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

weariness, when it cuts us to the core, reveals our truest, most fragile selves.

We will never not need God and one another. Our telos is community, not self-sufficiency. It’s a feast, a life together.

Inherited ways of prayer and worship—liturgical practices—are a way that the ancient church built cairns for us, to help us endure this mystery, to keep us on this path of faith, to guide us home.

These clouds of mosquitos—my anger and neurosis, my fears and doubts, my unanswerable questions and exhaustion—buzz around me. Sitting wordlessly before God allows space for the real work to begin in my heart.

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.

Theodicy names the abstract “problem of pain”—the logical dilemma of how God can be good and all-powerful even as horrible things regularly happen in the world. And it also names the crisis of faith that often comes from an encounter with suffering.2

Saint Isaac the Syrian wrote, “The Love of God proceeds from our conversing with Him; this conversation of prayer comes about through stillness, and stillness arrives with the stripping away of self.”

Our shared human vulnerability calls us to action—to work. 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.

work itself is often a place of futility, where we bump up against the wrecked state of the world.