Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

Our work—whether paid or not, drudgery or a joy, skilled or common—makes a difference. Done well, it adds truth, beauty, and goodness to the world. It pushes back the darkness.

Our response to human vulnerability is always, in part, to seek to mitigate it, to make the world, however slightly, more peaceful, safe, beautiful, just, and truthful.

what we habitually go to for comfort is eventually what we worship. It becomes our god. But when these other comforts, however good in themselves, become our soul’s refuge, they tend to kill us.

The afflicted unmask the lie that what makes life worth living and God worth knowing are the pleasures I can wrench from my days.

“absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

To love God through suffering means learning that when we look for evidence of God’s work in our lives, it is often in the last place we’d want to find it: in weakness, in pain, in the cross. So do we have

The hope God offers us is this: he will keep close to us, even in darkness, in doubt, in fear and vulnerability. He does not promise to keep bad things from happening. He does not promise that night will not come, or that it will not be terrifying, or that we will immediately be tugged to shore. He promises that we will not be left alone. He will k

Through prayer I dared to believe that God was in the midst of my chaos and pain, whatever was to come. I was reaching for a reality that was larger and more enduring than what I felt in the moment.

Christian asceticism is never meant to be a denial of the goodness of materiality or embodiment. Christianity is an earthy, pleasure-affirming faith. But Christians have often practiced self-denial in order to learn to enjoy good things in their proper place.

We embrace ascetic practices to learn to suffer. We know that we all inevitably will suffer, so we practice it ahead of time.