The Case for Recited Prayer
In Prayer in the Night, an Anglican priest walks us through the nighttime service from the Book of Common Prayer and explains the benefits of reciting traditional prayers.
Review by Drea Jenkins
Darkness is an equalizer and a revealer of the human condition. By day, we may be occupied by our work, families, and friends, but at night, when we can’t focus on our to-dos or our loved ones, our suffering and struggles demand attention. We come face to face with our loneliness, our illnesses, and our past hurts in the silence of night. Indeed, silence can push us to deal with the problems that we have ignored over the drone of our busyness. It is in that silence of night that we often need something to help us get through to the morning.
For Tish Harrison Warren, that something was Compline, an Anglican nighttime prayer service. In her new book Prayer in the Night, Warren uses Compline to explore the effects that prayer, and particularly recited prayer, can have on a person’s wellbeing and their relationship with God. Warren is an Anglican priest, and she begins by recounting her personal experience of reciting Compline with her husband while they were in the emergency room during a miscarriage. Compline was as necessary to her in that moment as the treatments and attention she was getting from the doctors and nurses. Warren proceeded to recite Compline at night regularly during the rest of that year, following both her miscarriage and her father’s death.
Compline is one of many prayer services found in the Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican church’s guide to worship since 1549. There are services for morning and evening prayer, for special occasions such as weddings and funerals, and for the celebration of the Eucharist. Compline (the name comes from completorium or “completion”) is, fittingly, the last prayer service of the day. When Warren says she prayed Compline at various points, she means that she recited the series of prayers that make up the service from memory.
These prayers can serve as a lifeline for those struggling to pray or fighting for a change in perspective.
As she prayed through Compline, Warren found that this was not primarily a “way of self-expression” or even of asking God for favors. Instead, the service is, for Warren, a means of connecting with God, who is with her in the most painful and chaotic moments of her life. She writes that she has found that connecting with God through prayer can be made easier by reading or reciting prayers handed down to us by the church. She does not discount the importance of “free form” or individual prayer, but argues that these traditional prayers, which have withstood the test of time and been said throughout history by many different people, can give us greater perspective on our current suffering and allow us to pray beyond what we know or what we would come up with by ourselves. In times of distress, recited prayers showed Warren how to believe in God more deeply than she could have on her own. These prayers can serve as a lifeline for those struggling to pray or fighting for a change in perspective.
Warren draws our attention, in particular, to one section from the end of the Compline service:
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.
For the latter half of the book, Warren organizes her thoughts by walking through this prayer, diving deeper into each phrase. The prayer asks God to keep watch because those praying want to feel God’s presence, want to know they are loved, as they face their various nighttime demons. Warren devotes a chapter each to those who work, those who watch, and those who weep, explaining how each of these may look in modern day and exploring the meaning behind the words work, watch, and weep.
Those who work may be simply that, a nurse or truck driver or security guard who is working through the night and needs God’s care as they keep moving after most people are asleep. Those who watch could be waiting, attentively and hopefully, praying for changes during the night or in the morning to come, or perhaps in their watching they are seeing beauty in their surroundings and noticing God’s goodness in the stillness of night. Those who weep are any who are in pain or sadness in the night, those who may find refuge in Psalms of lament. Psalms are another, older source of prayers used throughout history. For many years, Psalms have helped those who weep work through their emotions (which Warren also emphasizes), and their continued use and timelessness underlines again Warren’s thoughts on the benefits of recited prayer.
In the latter half of this prayer, the speaker asks God to act beyond just “keeping watch.” In discussing each phrase, Warren notes what actions are asked of God in the Compline service as opposed to what we may think to ask God to do if we want God to simply solve our worldly problems. This prayer asks God to “tend the sick” instead of “healing all the sick,” and “soothe the suffering” instead of “taking away all suffering in an instant.” Throughout Compline, the wording leans toward asking God for love and attention. For Warren, this shows that prayer is an act of “being with God,” not an act of self-expression. The one praying may want to ask God to help him or her out of pain and suffering, but ultimately the purpose of this prayer is not to request sweeping miracles and drastic change (though these can be great blessings), but simply to ask God for his love and care. Warren builds up to this idea and lands it perfectly in her conclusion: Most prayer is, in some way, people wanting to know who God is and wanting to be assured that God does indeed love them. Luckily for us, God’s love is fixed and perfect. It will not diminish, even when he is asked about it over and over again.
Warren’s in-depth analysis of Compline is good in itself, but her engagement with traditional prayer is something that those who pray can aspire to. She both explains in writing why traditional, passed-on prayers are important, and she shows us how the practice of reciting them has shaped her faith and life. While sometimes her analysis may be more robust than strictly necessary, the stories from her personal life and her well-researched, deeper dives into theological topics, such as night and theodicy, make this short book a pleasure to read.
And as someone who often has trouble sleeping through the night, I found myself wanting to try almost all of the prayers and practices Warren mentioned, such as the practice of silence to bring calm and allow one’s emotions to surface naturally. But the most compelling practice in the book has to be the repeating of Compline. Warren’s personal experience of reciting the service is touching, and I would challenge anyone to read the first few chapters of this book without wanting to read and learn parts of Compline themselves.
Drea Jenkins is a software developer in Nashville, TN. She graduated from Dartmouth in 2020 and loves to spend her free time reading, writing, praying in the middle of the night, and coding.
Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren was published by InterVarsity Press on January 26, 2021. Fare Forward is grateful to the publisher for providing an advance copy to our reviewer. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
