzeigen expand_less