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

We want to be indispensable, omnicompetent, and indestructible. But we are human, creatures of the dust. Embracing this truth about ourselves is the kind of humiliation that births freedom.

I needed the sort of comfort that doesn’t pretend that things are shiny or safe or right in the world. I needed a comfort that looked unflinchingly at loss and death.

When good gifts are lost, the Giver remains—and the Giver is the ultimate source of joy to begin with, the reality to which sacramental reality points.

To choose joy is to see all existence as a gift, which is why the practice of joy is inseparable from the practice of gratitude. Gratitude gives birth to joy because gratitude teaches us to receive life as a gift in the moment we’re in, regardless of what lies ahead. “It is the truly converted life in which God has become the center of all,”

our work is often disappointing, grueling, unrewarding, meaningless, and even exploitative and degrading.

I needed words to contain my sadness and fear. I needed comfort, but I needed the sort of comfort that doesn’t pretend that things are shiny or safe or right in the world. I needed a comfort that looked unflinchingly at loss and death. And Compline is rung round with death.

For God to take something as miserable and putrid as illness and make any beauty out of it, we need more than just healing. We need love.

If the question of whether God is real or not—or of whether God is kind or indifferent or a bastard—is determined solely by the balance of joy and sorrow in our own lives or in the world, we will never be able to say anything about who God is or what God is like.

The most profound ways that we encounter God are often in affliction.